Thomas Geoghegan - Were You Born On the Wrong Continent?

Start: 10/14/2010 6:00 pm

In the 2008 presidential election, Newt Gingrich was among those who claimed that Barack Obama wanted to bring us “European socialism,” or, as Jacob Weisberg described it, “He wants to make us French.”

In an idiosyncratic, entertaining travelogue that plays on public policy, Thomas Geoghegan asks what our lives would be like if we lived them as Europeans. Sneaking out of his workaholic American life, he takes five trips where he tries to understand so-called European socialism firsthand. After visiting France, he ventures into Germany to see what some call the “boring” Europe. There he finds the true “other”—an economic model with more bottom-up worker control than that of any other country in the world—and argues that, while we have to take Germany’s problems seriously, we also have to look seriously at how much it has achieved. Social democracy may let us live nicer lives; it also may be the only way to be globally competitive.

This wry, timely book helps us understand why the European model, contrary to popular neoliberal wisdom, may thrive well into the twenty-first century without compromising its citizens’ ease of living—and be the best example for the United States to follow.

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