Degrowth would make Europeans into "Europoors"

Photo by Annie Spratt on UnsplashAbout a month ago, I weighed in on an interesting debate over American vs. European living standards. On one side, you have people who argue that Europe is much poorer than America, and is falling even further behind. Most of the people making this argument are Europeans themselves — especially economists like Mario Draghi, Philippe Aghion, Luis Garicano, and Antonin Bergeaud. They look with envy on the U.S. tech sector, which Europe has no real equivalent to, and they yearn for liberalizing reforms that would allow Europe to catch up. On the other side, you have American liberals like Paul Krugman and Brad DeLong. They argue that Europe is not falling behind — that most of the gap in material living standards is due to Americans working more, and that America’s apparently faster productivity growth is an artifact of the way relative growth rates are measured. This is an interesting debate, and in the end it comes down to some surprisingly technical…