Issues & Ideas
© Foreign Policy Magazine Published: Monday, February 11, 2008
German students will be well-versed in many subjects upon graduation; one
topic they will know particularly well is their rights as welfare
recipients. One 10th-grade social studies text titled FAKT has a chapter
on
"What to do against unemployment." Instead of describing how companies
might create jobs, the section explains how those without jobs can
organize
into self-help groups and join weekly anti-reform protests "in the
tradition of the East German Monday demonstrations" (which in 1989 helped
topple the communist dictator****p). The not-so-subtle sub-text? Jobs are a
right to be demanded from the government. The same chapter also details
various welfare programs, explains how employers use the threat of layoffs
as a tactic to cut pay and concludes with a long excerpt from the platform
of the German Union Federation, including the 30-hour work week,
retirement
at age 60 and redistribution of the work pie by splitting full-time into
part-time jobs. No market alternative is taught. When FAKT presents the
reasons for unemployment, it blames computers and robots. In fact, this is
a recurring theme in German textbooks -- the Internet will turn workers
into "anonymous code" and kill off interpersonal communication.
Equally popular in Germany today are student workbooks on globalization.
One such workbook includes sections headed The Revival of Manchester
Capitalism, The Brazilianization of Europe and The Return of the Dark
Ages." India and China are successful, the book explains, because they
have
large, state-owned sectors and practice protectionism, while the societies
with the freest markets lie in impoverished sub-Saharan Africa. Like many
French and German books, this text suggests students learn more by
contacting the anti-globalization group Attac, best known for organizing
messy protests at the annual G-8 summits.
One might expect Europeans to view the world through a slightly
left-of-centre, social-democratic lens. The surprise is the intensity and
depth of the anti-market bias being taught in Europe's schools. Students
learn that private companies destroy jobs while government policy creates
them. Employers exploit while the state protects. Free markets offer chaos
while government regulation brings order. Globalization is destructive, if
not catastrophic. Business is a zero-sum game, the source of a litany of
modern social problems. Some enterprising teachers and parents may try to
teach an alternative view, and some books are less ideological than
others.
But given the biases inherent in the curricula, this background is
unavoidable. It is the context within which most students develop
intellectually. And it's a belief system that must eventually appear to be
the truth.
CAN OLD EUROPE DO NEW TRICKS ?
This bias has tremendous implications that reach far beyond the domestic
political debate in these two countries. These beliefs inform students'
choices in life. Taught that the free market is a dangerous wilderness,
twice as many Germans as Americans tell pollsters that you should not
start
a business if you think it might fail. According to the European Union's
internal polling, just two in five Germans and French would like to be
their own boss, compared to three in five Americans. Whereas 8% of
Americans say they are currently involved in starting a business, that's
true of only 2% of Germans and 1% of the French. Another 28% of Americans
are considering starting a business, compared to just 11% of the French
and
18% of Germans. The loss to Europe's two largest economies in terms of
jobs, innovation and economic dynamism is severe.
Attitudes and mind-sets, it is increasingly being shown, are closely
related to a country's economic performance. Edmund Phelps, a Columbia
University economist and Nobel laureate, contends that attitudes toward
markets, work and risk-taking are significantly more powerful in
explaining
the variation in countries' actual economic performance than the
traditional factors upon which economists focus, including social
spending,
tax rates and labour-market regulation. The connection between capitalism
and culture, once famously described by Max Weber, also helps explain
continental Europe's poor record in entrepreneur****p and innovation. A
study by the Massachusetts-based Monitor Group, the Entrepreneur****p
Benchmarking Index, looks at nine countries and finds a powerful
correlation between attitudes about economics and actual cor****ate
performance. The researchers find that attitudes explain 40% of the
variation in start-up and company growth rates -- by far the strongest
correlation of any of the 31 indicators they tested. If countries such as
France and Germany hope to boost entrepreneur****p, innovation and economic
dynamism--as their leaders claim they do -- the most effective way to make
that happen may be to use education to boost the cultural legitimacy of
going into business.
The deep anti-market bias that French and Germans continue to teach
challenges the conventional wisdom that it's just a matter of time, thanks
to the pressures of globalization, before much of the world agrees upon a
supposedly "Western" model of free-market capitalism. Politicians in
democracies cannot long fight the preferences of the majority of their
constituents. So this bias will likely continue to cir***scribe both
European elections and policy outcomes. A likely alternative scenario may
be that the changes wrought by globalization will awaken deeply held
resentment against capitalism and, in many countries from Europe to Latin
America, provide a fertile ground for populists and demagogues, a trend
that is already manifesting itself in the sudden rise of many leftist
movements today.
Minimal reforms to the welfare state cost former German Chancellor Gerhard
Schroder his job in 2005. They have also paralyzed modern German politics.
Former communists and disaffected Social Democrats, together with
left-wing
Greens, have flocked to Germany's new leftist party, whose politics is a
distasteful mix of anti-capitalist demagoguery and right-wing xenophobia.
Its platform, polls show, is finding sup****t even among mainstream
Germans.
A left-leaning majority, within both the parliament and the public at
large, makes the world's third-largest economy vulnerable to destructive
policies driven by anti-capitalist resentment and fear of globalization.
Similar situations are easily conceivable elsewhere and have already
helped
bring populists to power in Latin America. Then there is France, where
President Nicolas Sarkozy promised to "rupture" with the failed economic
policies of the past. He has taken on the country's public servants and
their famously lavish benefits, but many of his policies appear to be
driven by what he calls "economic patriotism," which smacks of
old-fa****oned industrial protectionism. That's exactly what French
schoolchildren have long learned is the way the world should work.
Both the French and German cases show the limits of trying to run against
the grain of deeply held economic ideology. Yet, training the next
generation of citizens to be prejudiced against being enterprising and
productive is equally foolhardy. Fortunately, such widespread attitudes
and
the political outcomes they foster aren't only determined by tradition and
history. They are, to a great extent, the product of education. If
countries like France and Germany hope to get their nations on a new
economic track, they might start paying more attention to what their kids
are learning in the classroom.
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