Individual and Community

Check out this post, by Mike Rappaport, over at "The Right Coast."  In the post, Rappaport quotes from, and discusses, this op-ed by a 2006 Nobel Prize winner, Edmund Phelps.  Here is a bit from the Phelps piece, called "Entrepreneurial Culture:  Why European Economies Lag Behind the U.S.":

As is increasingly admitted, the economic performance in nearly every Continental country is generally poor compared to the U.S. and a few other countries that share the U.S.'s characteristics. Productivity in the Continental Big Three--Germany, France and Italy--stopped gaining ground on the U.S. in the early 1990s, then lost ground as a result of recent slowdowns and the U.S. speed-up. Unemployment rates are generally far higher than those in the U.S., U.K., Canada and Ireland. And labor force participation rates have been lower for decades. Relatedly, the employee engagement and job satisfaction reported in surveys are mostly lower, too.

It is reasonable to infer that the economic systems on the Continent are not well structured for high performance. . . .

Many economists attribute the Continent's higher unemployment and lower participation, if not also its lower productivity, to the Continent's social model--in particular, the plethora of social insurance entitlements and the taxes to pay for them. The standard argument is fallacious, though. . . .

In my thesis, the Continental economies' root problem is a dearth of economic dynamism--loosely, the rate of commercially successful innovation. . . .

. . .  Germany, Italy and France appear to possess less dynamism than do the U.S. and the others. . . .

Further, I argue that the cause of that dearth of dynamism lies in the sort of "economic model" found in most, if not all, of the Continental countries. . . .

There are two dimensions to a country's economic model. One part consists of its economic institutions. These institutions on the Continent do not look to be good for dynamism. . . .

The other part of the economic model consists of various elements of the country's economic culture. Some cultural attributes in a country may have direct effects on performance--on top of their indirect effects through the institutions they foster. Values and attitudes are analogous to institutions--some impede, others enable. . . .

[The weakness of certain entrepreneurial values is an "impediment to a revival of dynamism there."  But this is not the only impediment.]  There is the solidarist aim of protecting the "social partners"--communities and regions, business owners, organized labor and the professions--from disruptive market forces. There is also the consensualist aim of blocking business initiatives that lack the consent of the "stakeholders"--those, such as employees, customers and rival companies, thought to have a stake besides the owners. There is an intellectual current elevating community and society over individual engagement and personal growth, which springs from antimaterialist and egalitarian strains in Western culture. There is also the "scientism" that holds that state-directed research is the key to higher productivity. Equally, there is the tradition of hierarchical organization in Continental countries. Lastly, there a strain of anti-commercialism. "A German would rather say he had inherited his fortune than say he made it himself," the economist Hans-Werner Sinn once remarked to me.  . . .

What would be an appropriately CST-informed reaction to this?