France and the Spots in Our Own Eyes

My colleague Greg makes some good points about the economic and social problems of France and the unsustainability of a number of its current practices.  But for me at least, the post loses a lot of credibility by painting things in such black and white terms, dismissing France overall as a "disaster" and suggesting that there is no middle point -- and no case for a middle point -- lying somewhere between where the U.S. and France are now, or learning something from each system.

(Let's set aside the loss of Christian faith, which we can all agree is very bad in spiritual terms.) The France that Greg condemns as a "social disaster" has the problems he identifies, but it also, as compared with the United States, has lower abortion rates, longer life expectancy, lower infant mortality rates, and lower homicide rates.  The relation of a generous social-welfare system to such figures is not 1 to 1, but it is there.  Whatever one says about the costs of the social-welfare system, the benefits that it provides for child-raising -- both for women at home and women in the busainess workplace -- have contributed to a fertility rate that is higher than virtually everywhere else in Europe (and very close to the U.S., bucking the general European trend of low fertility).  A lot of what we save in social welfare spending is eaten up in our much more expensive health-care system.  And while productivity per worker is less in France than in the US, productivity per hour worked is comparable or slightly higher, fitting with the idea that the French accept lower economic performance overall in return for simply working less and having more leisure and family time.  Again, I'm not saying the French approach is right and the US wrong -- and it's likely that their current point on the trade-off curve is not sustainable -- but Greg's post seems not to recognize any conflict of values or considerations here whatsoever.

I think that among the insights Catholic social thought should give us, stemming from the recognition of original sin, is an acknowedgment of the imperfections of all social and economic systems and the inevitable trade-offs between them.  I don't see that in Greg's post; for him, the problems are entirely on one side.  And his curt dismissal of the idea that France might ever make reasonable adjustments in its system toward more productivity and risk -- as e.g. the US, Britain, and some of the Scandinavian countries have done over the years -- strikes me as simple France-bashing.

Finally, Greg's slippery-slope arguments against welfare policies might be valid, but they might not.  The nature of slippery-slope arguments, of course, is that they use the prospect of bad results down the line to prevent you from doing something now that is justified taken alone.  For example, one might say, paralleling Greg's logic, that we should never invade a nation (say, Afghanistan) to respond to an attack on us (like 9-11), because if we do we'll get too sanguine about the idea of war and start, to paraphrase Greg, "careening toward the [moral] and [geo-political] disaster that is [the Iraq War]."  (Gee, maybe that's one instance where the French turned out to have gotten something right.)

Tom