One of the things I find most tiring–and there are, granted, many candidates for that list–is the refrain that "well, things may be bad in the U.S. but look how much worse it is in Europe?" I get that nonsense all the time, particularly when I have to debate the free-marketeers and the defenders of this country’s economic system. In my most recent dust-up on CNBC with Maria Bartiromo, she used the "what, you want to be Europe" defense, to which I said, more or less, we can learn a lot from Europe.

   Anyway, I was reminded of this, again, after getting a new short briefing paper from the great folks at the Center for Economic and Policy Research who point out that "U.S. Unemployment Now As High as Europe" and as a result:

 …the United States is now tied for the fourth highest unemployment rate among the major OECD countries. In March 2009, the U.S. unemployment rate was 8.5 percent,6   only lower than Spain (17.4 percent), Ireland (10.6 percent), and France (8.8 percent), and level with Portugal. Sixteen other major OECD economies had a lower unemployment rate, including Denmark (5.7 percent), Germany (7.6 percent), Italy (6.9 percent), the Netherlands (2.8 percent), and Sweden (8.0 percent).

 

The United States is also one of the countries where the unemployment rate has increased most since 2007. Between 2007 and March 2009, the U.S. unemployment rate rose 3.9 percentage points. Only Spain (up 9.1 percentage points) and Ireland (up 6.0 percentage points) saw bigger increases over the same period. In France, the increase in the unemployment rate was only 0.5 percentage points. In four countries, the most recent unemployment rate is actually lower than it was in 2007: Belgium (down 0.2 percentage points), Germany (down 0.8 percentage points), Greece (down 0.5 percentage points), and the Netherlands (down 0.4 percentage points).

   But, smartly, they caveat these numbers with this observation:

The case for the superiority of the U.S. model was always exaggerated.  For one thing, it tended to ignore the relatively lower performance of the U.S. on broader quality-of-life measures like the Human Development Index.  But even when limited to differences in unemployment, the case for the U.S. model was overstated. From the 1990s on, the United States did have lower unemployment rates than several large European economies, such as France, Germany, Italy, and Spain,  but many smaller European economies with large welfare states and high levels of labor-market regulation regularly did as well or better on unemployment than the United States. In 2000, for example, at the peak of the late 1990s economic boom, when the U.S. unemployment rate stood at 4.0 percent, Austria (3.7 percent), the Netherlands (2.8 percent), Norway (3.4 percent), and Switzerland (2.6 percent) all had lower unemployment rates than the United States; and rates in Denmark (4.3 percent) and Ireland (4.2 percent) were not far behind.

 

   The point is that unemployment figures are not the only thing to look at when we ask the question: how does a society care for its people?

   You can read the entire brief by downloading it.