Paris — The bus crawls the hill, never more than a few miles per hour. It gently taps the bike, the biker collapses in a pool of his own drama, but I have to wonder: what the hell is a bus doing here?
It’s the butte of Montmartre, hordes of aloof Chinese and fat Texans stopped mid-street with phone cameras angled at every croissant and half-obstructed view of some hazy, distant, presumably-Eiffel Tower form.
And then a bus.
As Southerners do, I see buses as a nice service for either the elderly or the poor, and I’m not sure why either would have a need to be atop this hill, a spot not unlike the Camino de Santiago, serving minimal purpose beyond the achievement of some personal quest. Want to prove you can survive the temptation of a béreted Mickey Mouse on t-shirt or coffee mug? Enter a knot of chaos and emerge with both wallet and watch still in hand? Come on up!
I watch for a minute as the biker lies peacefully splayed across the northbound lane of the Rue du Mont-Cenis, the peeking sun completing a perfectly lovely scene for an afternoon nap, and honestly I’m tired too. I consider joining him.
Gawkers divert their phone cameras from the pull of tourist schtick to capture the body, a flopped opossum, waiting on the soccer pitch for an official to call a foul. Unclear who back home in Plano is scrolling Facebook in search of such cheap voyeurism, but the photographer’s eyes radiate as she surely envisions her caption – “EUROPE IS DANGIROUS.”
What’s wrong with Europe?
For years we talked about Germany being an otherwise-healthy continent’s “sick man,” but now I’m not sure who isn’t sick. Since the 2008 crash, European growth has underperformed the US by over 20 percentage points, on top of the euro losing a quarter of its value against the dollar.
A fact generally forgotten, Europe’s economy was larger than that of the US at the time of the crash, whereas today, in dollars, it is closer to two-thirds the size.
On the ground in Paris, the French market feels dynamic. Louis Vuitton boutiques pepper the streets, spreading far from the Champs-Élysées and Place Vendôme, and still can’t keep up with demand. One sip of Sancerre demotes California Zin to something near elephant piss, patisseries the clear victor over British bean-and-blood morning feasts, while the Airbus ride is noticeably modern and fresh relative to America’s drop-from-the-skies Boeing.
Foreign tourists swamp the Île de la Cité and Place de la Concorde, waiting hours to enter the Louvre or Notre-Dame or Sainte-Chapelle, proudly translating their normal brewed coffee order into something with an espresso base before fully appreciating the lack of public toilets.
But those lines highlight the problem – for tourists from Europe’s once-peer markets, a trip to Paris or Amsterdam is now cheaper than one to Yellowstone or Orlando. Even adjusted for generous social benefits, Europeans’ standard of living no longer compares to Americans’.
The question is why – and it’s hard to pinpoint specific causes without falling into ideological traps.
Europe’s vaunted social safety nets have long been the envy of the post-war world, even if we Americans are forced to admit it with a high degree of nuance, lest we be accused of the heresy of chasing socialism. But high levels of social spending are arguably less productive than injections into roads, fiber optic cables and industrial subsidies, and are hardly motivating for workers (see: Germany’s Hartz IV reforms).
That, on top of the layers of bolt-on bureaucracy, with the challenges of heterogenous languages and cultures, paired with a penchant for aggressive regulation, is generally where the American arguments land. And those arguments aren’t wrong.
But it’s also true that the American federalist structure invites its own inefficiencies. An attorney general in Mississippi can cause all sorts of hell for a company in New York, taxes stack up to European levels in many major cities, and a ride on Amtrak doesn’t exactly prove our superiority at productive government spend.
Rather I’d argue the difference lies in one of the most maligned stereotypes of my countrymen – our unbridled, often completely groundless but still shockingly effective optimism.
The faith that powered Manifest Destiny and dreamers on the Oregon Trail later led Americans to pile into war bonds and the stock market (again and again, even after crashes). In the flames of the Depression, the nation leaned into hope to craft the 30-year mortgage… and is there a greater expression of faith than the credit card, a loan to a stranger based on little more than a signature?
In each instance it was optimism that led Americans to invent new ways to invest in each other, in the process building a deeper, cheaper, enthusiastic pool of capital for companies, consumers and the government, and in turn a flywheel that has, on balance and over time, rewarded dreams and a willingness to take risks.
In Europe, meanwhile, capital markets are dominated by conservative pension funds and insurance companies, tasked with preservation of capital, protection against those same risks.
(Before this overly simplistic take wanders fully into bald eagles-and-apple pie kitsch, I’d point you to the Financial Times to see it in action: European columnists railing daily against companies fleeing London and the Continent for New York.)
Yankee investors are willing to pay for the dream of future growth – to have a little faith, if you will – which means the same company with the same earnings will be worth a tenth to a third more just by working with optimistic Americans.
If it were your dream, wouldn’t you do the same?
We’re at dinner, three of us packed onto a two-top at Le Marais’ Bistrot des Tournelles, but there’s sufficient wine flowing to forget the close quarters.
Americans are on either side of us, amiable but bigger and louder than the crowd around them. The waiter switches to perfect New World English on their tables, back to French on ours. Could it be he’s more playful in the language where tips are presumed?
The evening is fun, the wine smooth, the chicken cordon bleu larger than the plate. I try to ignore the guffaws, golf shirts and cargo khakis to my left. I’m in Paris, dammit, even if the Greg Norman pastels are dragging me to a Stein Mart in Vestavia Hills.
Socialist Jean-Luc Mélenchon has just announced yet another run for president. It’s tough to see anyone other than hard-right Marine Le Pen’s protégé with any momentum, though, as Mélenchon is rather past-tense and there is only contempt for the ruling establishment. Devoid of a de Gaulle, the world’s fieriest electorate wants more from the Élysée, and isn’t about to let a queasy bond market slow its demands.
One of our group rants a little too much about the US, about New York’s Italian not being that good, about the people lacking discernment and the age-old “it’s so unfair they can go anywhere and not have to know the language.”
The tables on either side of us quiet down a notch. One man sighs, “well I guess we are in Europe.”
There will come a day when the world doesn’t only speak English and spend dollars, and Americans will lose the benefits that reserve currency privilege entails. Maybe we’ll all learn a little more French?
Winston Churchill entered World War II as a global power, but by the time he arrived in Tehran, FDR and Stalin were his saviors, no longer his peers. Bretton Woods, the agreement cementing the world’s official transition from sterling to dollar, would come merely a year later.
And our day will come too.
But through volatile markets and prices, through the occasional ills of capitalism and right into that inevitable moment our dynasty fades to history, I have faith we’ll work it out.
Europeans should try a little of that blind, baseless faith for themselves.
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