Letter: Yanks out

Hamish McRae, while supporting American economic neo-liberalism, fails to ask an important question (Business, 16 March). Why, despite the very real structural problems Euro-pean capitalism is facing, has no political force which commands any significant following proposed to imitate the US? This might have something to do with the statistics Mr McRae doesn't cite, for example those comparing poverty in the US and France or Germany, or those showing that Europe has consistently outperformed the US in growth of standards of living over the last two decades. Living on unemployment benefit in France, one has a better standard of life than in one of the millions of low-paid, dead-end jobs that form a significant proportion of the US "jobs miracle".

Maybe the Europeans are so wedded to their version of capitalism because they think it has magical powers. German productivity is 10 per cent lower than in the US and average hours worked are 18 per cent less and yet despite this, German GDP per head is 85 per cent of the US - quite a feat really. European capitalism may be even better than we thought.

Peter Poellner

University of Warwick