While attending a vaccine center in Washington, D.C. last week, where Covid vaccines were being given to kids between the ages of 6 months and 5 years, President Biden stated:
We’re the only country in the world doing this right now. This is a great day for you all. Thanks for the example you are setting.
He was obviously proud.
But measuring your country against other countries is not a good way to tell whether you’re doing right and they’re doing wrong, or vice-versa.
In his book One Billion Americans, Matthew Yglesias made a similar claim in the other direction. He wrote:
It’s true that the United States has been painfully slow compared with some peer countries to provide subsidized child care.
In context, Yglesias was clearly saying that we in the United States should step up and imitate those peer countries. That’s why the words “painfully slow.”
The best way to tell whether a policy is good or bad is to examine the principles behind, and the details of, the policy.
READER COMMENTS
Dylan
Jul 2 2022 at 5:52pm
I agree that in isolation this doesn’t tell us much, but in can provide useful context to know whether you’re doing something right or wrong or if something is even possible. One example, the cost of big infrastructure projects is much higher in the U.S. than it is in most of the rest of the world. Looking and seeing that those countries that are cheaper don’t have bridges falling apart or rampant environmental destruction from excessive building should give us a clue that we’re doing something wrong. Principle might tell us we shouldn’t have government doing infrastructure projects at all, but the comparison with the rest of the world at least lets us know that it is possible to do it better, even with government involvement.
David Henderson
Jul 2 2022 at 6:07pm
True. I overstated.
Both of my examples are of big picture policy choices. But I agree with you that if a government sets out to do x, it’s a good idea to see how, and at what cost, other countries do x.
Roger McKinney
Jul 7 2022 at 5:53pm
I think you’re confusing two actions. If we’re already doing something it’s reasonable ti compare how well we do it with others doing the same thing. We do that a lot in the Healthcare industry.
But it’s a very different thing to say someone else is doing something we’re not and we should start doing it because they are. That’s irrational.
Jose Pablo
Jul 2 2022 at 6:20pm
Great post. I have always been puzzled by the way that (mostly European) economist do benchmarks of health care expenditure (mostly public) per capita in different countries, signaling out countries with the lower expenditure per capita as having the wrong policy.
This way of using benchmarks always seemed very un-economic to me.
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Jul 3 2022 at 2:28pm
True, but levels of income and culture are pretty similar between the US and many other countries that cross-country comparisons can be useful. Just today I saw Alex Tabarrok again bring up DFA’s failure to have reciprocal approval (of sunscreen) with European regulators. Cross country comparisons are not substitute for cost benefit analysis but I think they can be useful “hypotheses” to test with CB analysis.
Comments are closed.