[lbo-talk] The Fall of France

[Dennis Redmond]

> LRB
> Vol. 26 No. 17 :: 2 September 2004
> Perry Anderson: The Fall of France
>
> The economy, after crawling forward at 1.3 per cent a year through the
> 1990s,
> is today sunk in yet another trough, with a widening deficit, rising
> public debt and very high levels of unemployment. Well over 9 per cent
> of the
> labour force, itself reduced by high rates of early retirement, is out
> of work. One quarter of French youth is jobless; two-fifths among
> immigrant families. Secondary education, once the best in Europe, has
> been steadily deteriorating; large numbers now emerge from it scarcely
> literate. Although France still spends more on a pupil in its lycées (for
> the first time outclassed, except at the very highest level, by
> private schools) than it does on a student at its universities, it has one
> of the lowlier rates of reading in the OECD. Scientific research, measured
> by funding or by discovery, has plummeted: emigration, virtually unknown
> in the past, now drains the country's laboratories.

Bizarre. A barrage of assertions, ungrounded by a single statistic. The
French economy hasn't done badly at all - deficits are running 3-4% GDP,
lower than 1994-95; unemployment is high, but the welfare state still
exists. I don't know what data he's using to complain about French high
schools -- France scores in the middle, I think, on most of the
cross-country research I've seen. France continues to field a respectable
scientific and technological base, and although it doesn't have the
industrial muscle of Central Europe, it is running current account and
trade surpluses, unlike that mighty US economy whose hegemony Perry is
always proclaiming.

Must be euro-envy.

-- DRR