It is not that western Europe’s overall economic performance has been dire: looked at over the course of the past two decades, and measured by GDP per head rather than simple GDP growth so as to reflect population changes, it has not been all that much different from that in the US. But it needed to be better in Europe, for two big reasons: to reduce western Europe’s chronically high levels of unemployment, which threaten social division; and to finance European welfare spending, which is so much higher than in the US.
