The article isn’t about France but…
France believes that it’s been in crisis for 30 years, that the country is close to a decent in chaos, and yet from the outside…
“I used to wonder: why is France so rich?”
“France gets so much wrong, and yet it still does pretty well on the metrics that actually matter.”
So what actually matters…
“But Ben Southwood has convinced me that France is rich because it gets the big things basically right. Housing supply there is freer: the overall geographic extent of Paris’s metropolitan area roughly tripled between 1945 and today, whereas London’s has grown only a few percent. Infrastructure is better: 29 French cities have trams, versus 11 here (likely one reason its second-tier cities are much more productive than Britain’s). It has nearly 12,000km of motorways versus around 4,000km here – and French motorways tend to be smoother and better kept (and three quarters are tolled, making congestion much less of a problem). Childcare is cheaper: about half the price per month, in part because they require half the staff. Energy is more abundant, as shown above. Because it gets those big four things right, it can afford to get a lot of other things wrong.”
Democracy is the solution to vetocracy – by Sam Bowman
Over the years I’ve had numerous friends leave France to only tell me years later how many of the big things were right and how the small things drove them mad!
