Q. What do you call someone who only speaks one language?
A. I'm American.
This is an old joke, but it's still valid. In fact, although I am monolingual myself, my academic research has primarily focused on international trade and finance. In my defense, the vast majority of world economic research is published in English. And in general, Americans' lack of language skills outweighs their insularity, relative unfamiliarity with what's going on in other countries and how things work.
Other countries, especially wealthy countries that more or less match the United States in technological development and general ability to get things done, are a kind of mirror that helps us see ourselves more clearly. But many Americans, even supposedly knowledgeable commentators, often seem unaware of both how similar and how different other countries are from us. It happens often.
Especially with an election looming on everyone's mind, who knows that President Biden is one of the most popular, if not unpopular, leaders in the Western world? Is there only one?
We will discuss this surprising fact and what it tells us later. First, let me talk about other international comparisons that I think are relevant to the current situation.
You hear politicians on the campaign trail trying to make hay with the old Reagan-era question, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” — What actually happened in 2020? There is a lot of amnesia about what was happening, a deadly and terrifying pandemic. To some extent, I think people are treating the coronavirus pandemic as an act of God that is beyond the control of politicians.
But that's not true. No matter what we did, many people were going to die. But the death toll was influenced by politics, perhaps especially as vaccines became the front line of the culture wars. And America has had a really bad pandemic compared to other countries. Life expectancy in the United States was already lagging behind comparable countries in 2019, but the gap widened further after the coronavirus outbreak.
Meanwhile, the U.S. economy experienced an unusually strong recovery from the pandemic recession. Even after adjusting for inflation, U.S. gross domestic product per capita has grown 7% since the eve of the pandemic, far outpacing the growth rate of other major wealthy countries. At first glance, this would seem to say good things about Biden's economic policies.
However, the public's perception of Japan's economic performance is strongly reflected in rising prices. Inflation (the rate of increase in prices) has subsided significantly, but prices have not and will not go down. And there has been significant criticism of policymakers, both the Biden administration and the Federal Reserve, for allegedly causing inflation, or at least failing to stop it.
But here is an example where the similarities between the richest countries are more obvious than their differences. After the pandemic, inflation skyrocketed almost everywhere. And when we carefully compare apples to Epfels using the same consumer price index, inflation rates were surprisingly similar across countries. Since the eve of the pandemic, the harmonized index of consumer prices has increased by 19.6% in the US and 19.8% in the euro area. This strongly suggests that pandemic-related disruptions, rather than national policies, were the main driver of inflation.
Still, inflation worries voters. Even when income growth outpaces inflation, as in the United States, people tend to feel that the higher wages they earned were taken away by rising prices. And this is perhaps the most important reason why all G7 leaders are in trouble, with more voters disapproving of them than supporting them, according to a tracking poll conducted by Morning Consult. be.
So, who is the winner of this popularity contest? Who has the least bad online approvals? The answer is Joe Biden, with Italy's Giorgia Meloni a close second. Other Group of Seven (G7) leaders are even more unpopular. And this has political implications. Worryingly, while the US election appears to be in turmoil, in the UK, where a general election must be held by January, current forecasts show Rishi Sunak's extremely low approval ratings for the Conservative Party. It is said that this is setting the stage for the de facto collapse of the country.
Now, given the economic and social fundamentals of very low unemployment, fairly low inflation, and declining violent crime, one could argue that Biden should do better in the polls (and I think so too). And the United States appears to stand out in that regard. voters They claim that the economy is bad even though they say the economy is good.
But all the political analysis that blames Biden's low approval ratings on the president and his campaign suggests he's too old (although that narrative suddenly peaked after the State of the Union address). (almost disappeared), or that they are disconnected from society. A “real” American's concerns — he needs to explain why he is doing no worse than his foreign compatriots.
