How the Scandinavians got so tall

By Max Ehrenfreund April 8

If you want to understand how the liberal brain trust is thinking about politics
and the economy today, a good place to start would be a new book by two
widely read political scientists on the left, Jacob Hacker of Yale University and
Paul Pierson of the University of California, Berkeley.
In "American Amnesia," Hacker and Pierson argue that Americans have
forgotten the hard-headed resourcefulness that made America prosper -- that
we've forgotten that sometimes the best tool for fixing a problem is the
government. The authors blame this absentmindedness on what they view
as misguided conservative ideology.
Americans now tend to think about our government as a constraint on our
freedom, or, at best, as a kind of necessary evil that is occasionally useful for
correcting the free market's excesses. Even those on the left sometimes
narrowly view the government primarily as a way of redistributing income
from the wealthy to those in need, according to Hacker and Pierson.
In Hacker and Pierson's expansive account of the history of U.S. politics, by
contrast, the government isn't just a means for redistribution or even an
economic handicap. Rather, they argue, the government is a crucial source of
economic growth.
Specifically, they write, one of the main reasons that we're so much better off
than previous generations of Americans is that the government can make
people do things for society's benefit that they wouldn't ordinarily do, such
as pasteurize their milk and vaccinate their kids. Also, the government can
make people pay taxes to fund lucrative investments in education, scientific
research and the construction of roads and rails -- to name a few of the
main reasons for material progress in the past century.

The authors argue that these limitations on freedom are how the United States
became a rich country, and why there are relatively few rich nations in the
world with a small government. "Government works because it can force
people to do things," they write on the first page, opening the book with a
challenge to the conventional wisdom on both sides of the aisle about the
relationship among economic freedom, economic growth and well being in
general.
Wonkblog interviewed Hacker and Pierson by phone last week, and an
edited transcript is below.
The interview started with a comparison of average heights in different
countries. For most of the history of the United States, Americans were the
tallest people in the world. Recently, though, northern Europeans became the
world's tallest people. The Scandinavians have a reputation for stature, but it
turns out it is the Dutch who are the tallest -- eight inches taller, on average,
than they were two centuries ago.
Hacker and Pierson argue the shift occurred because, these days, active
government has made Europeans healthier than we are. In particular,
according to the authors, they have healthier childhoods, because their
governments offer more material help to pregnant women and infants than
does the U.S. government.
Hacker: The United States has gone from being the country with the tallest
people in the world by a pretty significant margin -- during the Second World
War, Americans were a couple inches taller than the Germans they were
fighting -- to a country in which heights are pretty middling compared with
other rich democracies. We mention Dutch men running into the tops of
doorways because we and the people who study height think its a very good

marker of population health. It tells you about nutrition in the womb and
socioeconomic cohesion and the degree to which a society is good at
encouraging a sort of healthy flourishing, particularly in early life.
The fact that we have gone from being the tallest to among the smallest
dovetails with all the other evidence in the book. While we're continuing to
improve in areas -- like education, life expectancy and the rest -- we're
improving much more slowly than in the past, and we're improving much
more slowly than other rich democracies are today.
Pierson: It's not that Americans are getting shorter. It's that the rate of
improvement has slowed down dramatically, which has not been true in a lot
of other countries. We're not waxing nostalgic for the idea that life was so
much better in some earlier time. We're really trying to celebrate the
incredible progress that the United States and other rich democracies made
over the course of the 20th century. Whats alarming is the way in which -- in
relative terms, either compared with our own past, or compared with the
performance of other countries -- the rate of progress has slowed down. Thats
something to be concerned about.
Hacker: We have grown bigger in one way, of course. We've gotten
significantly heavier. The average male in the 1960s weighs the same amount
as the average woman weighs today.
One of the other really interesting parts of the book was where you
talk about creativity. Economists have long hypothesized that the
reason economic growth happens in the modern world is that
people are creative. They come up with new ways of doing things.
They invent things, they engineer things, they have new ideas and
they discover things, and that makes us all better off. Today,

creativity is generally seen as a product of individual genius.

Previously, Americans understood the process as a collective one.
Could you just talk a little bit about how that changed?
Pierson: That is an absolutely fundamental point. Drawing on a lot of
economic research, the idea that it's a handful of superhumans who generate
these breakthroughs -- I just don't think that idea can survive close scrutiny.
The contributions of those individuals are obviously extraordinary and
important, but you need an infrastructure. You need high levels of education,
you need universities, you need the incentives for people to carry out basic
research that other people can build on. Obviously, this casts doubt on any
language of "job creators" that suggests that either by just their brilliance or
the amount of money that theyre putting up, it's just a handful of people that
are creating prosperity.
That leads to the question of why has the way that we've talked about
it changed so dramatically over the past 50 years.
In his review last week, The Washington Post's Steven Pearlstein
basically said that you folks don't have a good explanation for how
this happened. Do you want to say anything about that review?
Hacker: I think we do have an explanation. The argument we make is about
the changing economy and the way that it in turn shapes business on the one
hand, and the changing party system in the United States. The Republican
Party -- the party that's always been closest to business -- gets away from
support for the mixed economy, partly in response to this shift in business,
and partly in response to the changing electoral and political incentives it sees.

We used to have a system in which people were willing to talk about

government, and government projects, that showed up in peoples lives in a
positive way. That in turn increased the sense of civic engagement on the part
of Americans and also their trust in government. Today, we have much more
of a vicious cycle in which Republicans have not just attacked government
rhetorically -- just destroying our capacity to effectively collect taxes,
particularly from the richest Americans. In attacking government both
rhetorically and structurally they've also been able to gain politically. It's
created this retreat from visible uses of government that are positive in
peoples lives. It's contributed to the sense of rising distrust.
Its been not just Republicans who have made this possible. Democrats have
accommodated it and in some cases pushed it along, chasing some of the same
business interests and responding to some of the same negative attacks on
government as Republicans. That, I think, is a pretty straightforward
argument about how two fundamental shifts in our economic world and our
political world came together.
It wasn't that long ago that Bill Clinton declared, "The era of big
government is over." How would you characterize the shift in
thinking among policymakers, scholars of government and
economists?
Pierson: When we talk about government, we tend to talk about it primarily as
a vehicle of redistribution -- that it takes from some people and that it gives to
other people. Obviously, we think the issue of inequality is extremely
important --we wrote a whole book about it before we wrote this one. That sort
of zero-sum view that most of what government does is about redistribution is
dominant in the way that a lot of very serious thoughtful people approach
government and policy. They reduce the state primarily about those

dimensions. And if you bring it up, they do think its important -- "Oh yeah,
they took lead out of gasoline and out of paint, and cleaned up the air and the
water." I don't think it's prominent.
Hacker: We tend to focus on this zero-sum element, this point-in-time
element of government's role, the transfers that go from one group to
another. George W. Bush once said, "Make the pie higher." One of the
mistakes is to think that making the pie "higher," making the economy larger,
means deregulating the small circle who are putatively creating prosperity. If
you start to understand prosperity as a social product, then you really start to
see government's role as much broader and much less about redistribution.
Conservative readers will say that the free market has done quite a
bit to improve people's standards of living, with free trade being
the classic example. If you look at, say, local housing regulations,
conservatively inclined folks have a very strong argument that
government is getting in the way of prosperity as well as fairness.
I'm just wondering if there is anything that you would add for
conservatives who think you're only telling one side of the story
here.
Hacker: We're not arguing that government always does the right thing. You
mentioned land use policies, which are clearly responsive to concentrated
interests. The conservative critique of crony capitalism carries a lot of weight.
It's just misdirected. It's not the Export-Import bank thats the problem. We
can debate it, but it's a flea on an elephant. The problem is that government
isnt effectively regulating industry.
We also have the fact that we spend vastly more than other rich countries on
health care because we have a set of policies that are far too solicitous of the

private health-care industry. The same kind of story can be told about the
financial industry, the degree to which its offloading large systemic risks on
the rest of our economy. Climate change is a huge rent, as economists call it,
that the fossil fuel industry enjoys. And so rent-seeking can take both forms,
but the biggest forms of rent-seeking -- the ones I just mentioned in health
care, energy, the fossil fuel industry and finance -- dwarf everything else.
At this point in our history, people do not understand the story we tell. The
valuable contribution of the book is to excavate and surface the enormous
positive contribution of government that transformed our society and all rich
societies in the course of less than a century from places where health and
income and education were all extremely low to enormously prospering,
flourishing societies.