Mallaby responds

I emailed Sebastian Mallaby this morning with what was essentially the contents of this post. He responded this afternoon with the following:

fair enough, but look at rates of growth in GDP per capita (last column)

Nb: most of the numbers from the EIU country profile page except for the % of GDP public consumption which I took out of the Economist 'Pocket World in Figures - 2007 Edition'. It didn't appear that piece of information was released on their website.

I then wrote back:

Thanks for the response. However, that chart is only for a 4-5 year time period, doesn't really seem enough to justify following the Danish/Swedish model. I'd be more interested in how those growth rates hold over the past 10, 20, 30 years. My suspicion is that it would render their performance much less impressive -- otherwise they would have already overtaken us in GDP per capita.

In any case I agree with most or perhaps even all of your prescriptions for improving government. I think you are making a conservative/right-wing argument (ending Freddie/Fannie, school vouchers, tort reform, wariness on labor unions, etc.) but are hesitant to admit it.

Thanks again,

Colin