I believe that the only group doing better in the neoliberal era are the top one percent. I think that one should characterize it as a system that is designed to help the top one, and especially the top one tenth of one percent of society, with some trickle down that steadily peters out as you go along the class gradient.
Exactly.
And France is resisting:
That last graph explains more than anything the permanent attacks against France in the business press. In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
However, Sweden is also a success story. It has strong economic growth and low unemployment. Canada has the fastest economic growth in the G-8. Japan has had sluggish growth for 15 years, but is still associated with industriousness and productivity. In contrast, the only thing France can boast is high per-hour productivity; it has high unemployment and had slow economic growth until 2005. It also has a somewhat hierarchical culture, which makes it easy to characterize it as a cumbersome bureaucracy. The US bleeds way more money to administration than France - for example, it bleeds 7% of its GDP every year to health care waste - but it is too counterintuitive to be asserted without evidence.
