"World's Most Prosperous Nation"?

I would like to point out a few more statistics that I believe shed light on the failures of right-wing economic policy and ideology. Specifically, they pertain to international and historical comparisons regarding our labor productivity.

First, we like to tout ourselves as the "world's most prosperous nation." http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/05/20070531-9.html. Even if we ignore the massive asterisk of our unparalleled economic inequality ("first you must ignore that which is unignorable"), this is not necessarily true. Actually, in 2006 Norway had the highest GDP per capita, but we were number 2 so I guess that's close enough. (Note: now Ireland has a higher GDP per capita, and if you want to include Luxembourg as a country, so do they.) See http://www.bls.gov/fls/flsgdp.pdf, Table 1. But scroll down to Table 4. Turns out for 2006 we were behind 4 other countries in GDP per hour worked (after Norway, which was by far the highest, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France; I'm sure now we are behind Ireland as well). Not that #5 or 6 is so bad, but I think this seriously calls into question the idea that we are the "world's most prosperous nation." After all, leisure has significant value as well, and obviously we have way less of it here.

Another way to see the fact that our economic prosperity indicators are inflated due to relative overworking is to compare median household income growth since the beginning of the Reagan era to the increase in hours worked over the same period. Our median household GDP increased 14.5% from 1980-2002, from $45,647 to $52,285. See http://www.epi.org/datazone/06/median_income.pdf. But the average hours worked for middle-income married couples with children age 25-54 has increased 17.1% over the same period, from 3,046 to 3,567. See http://www.epi.org/datazone/06/wrk_hrs_hus_wif.pdf. So for the typical middle-income family, it would appear that all of the increase in income over the Reagan & post-Reagan era is a mere reflection of an increase in hours worked.

But as we know, the real problem with our economy isn't that it's not productive. Our recent productivity growth has been strong, and classical economic theory tells us that increases in productivity should lead to proportional increases in wages. But it hasn't. U.S. manufacturing productivity has increased 182% since 1980, but manufacturing wages have only increased 32% over the same period. See ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/ForeignLabor/prodsuppt01.txt and ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/ForeignLabor/prodsuppt13.txt. So I guess the bottom line is that we cannot try to justify our immoral economic system on the grounds that it produces wealth on a scale unheard of elsewhere. It produces great wealth, no question, but not necessarily any more wealth than social democratic economies produce. And recent productivity growth has served to swell corporate profits instead of increasing wages or hour-adjusted average household income.