Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?: How the European Model Can Help You Get a Life

edstrom's picture
October 14, 2010 - 11:33am — edstrom

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 So far the Moving Train Book Club has covered two of Geoghegan's books, "The Law in Shambles," and "The Secret Lives of Citizens."  Both are among my favorites.  Geoghegan is a Chicago-based labor lawyer who writes about how the law and society interact and determine our standards of living and the quality of our lives.  

This is his latest book, 336 pages, published by New Press in August, 2010.  Geoghegan was a Fulbright Scholar who spent a year in Germany and has used that as a basis of incidental comparisons with the US social, economic and legal situations.  Here he devotes the entire book to a more detailed discussion of this subject with special attention paid to the contrasts between the reactions to the 2008 collapse of "Casino Capitalism" in the US and Europe, and Germany in particular.

This book was brought to my attention by an interview with Geoghegan at AlterNet where he explains what led him to write this new book:

Terrence McNally: You start your book Were you Born on the Wrong Continent? with a personal experience, a stopover in Zurich. Could you talk about that?
Thomas Geoghegan: In 1993 I got it in my head, for reasons too long to tell, to go see a woman I'd met who happened to be in Moscow. Because of the coup in October 1993, all the flights to Moscow were canceled, and I ended up in Zurich. I had not been in Western Europe for years, and, while I was waiting for clearance, I happened to walk around the streets and I was just thunderstruck by how nice it was. Every bookstore seemed like a boutique and even the train station was like a perfumery. And I thought, how did this part of the world get so wealthy without my knowing it? That was the epiphany that led me to take a bigger and bigger interest in how Europeans live, and to ask ultimately, were you born in the wrong continent?

 

From the product description over on Amazon.com:

In an idiosyncratic, entertaining travelogue that plays on public policy, Thomas Geoghegan asks what our lives would be like if we lived them as Europeans. Sneaking out of his workaholic American life, he takes five trips where he tries to understand so-called European socialism firsthand. After visiting France, he ventures into Germany to see what some call the “boring” Europe. There he finds the true “other”—an economic model with more bottom-up worker control than that of any other country in the world—and argues that, while we have to take Germany’s problems seriously, we also have to look seriously at how much it has achieved. Social democracy may let us live nicer lives; it also may be the only way to be globally competitive.