Part 2 book “Socialist optimism” has contents: Economic growth and inequality, education in a free society, equality and democratic control, the US as exemplar and paradigm, socialism and human possibilities. | 9 The US as Exemplar and Paradigm For much of the twentieth century, the US was a standard of the good life, for perfectly explicable reasons. In a war-torn, class-ridden, poverty-stricken and undemocratic world, America was distinctive for peace, class mobility, wealth and the absence of mass terror. This transcendent position reached its height in the period immediately after the Second World War. The vibrant role of the US in the interwar period in the forms of culture characteristic of the twentieth century – cinema, popular music and jazz – was now supplemented by overwhelming military, political and economic predominance. The most important source of its international prestige in economic affairs, however, has remained its singular superiority in levels of per capita income, which was double that of the nations of Western Europe in 1950. In the postwar period up until the early 1970s, the US experienced lower growth rates in national income and higher levels of unemployment than Western Europe and Japan. Even with this erosion, the US continued to maintain its leading place in the calculation of national income per capita. In 2014, it was richer than any state in the European Union (excluding Luxembourg) – by 16 per cent in comparison with the Netherlands, by 20 and 21 per cent compared with Germany and Sweden, respectively, and by 40 and 41 per cent compared with the UK and France, As we shall see in the next chapter, much of this apparent predominance disappears for typical workers when these figures are modified to reflect the highly unequal distribution of income in the US and the exceptionally high number of hours worked per year. The US is an old nation and invariably embodies idiosyncratic and peculiar aspects. It is, for instance, the centre of world science and simultaneously the location of a vast creationist movement. These are fascinating and troubling aspects of the culture, but will be dealt with only in passing. The focus here .
