Shorto is candid about his misgivings about the 52% Dutch income tax rate, but points out that that figure includes social security, state and local taxes, and that real estate taxes are much lower, so that in the end the overall tax rate isn’t much more there. And for their money the Dutch get high quality universal health care, including doctors who make house calls and provide “an old-fashioned, personal feel” and a week of all-day-long after-birth home care during which “someone comes and does your laundry, vacuums and teaches you how to care for a newborn,” among other things.

They also get $4,265 of vakantiegeld (vacation money) at the start of the summer from the government to spend during their four-weeks-long mandatory paid vacation. And nice, cheap “social housing” that people from a broad socioeconomic spectrum inhabit. And good pensions (what are those again?). And people are expected to work hard, but not excessively. 

The contrast with our society was all the more evident this morning when I read this article in the Times today, chronicling the harrowing travails of New Yorkers whose lives have been shattered as the economy worsens. It included mention of a lab technician who had lost her job because she couldn’t concentrate at work. Why couldn’t she concentrate at work? Because her eighteen-year-old son was dying of bone cancer. Sorry lady, we’re not interested in excuses in the U.S of A. 

Shorto traces the Dutch collectivist ethos to the hundreds of years of problems they’ve had as a result of being below sea level:

. . .the big problem is pumping the water. . . in most cases your land lies in the middle of the country, so where are you going to pump it? To someone else’s land. And then they have to do the same thing, and their neighbor does, too. So what you see in the records are these extraordinarily complicated deals. All of this had to be done together.

In other words, the interdependence of their well-being was insistent and undeniable and demanded that they look out for one another. Taking an every-man-for-himself approach was never an option there. And, as studies increasingly demonstrate, individual happiness and well-being are seldom separable from membership in healthy communities and societies.

I’ve long been sold on the preferability of European social democracy, so Shorto’s article just confirmed my biases further. However, he does raise the open question with which we in the United States are faced: “Can such a system work in a truly multiethnic society?”

Many people assume that the more humane capitalism of social democracies such as Netherlands’ can only work in ethnically and culturally homogeneous countries where people identify with one and other strongly and easily. What do you think?

PS: I’m very encouraged President Obama invited Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz to the White House for dinner recently. This summer’s vakantiegeld hasn’t shown up in my account yet, but it’s a step in the right direction.