You Can Polder If You Want To. You Just Have To Want To.

Should America follow the Dutch social model? Ask that of any US pundit, the conventional reply will be “Nooo, the socialism, it burrns! 52% tax!”

But just maybe, maybe they should think the unthinkable, says American exiled in Amsterdam Russell Shorto, in a fascinating article in the NYT magazine. Americans pretty much pay an equal amount in cumulative taxes, to much less effect:

…in talking both with American expats and with experts in the Dutch system, I hear the same thing over and over: American perceptions of European-style social welfare are seriously skewed. The system in which I have embedded myself has its faults, some of them lampoonable. But does the cartoon image of it — encapsulated in the dread slur “socialism,” which is being lobbed in American political circles like a bomb — match reality? Is there, maybe, a significant upside that is worth exploring?

It’s a biggish read but worth it as a primer on how the country works:

I spent my initial months in Amsterdam under the impression that I was living in a quasi-socialistic system, built upon ideas that originated in the brains of Marx and Engels. This was one of the puzzling features of the Netherlands. It is and has long been a highly capitalistic country — the Dutch pioneered the multinational corporation and advanced the concept of shares of stock, and last year the country was the third-largest investor in U.S. businesses — and yet it has what I had been led to believe was a vast, socialistic welfare state. How can these polar-opposite value systems coexist?

[….]

…water also played a part in the development of the welfare system… The Dutch call their collectivist mentality and way of politics-by-consensus the “polder model,” after the areas of low land systematically reclaimed from the sea. “People think of the polder model as a romantic idea” and assume its origins are more myth than fact, Mak told me. “But if you look at records of the Middle Ages, you see it was a real thing. Everyone had to deal with water. With a polder, the big problem is pumping the water. But 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.”

[…]

IF “SOCIALISM” IS THEN something of a straw man — if rather than political ideology, religious values and a tradition of cooperation are what lie beneath the modern social-welfare system — maybe it’s worth asking a simple question of such a system: What does it feel like to live in it?

Sholto answers that question by interviewing a number of other US expats, which is a bit lazy of him though he does admit it:

Indeed, my nonscientific analysis — culled from my own experience and that of other expats whom I’ve badgered — translates into a clear endorsement. My friend Colin Campbell, an American writer, has been in the Netherlands for four years with his wife and their two children. “Over the course of four years, four human beings end up going to a lot of different doctors,” he said. “The amazing thing is that virtually every experience has been more pleasant than in the U.S. There you have the bureaucracy, the endless forms, the fear of malpractice suits. Here you just go in and see your doctor. It shows that it doesn’t have to be complicated. I wish every single U.S. congressman could come to Amsterdam and live here for a while and see what happens medically.”

It’s not quite as simple as that – it’s all in Dutch, for a start – but close. I’ve experienced the health and social care systems of the US, UK and NL personally and up close, and the Netherlands’ is the one I’d go for every time. Once you get past the impenetrable bureaucracy, (which Shotto doesn’t really mention, but it is a massive obstacle) and the language/cultural issues, it seems to work on the whole.

It’s certainly rare to see anyone truly, visibly poor here, unlike in the US and the UK, and to be sick or disabled here is not the automatic life-sentence to poverty and exclusion it is there. Sholto goes on to back this up with numbers:

A study by the Commonwealth Fund found that 54 percent of chronically ill patients in the United States avoided some form of medical attention in 2008 because of costs, while only 7 percent of chronically ill people in the Netherlands did so for financial reasons.

Read more….

Enough said. Case proven.