What the British could learn from the French

If I ran the British government, to promote more heterodox thinking I would employ a small cadre of French people as an alternative sounding board. I know it may seem ridiculous to seek advice from a country which makes tea with lukewarm water and thinks Johnny Hallyday was better than Elvis but, if only by the law of averages, they can’t be wrong about everything.

And on the subject of pensions and retirement, they may have a point. The reaction to pension reform in France is a lesson in how two adjacent countries can frame the same problem in completely different ways. When the retirement age is raised in Britain, we shrug. In France, they set fire to things.

It is fascinating to see how many young people in France are thronging the streets to defend their right to play a lot of pétanque in 40 years’ time. If I were a young Frenchman, would I not resent paying high taxes so that train drivers can retire at 55? It seems not. On the other hand, is that any worse than for a young Londoner to pay most of their after-tax salary in rent so their landlord can live off their labour? In Britain it is the property market, not the pension system, which redistributes wealth from the young to the old. (One strange feature of Anglo-Saxon economics is that all economists are agreed that rent-seeking is bad, and yet no economist ever proposes any action to discourage it.)

For good and ill, the French accord economics a far lower status in their decision-making hierarchy than Anglo-Saxons do. In Britain, economic logic decides everything; in France, it is secondary to qualitative considerations.