This is a favorite theme of mine. I teach a course, "Economics of the welfare state," that rests heavily on international comparisons of health policy, retirement policy, etc. 1/ theatlantic.com/politics/archi…
By the way, it's not as simple as "Europe is to our left, and that's better." For example, one lesson is that single-payer works, but so do other systems. There are several ways to achieve universal coverage 2/
And countries don't do everything well or everything badly. France has amazingly successful health care, seriously screwed up retirement policy (which we do relatively well) 3/
Safety-net programs aren't the only place to learn from others. When the 2008 crisis happened, economists who had paid attention to the Asian crisis of 1997-9 were much readier to take what was happening onboard than those who had assumed that America was different 4/
One thing worth mentioning, though: in policy debates, people sometimes extol foreign role models that are more imaginary than real. Social Security privatizers talked a lot about Chile's system, which the Chileans themselves hated 5/
But that's also a mark of American insularity: ignorance of foreign experience turns other countries into rhetorical points that have little to do with reality. 6/
So it's a big world out there, and people are people, so we should learn from it 7/
