Karl Zinsmeister has written back to me as follows:

Eric Raymond kindly forwarded me your critique of my essay “Old and In The Way” (http://taemag.com/taedec02a.pdf).

You are too clever by half. The figures you multiply in your response to my essay cannot be so crudely treated. For one thing, you have considered only persons working, and ignored hours worked per person. Nor can overall labor productivity be treated so simply. Overall productivity figures capture a mix of factors: output per labor input (representing about a third of America’s present productivity advantage over the EU), as well as higher labor inputs and other factors.

Incidentally, I used a European source for these particular figures, precisely to insulate myself from sniping of the sort you have attempted in your blog. The data you refer to were first presented by the Dutch Secretary of State for Social Affairs and Employment, Hans Hoogervorst, in a Feb 1, 2002 speech at the Hague. His paper is reproduced in “Europe’s Welfare Burden,” published in 2002 by the Institute for the Study of Civil Society in London (link).

I would appreciate your posting this as a response on your blog.

I can only respond that Zinsmeister does not appear to have read the post carefully or to have thought too much about the response. Hours worked per person are a crucial part of the calculation and are, of course, included. And whether multiplying his figures is a ‘crude’ procedure or not, it’s the appropriate way to deal with a mathematical identity.

Output per person in population = Proportion of employed people in population*Hours worked per employed person*Output per hour worked.

As with Glenn Reynolds and the debate over Sweden a while back, Zinsmeister suggests that quoting a European critic of Europe’s performance ‘insulates’ him from any suggestion of error. I don’t suppose that either Reynolds or Zinsmeister would be impressed if I attacked the performance of the US and then said I must be right because I relied on, say, Noam Chomsky, or even Al Gore. Unfortunately, I can’t check the source as the link is to an a precis of a book with no relevant info. But what kind of procedure is it to rely on obscure secondary sources for data that is readily available from agencies like the OECD and BLS?