(^470) THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONS
among them tended to buy their cars from Germany. But France re
mained the master of quality, making articles set above and apart by
taste (in both senses) and beauty. And France, the country, remained
one of the world's most beautiful places to visit, a work of natural and
man-made art, a tourist paradise. By the 1990s France had one of the
highest standards of living in the world, with income a quarter again
as high as that of old rival Great Britain. The old staples had slumped;
France did not learn to mass-produce the high-tech devices of the
computer age. But wine and cheese and fabrics and fashions remained.
One sticking point, source of weakness as well as strength: the
French are proud. They have their way of doing things and, unlike the
British, do not take easily to loss of power. This makes them poor
learners of foreign ways. They have their own way. Today, French
workers enjoy a generous social safety net and excellent medical and
child care, along with strong vested privileges (long paid vacations,
early retirement). This, plus cultural advantages, makes France a mar
velous country to grow old in. But it also makes employers slow to
hire, because every hire is laden with associated costs and potential li
abilities. The effect: a high unemployment rate that hits especially hard
at the young. The state, concerned for social peace (how does one
argue peaceably and reasonably with truckers who block major roads?),
would preserve these social arrangements, fears to adulterate them,
yet wants more jobs. Such countries as the United States, persuaded of
the value of free markets and committed to survival of the fittest,
shower the French with advice. The French reply: Get lost; we don't
need any lessons from you. Especially not from you, with your crime,
racial antagonisms, imperfect assimilation.
The German comeback was even more astonishing. The country
had suffered heavy war damage, and much of what was left was seized
by the Russians, who had good reason to make the losers pay for what
they had destroyed and taken—but did not always know what to do
with the machines and materials. Heaps were left to rust at roadside.
Better junk than German. In 1945, Germans had stopped taking baths
for lack of hot water or soap. Young women gave themselves to occu
pation troops for a pack of cigarettes. Bourgeois in coat and tie could
be seen scavenging horse droppings to use as fuel.
These German hardships and humiliations elicited little sympathy.
Some Allied experts called for the pastoralization of the country: no
more industry. Others argued that if the country was to pay repara
tions, some industry was unavoidable—say, half the output of 1938. All
such retributive projects fell before the imperatives of cold war: the
nora
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