THOMAS GEOGHEGAN: Were You Born on the Wrong Continent? How the European Model Can Help You Get a Life New York 2010 The New Press, 336 pp. T his should be a good time for a book that essentially asks Americans to learn from Europe and especially from Germany. Few Western countries have man­aged the global financial and economic crisis as well as Germany, it seems, and its successful crisis management has a lot to do with those features of the German model which Thomas Geoghegan highlights as»blueprintable.« In the crisis, the institutional strength of the unions led to measures designed to maintain the high-skills backbone of the German economic model based on high-quality exports. For Geoghegan, German industrial relations(and similar systems in other European countries) explain why not only the bottom two-thirds of Americans would be better off in Europe; for him, that is a given, especially with regard to the unemployed and people on welfare. No,»Europe is set up for the bourgeois,« too(p. 11), for the upper middle class, who get the same benefits, such as six weeks of vacation, maternity leave, good pensions, and so on. His thesis is»that even people who are at the top or are in the top 20 percent by income are better off in a European social democracy than in a country like the us «(p. 260). While us per capita gdp is higher than in most European countries, the quality of life is not. Thanks to the strength of the European unions, there is an»invisible gdp «(p. 14) of lower inequality, better public services and goods, and perhaps most importantly from the perspective of an American professional, lower working hours, almost 400 fewer hours worked by the average German than by the average American in 2006. Geoghegan marvels at the fact that, with far fewer hours, Europeans still manage to get close to the per capita gdp of Americans. Writing well before the 2010 midterm elections but already in the midst of the Tea Party frenzy, Geoghegan must have known his arguments would be a hard sell in the us , even without the Greece crisis. He thus opens his book by repeatedly assuring his readers that he is»no European socialist.« I doubt very much that this will help him in a country where a sizable minority of the population upholds the belief that a harmless middle-of-the-road Democrat like Barack Obama is indeed a socialist without being ridiculed daily in the media. And, of course, American exceptionalism is not an ideology reserved for the Right. So there is definitely the danger that this treatise will be a case of preaching to the choir. As a European socialist, I do have my reservations. First, like almost any American liberal that I have ever talked to about their European experience, Geoghegan goes somewhat overboard in his description of the achievements of 154 Rezensionen/Book Reviews ipg 3/2011