Ride 'em Cowboy.

• Author: Sanchez, Julian
• Position: Data - Brief Article

Americans, they say, know little about the rest the planet. But in Cowboy Capitalism (Cato Institute), the German business journalist Olaf Gersemann observes that many Europeans have some funny ideas about economic conditions in America. Among them: that Americans commonly work three jobs to make ends meet, and that low U.S. unemployment is entirely due to the high proportion of the population that's incarcerated.

The latter isn't a bad guess, given our massive population behind bars. But the numbers--more precisely, the proportion of the working-age population...