COLUMN LEFT / GEORGE BLACK : The Japanese Ethic Is No Cure for U.S. : There’s a link between poor productivity and America’s declining quality of life.

From Pat Buchanan on the right comes the cry of “America First”; from the center, or wherever it is that George Bush stands, the assertion that the United States is the planet’s “one sole and preeminent power,” and from every Democrat, the claim that he is the man to make America No. 1 again. To a European observer like myself, all of this sounds less like a presidential campaign than a collective psychological disorder.

One curious feature of the new isolationist mood is that it slaps a taboo on any discussion of the lessons this country might learn from its economic competitors--except, that is, for a morbid fascination with all things Japanese. This takes two forms. One is a resentful protectionism: In the lame image of one Democratic campaign ad, we will block the Japanese puck before it enters the American net. The other is a troubled sense that the competitive gap could be closed if Americans would only imitate the Japanese work ethic.

In her new book, “The Overworked American,” Harvard economist Juliet Schor offers a persuasive rebuttal of this notion. For Schor, the degree to which we already mimic the workaholic habits of the Japanese is not the cure, but part of the disease. Poor productivity, she believes, can be directly attributed to our declining quality of life. Working hours have been on the rise for two decades; if Americans continue at this rate for another 20 years, Schor projects, they will be on the job for 60 hours a week, 50 weeks a year. The Japanese already have a word for what this leads to: karoshi, or death by overwork.

The thriving economies of Western Europe, Schor says, are a much better model of a future that is both productive and sane. German and French manufacturing workers put in 320 fewer hours in a year than their less-productive counterparts in the United States. Swedes enjoy even more leisure time. Citizens of the European Community average between 25 and 30 days of paid vacation; American get less than half as many.

That last set of figures is from another book to be published soon, Andrew Shapiro’s “We’re Number One!” Shapiro makes a similar quality-of-life argument, but his statistical tables make better sound bites. Here are a few examples:

--All Canadian and Japanese citizens and most Europeans have comprehensive public-health insurance, compared with 21% of Americans. One of the prime indicators of an effective health-care system is, of course, infant mortality. The United States has the highest rate in the developed world. It also tops the list in low birth weight, ahead of even Romania, the land of Nicolae Ceausescu’s tragic orphans.

--Women in Great Britain, even after the Thatcher decade, enjoy a guaranteed 40 weeks of paid maternity leave. The figures for Canada, Japan and the rest of Western Europe range from 12 to 28 weeks. In the United States, it’s zero.

--The United States ranks 17 out of 18 industrial nations in public spending on education and near the bottom in students’ knowledge of critical subjects. (Shapiro’s findings here could have been supplemented by a new report from the Educational Testing Service, which shows that in science and math, American 13-year-olds lag well behind their peers in the former Soviet Union.)

The list goes on and on: The United States does rank as “the undisputed leader of the world” (Bush’s phrase) in budget deficits, foreign debt, innumeracy, unequal distribution of wealth, private consumption, murder, rape. . . . Well, for the full list, you’ll have to wait for Shapiro’s book, which is out in May.

The sad thing is that many will dismiss Schor and Shapiro as America-bashers. Some mysterious force--call it fear, call it hubris--leads the current crop of candidates to deny that there is anything to be learned from the outside world. But reading these two new books, it is hard to escape the feeling that the countries that successfully combine economic well-being with quality of life differ from the United States in three crucial areas: tighter government regulation of capital, higher public investment in social services and a strong tradition of labor unions.

Do ordinary American workers--or the middle class, as we are now perplexingly obliged to call them--believe that the Germans’ and Swedes’ shorter work weeks, longer vacations and free child-care were gifts from the sky? If the enthusiasm for a Canadian-style public-health system is anything to go by, U.S. voters seem ready to break some old taboos. It is their would-be leaders who lag behind. So send them all a copy of these two new books. They might discover that they have, quite literally, a world to learn.