Article: "America Could Have Been One Giant Sweden "

[George Wallace]

I think you just like to hate the USA, but I have no evidence to prove that...

Not to mention "hate Harper".  (But that is for another thread.)  >

 

[tomahawk6]

Did you double check your light?

I never gave it a thought.I do now !!  ;D

 

[jollyjacktar]

Well seeing as the incarceration rate in the US is the highest in the world, we can infer a few things. Americans are more prone to crime than other nationalities, or the justice system isn't effective when it comes to rates of recidivism. OR, the US justice system jails people for minor offenses, such as possession, traffic offenses etc (African-Americans are disproportionately represented here). Any way you slice it, this is clearly a systemic problem and unique to the US. So yeah, GOTTA hate that place. It's falling apart.

Wow, I am having a hard time believing the BS you're spouting in many of these threads.  What a wanker...  you're a first for me.  You're going on ignore.

 

[George Wallace]

Wow, I am having a hard time believing the BS you're spouting in many of these threads.  What a wanker...  you're a first for me.  You're going on ignore.

The laughable thing about his stats on what nation has the highest incarceration rates is the obvious disregard as to why they may and other nations may not.  Of course the fact that nations like North Korea, China (at times), Middle Eastern and Southwest Asian nations may have lower incarceration rates could be due to the fact that instead of incarcerating people, they execute them.  I wonder what Kilo_302 can dig up for us there?  After all: "Stats don't lie."  >

 

[a_majoor]

I also notice that Kilo fails to mention that the GDP per capita is quite a bit lower in Sweden. For comparison:

IMF
USA        Rank 10  GDP/Capita  55,597
Sweden  Rank 17  GDP/Capita  45,986

World Bank
USA      Rank 10    GDP/Capita  53,042
Sweden  Rank 15    GDP/Capita  44,658

CIA
USA        Rank 19  GDP/Capita 55,800
Swenden Rank 26  GDP/Capita 44,700

Making allowances for different methodologies, it seems being a "giant Sweden" would make America and Americans significantly poorer. Or is the real goal to force everyone to live an impoverished existence? Of the nations which have higher per capita GDP than the United States, I can quickly discount places like Qatar, since they are single source resource driven figures, and focus on replicating the success of places like Hong Kong or Singapore by examining the reasons for their success.

 

[pbi]

It isn't much wonder why the US gets more immigrants than, say, Denmark or Finland. Based on what the average immigrant likely understands about the US, it's a no-brainer.  (Not to mention the fact that a goodly number of "developed Western nations") seem to be struggling with the whole concept of having any immigrants at all, and not very happy with the ones they've got...)

And, as far as I can see, tons of immigrants continue to do well in the US, just as they do in Canada.  And, of course, some immigrant groups don't do well at all, again just like Canada.

But I don't think that allows anybody to deny that America has some very serious social problems, and has had them for a while. In 1997 I visited the FBI Academy at Quantico. The FBI official who spoke with us made the point that (at that time) the biggest single cause of death for young black American males was gunshot wounds. If I understand correctly, US prisons at both Federal and State levels are disproportionately full of blacks and Hispanics. Not, I think, because the US justice system is inherently racist, (most of the inmates are probably guilty) but because of the ancient truth that poverty and hopelessness breed crime.

I'm not sure how much blame lies on the US education system, although no doubt it has a role. My experience with the US education system was limited to having two kids in it for a year, in suburban Virginia. While I was very impressed with the standards in the county we lived in, I understood from others (both Canadians living in the US, and Americans) that there were large variances between states, and perhaps even between counties.

I doubt very much whether this could simply be blamed on "teachers unions" as Tomahawk suggests. I think you would need to cross-check academic results in a given state with the level of teacher labour activism before you could say that. In my opinion it's probably more about how much money the state/county is willing to spend on education, and how important voters think education really is. Pretty much like Canada.

 

[Brad Sallows]

The education system is the root of the problem.  The US has problems with failed urban school systems the same way Canada has failed systems on - or serving - some reserves.  There are places in both countries where few give a hoot about attendance, let alone achievement.  Kids graduate with courtesy passes, which the real world recognizes as worthless.  Teacher unions, and by association Democratic politicians and groups, come under fire for resistance to reform.  Chicago and Washington DC are examples (horrible warnings).

A deficient education essentially closes nearly all other doors and thereby fuels nearly all social problems.

Lack of money isn't the explanation.  Inflation-adjusted per-pupil funding in the US, as in Canada, is generally at all-time highs.  And this shouldn't simply be shuffled off as "overpaid teachers", either.  In the US, teacher remuneration is probably too low, while in Canada it is probably too high.  Regardless, a lot of funding has been consumed by non-teaching functions.  What needs to change is allocation, not total amount.

To paraphrase what I've written earlier: every year the rice bowl holders spend pursuing their own political interests and demanding political self-abasement from their political foes, another cohort of young people is lost.

 

[Fishbone Jones]

Like other members of this forum, I live in the USA. I live, shop, bank in the local community, and travel to other states regularly. I have never seen or heard of someone being jailed for the reasons mentionned above, and I have seen busted tail lights, countless turns without a signal and other traffic offences on a regular basis, just like in Canada.
I suspect if people are jailed following these, and other very minor infractions, it has more to do with past offenses, or what they did or said when they were stopped for the infraction.

I think you just like to hate the USA, but I have no evidence to prove that...

He hates everything contrary to his opinion.

 

[cupper]

He hates everything contrary to his opinion.

And the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate
Baby, I'm just gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, shake
I shake it off, I shake it off

- Taylor Swift

>

 

[a_majoor]

Economics commentator Megan McArdle suggests that if America were to become a giant Sweden, Sweden could not afford to be Sweden. This is simply another example of PM Margaret Thatcher's observation that eventually Socialists run out of other people's money. So long as the Americans are vastly larger and wealthier than the Swedes, there is enough "other people's money" in trade, innovation and so on to support Socialist nations like Sweden:

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-06-08/u-s-can-t-import-the-scandinavian-model

U.S. Can't Import the Scandinavian Model
Jun 8, 2015 9:00 AM EDT
by Megan McArdle

Ah, Scandinavia, Nordic paradise. Nowhere else seems to so easily combine a very progressive welfare state with high levels of growth. It's no surprise, then, that it is the darling of international indices of everything from happiness to prosperity.

In vain do the more libertarian-minded rejoinder that Swedes have the same poverty rate in America as in Sweden, that small homogenous countries are probably better able to support a cradle-to-grave welfare state than large, heterogenous ones, that tiny countries are more likely to generate outlying results than bigger ones (which looks fantastic if you drop the outlying underperformers from your sample), and that however splendid Norway may be, "tiny population nestled atop huge fossil fuel deposits" is probably not a strategy that the U.S. can emulate. What are you gonna believe -- some long-winded explanation, or this simple number that's right in front of your eyes?

Dan Drezner makes another point, however, that is not raised often enough: There's reason to think that the Scandinavians may be able to pair their high levels of government spending with a decent growth rate precisely because the U.S. does not follow their lead.

Let me explain. In the simplest terms, economic growth is population growth, plus productivity growth. How do nations get more productive? Well, one way is to find a lot of lucrative fossil fuel deposits in the North Sea. But let's accept that this is not going to be a widespread ticket to prosperity. Most of the way we get more productive is to innovate in some way (and indeed, the technology that discovered and recovered the Norwegian oil is itself an innovation.)

Where does innovation mostly come from? Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson and Thierry Verdier, the academics whom Drezner cites, argue that it disproportionately comes from economies where "incentives for workers and entrepreneurs results in greater inequality and greater poverty" . . . i.e., the United States. Those innovations, however, don't make just us more productive; they filter out to the rest of the world.

Now, you can quarrel with the academics' model, and indeed, many people have. But even if you think they are wrong about needing inequality-producing incentives to drive innovation, there remains a kernel of truth: When it comes to growth, Scandinavia's economic policy simply doesn't matter as much as U.S. economic policy, so it's hard to draw good lessons from it for other, larger countries.

Globally, this is simply obviously true, but even locally, it will always be the case that most of the innovations that drive Scandinavian growth will have to come from outside their borders, simply because their populations are so tiny compared to the hundreds of millions of other rich-world people who are living on the current innovation frontier. It is also true that their economies will be far more vulnerable to things that happen elsewhere -- witness the problems the Norwegian economy is experiencing as oil prices decline (thanks to the North American shale oil revolution, and the response it triggered from OPEC).  In other words, the government can really screw things up, if it wants to, but it can't likely meaningfully increase the rate of growth above the level of innovation that the global system will support.

And if you think that Acemoglu, Robinson and Verdier are right, then Scandinavia simply doesn't need to focus on innovation, as long as the United States is willing to carry that weight. Which suggests that the Scandinavians may be crazy like a fox. But that doesn't mean that the rest of us can join them in the henhouse.

To contact the author on this story:
Megan McArdle at [email protected]

To contact the editor on this story:
Philip Gray at [email protected]

 

[Danjanou]

I knew I shouldn't have looked in here  :facepalm:

Yeah me too. Next time warn a guy will ya. :