An interesting commentary from an ex-pat living in Norway, who notes that while Scandanavians are told they live in the world’s richest countries, studies don’t back that up. In part:

“Even as the Scandinavian establishment peddles this dubious line, it serves up a picture of the United States as a nation divided, inequitably, among robber barons and wage slaves, not to mention armies of the homeless and unemployed. It does this to keep people believing that their social welfare system, financed by lofty income taxes, provides far more in the way of economic protections and amenities than the American system.”

but …

“if the E.U. was treated as a single American state, it would rank fifth from the bottom, topping only Arkansas, Montana, West Virginia and Mississippi. In short, while Scandinavians are constantly told how much better they have it than Americans, Timbro’s statistics suggest otherwise. So did a paper by a Swedish economics writer, Johan Norberg.”

He goes on to cite other research placing Scandanavian disposable income behind most other Western European countries.

One study in that NYT article, by Swedish research organization Timbro, led with:

Too many politicians, policy-makers, and voters are continuing their long vacation from reality. On the one hand, they accept, or in some cases even prefer, a substantially lower growth than in the US. On the other hand, they still want us to enjoy the same luxuries and be able to afford the same welfare as Americans can.

The citizens of those nations have made a decision to trade private income and consumption for publicly supplied services. That may sustain quality of life in the short term. But over the long haul, more market-oriented economies will draw ahead and provide a higher living standard for all their citizens. The beneficiaries of the status quo can fight a holding action for decades, but long term economic under-performance will become as evident to Scandinavians as it was twenty years ago to Poles, Czechs, and East Germans.

(in the same vein, when I lived in Canada for a while, the announcers for CFL games would continually tell their audience that the CFL was equivalent to the NFL — this despite the fact that it was populated my lower-round NFL failures. But people believed it despite the evidence)

This entry was posted on Monday, April 18th, 2005 at 10:49 pm by A Senior Administration Official and is filed under Brilliant, but uncategorizable. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.