How many? How many people of Swedish descent die yearly over and above however many die in Sweden, er, naturally I guess? Do you have any figures showing the massive disparity in death rates for Swedes here verse those in the mother country that we can compare and contrast? Hell, for that matter, how many people in the US claim Swedish ancestry? This seems to indicate that there are over 4 million in the US which is nearly as many as there are still back in Sweden, so it doesn’t seem like they are doing that badly here in evil America. 
For any such scheme to work, the government can’t simply print more money to fund it, but would have to fund the guaranteed income out of income that is already being generated in the economy. So it wouldn’t necessarily result in inflation, and would have to be reallocated from other programs, which would obviously be controversial. I’m sure an especially controversial component would have to be rolling back the tax code to Eisenhower-era marginal rates on top incomes. It’s difficult to imagine how such a proposition could ever be anything other than a complete non-starter, at least in today’s political climate. Yet, the traditional construct of jobs, professions, wages, and salaries, besides motivating people to learn how to do things and to work, has historically fulfilled a secondary function of income distribution. As the market value of gainful labor, as distinct from innovation and entrepreneurship, continues to erode there’s less distribution and more concentration of wealth as we’ve seen.
When people are unable to keep themselves and their children fed, clothed and housed because there are no jobs and no social safety net, I believe the terms they will be using will be something MUCH stronger than “non-starter.”
I do agree however, that the political climate is not good now. My very great fear is that if a robot job holocaust occurs, the political climate will not change, or change so slowly that a significant portion of Americans will suffer horribly … and needlessly.
The poverty rate among Swedish Americans is 6.7%. The percentage of Swedes living below the American poverty line is also 6.7%. There is no additional poverty in adapting the American way. The average Swede is missing out on an additional 12 grand a year in return for the exact same poverty rate.
I wonder if Swedish poverty is the same as American poverty.
I’m betting the Swedish social safety net is just a TAD better than the American social safety net.
This comparison is completely meaningless.
“Swedish Americans” and “Average Swedes” are two completely different groups.
Swedish immigration to the United States was at its peak 150 years ago. The swedes were quickly assimilated into mainstream america and lost almost all cultural ties to sweden. There hasn’t been any swedish speaking communities in the US for almost a hundred years, and most people who identify as swedish americans will have other ancestry as well.
Swedish Americans have always been a relatively priviledged group in America. Being really white and protestant, there has never been any real prejudice or negative sterotypes about them.
Modern Sweden, on the other hand, is a country with a very high immigration rate. There are around 9.5 million people in Sweden today, of these around 2 million were either born outside Sweden or has two foreign-born parents. Many of these are recent refugees from Iraq, Somalia and Afghanistan who have little in the way of formal education and who have trouble finding a job here. The majority of Swedes living below the poverty line belong to this group.
You can rise higher in America than you can in Sweden.
You can fall harder, economically, in America than you can in Sweden.
What do you mean by that? On Forbes’ list of billionaires per capita Sweden is ranked 12th compared to America in 14th place. The likes of TeraPak, H&M and Ikea are all gigantic companies started in Sweden.
So, they have 14 billionaires according to your cite, which is pretty impressive. There are 7 US states that have more, however. 
And the US has the most billionaires without trying to parse the data…looks to me like the US has more than most or all of the EU put together (China, surprisingly, is the number 2 country which I didn’t know, so it was educational looking this up).
And there are ten states with higher population than Sweden. Which might contradict your point … if we knew what it was.
But yes, U.S. has a high portion of billionaires. Is this an argument against U.S. measures to promote wealth inequality? Or proof that the measures are working?
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And there are ten states with higher population than Sweden. Which might contradict your point … if we knew what it was.
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I was just pointing out that you can spin statistics in myriad ways really, and you have to spin them to put Sweden ahead of the US wrt billionaires by saying per capita. California has 39 million people living there, but they have nearly 100 billionaires so while they have more people than Sweden at 9 million the ratio of people to billionaires still favors California. It’s all about how you spin the numbers. The US also has more millionaires in absolute terms than any other nation but a huge margin, but you could probably spin Sweden (or several other countries) to look better if you parse that in various ways.
Wasn’t my argument…I was just kind of replying to it semi-tongue in cheek. Whether this is proof of the system working or not working I think is going to depend heavily on whether you think wealth inequality is a dire problem that needs to be fixed in the US or whether it’s a feature, not a bug…or something in-between…and will depend heavily on your political leanings and world view.
The comparison is useful because it helps the problem of comparing a homogeneous country like Sweden to a diverse country like the US. It is far from perfect but better than just comparing entire countries.
Your comment about immigrants in Sweden are instructive. In Sweden immigrants who are not from Europe have a tough time finding jobs. The percentage of these immigrants in the working age range who don’t have jobs is 49%. Consequently, the child poverty rates for those who are born to immigrants is 50%. By contrast, labor force participation in the US is higher for immigrants than for natives ( though some of that is because of different age distribution). This shows the same effects of generous welfare as the studies of American Indian tribes I cited earlier. Overly generous benefits lead to less productive work, which leads to people trapped in poverty.
How does this explain that the US’s labor productivity rate is lower than, for instance, Norway’s. Or that the US’s labor productivity growth rate is lower than, for instance, Sweden?
Do those countries not have “overly generous” benefits?
Perhaps because Norway is a petro-state with a tiny amount of people and a bounty of natural resources that can be cheaply extracted, inflating their GDP by over 50% and thus grossly inflating worker productivity (as measured by GDP/total hours worked). Considering that US productivity is third in the world, your claim that you picked Norway “for instance” is highly improbably and misleading, since it is one of two countries (along with the microstate Luxembourg) to have higher productivity per hour than the US.
The claim that Sweden has faster productivity growth is misleading because Sweden has a lower starting productivity and thus smaller increases in productivity will yield a larger percent increase, and because growth is the wrong metric to use here – overall productivity is what matters. Until (if ever) Sweden’s productivity outstrips the US, growth rates don’t matter.
We do have a genuine point-of-reference, from the 5-year-long “Mincome” experiment in Dauphin MB:
A final report was never issued, but Dr. Evelyn Forget conducted an analysis of the program (pdf) in 2009 which was published in 2011. She found that only new mothers and teenagers worked substantially less. Mothers with newborns stopped working because they wanted to stay at home longer with their babies, and teenagers worked less because they weren’t under as much pressure to support their families, which resulted in more teenagers graduating. In addition, those who continued to work were given more opportunities to choose what type of work they did. Forget found that in the period that Mincome was administered, hospital visits dropped 8.5 percent, with fewer incidents of work-related injuries, and fewer emergency room visits from car accidents and domestic abuse. Additionally, the period saw a reduction in rates of psychiatric hospitalization, and in the number of mental illness-related consultations with health professionals.
Yes, OK, Canada, they are not like us, and 5 years seems like a pretty small data point. But it is interesting to see that anxiety and craziness seem to be lower when people are less stressed out over money.
No, not at all. Only some “spins” are in any way meaningful or reasonable, and comparing the gross number of billionaires in a country with a population two orders of magnitude greater than another one is manifestly not a reasonable way to “spin” statistics. What purpose does your post serve only to muddy the waters? The fact is, you can climb as high in Swedish society as you can in American society, despite Sweden providing its citizens an extraordinary welfare system and world class public services.
No it is not useful in any meaningful way. You were allegedly trying to compare poverty rates between Sweden and the US by taking the statistics for the entire country of Sweden, where most of the poor are non-european immigrants, and comparing them to an arbitrary selection of white mid-westerners. By doing this you are conveniently excluding all disadvantaged minorities from the american numbers, as well as the entire population of the poorer states in the south, where no Swedish Americans live.
How do you explain it? The data is in perfect alignment with the theory I posited. Sweden and Norway take the bottom 10-15 percent of their productive workers (according to Huvudtvätt mainly immigrants) and pay them to stay home. The lowest productivity workers are then excluded from productivity statistics. In the US these people would be working and contributing to society, but they would count toward productivity statistics thus lowering them.
Don’t you see the problem here? Overall productivity being only thing that matters means that the countries that already have ascended to the top of the GDP heap (such as the United States did after World War 2 for obvious reasons) have a decidedly inbuilt advantage.
As to the top point of Norway being elevated by its natural resources, the US is well known for having quite substantial national resources. Much more so than the countries who are 7 points below it (the same distance the US is from Norway), Belgium and the Netherlands.
Sweden’s labor force participation rate is roughly the same as the US’s (or slightly higher). (The BLS’s rates unfortunately only go to 2012 - http://www.bls.gov/fls/flscomparelf.htm#chart04 )
I mean people still have to provide lower-level services. It appears the not-looking-for-work numbers are relatively equal in the US to Sweden.