Conservatives argue that it’s not viable to implement the type of Scandinavian Utopia of welfare capitalism and social democracy in the United States due to population size and diversity.
Is this a valid statement?
It’s not a utopia; nowhere is. But their claim is nonsensical; diversity and size are both irrelevant to the issue. It’s just that they’ve decided on an “America is uniquely incompetent” argument for why America can’t do all sorts of things other countries do; not just the Scandinavian ones.
Diversity has its benefits but it is incorrect to say that it doesn’t come with some extreme social cost.
I will defer to that notorious, right-wing rag, The New York Times and Harvard studies for a summary for this argument.
“But a massive new study, based on detailed interviews of nearly 30,000 people across America, has concluded just the opposite. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam – famous for “Bowling Alone,” his 2000 book on declining civic engagement – has found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings.”
Anybody with any sense knows this is true intuitively. People are less likely to want to help their neighbors (no matter how big you define the “neighborhood”) either in person or through taxes if those neighbors are substantially different than themselves.
You can see the same thing in the U.S. Vermont and New Hampshire are almost all white and they operate just great despite having an unfavorable climate (just like Scandinavia).
Conservatives aren’t saying Scandinavian Utopia isn’t viable in the U.S. They’re saying it isn’t really “utopia” and it’s antithetical to the core values of the country. They believe that this country was founded on the principle of individual rights, and any kind of “welfare capitalism” would plunge us into the same sorry state as much of Europe. The concept of a “social democracy” isn’t in their vocabulary. They’re not opposed to it for pragmatic reasons, but on ideological grounds.
Guns or butter.
We can have a nice social utopia…but not at the same time we’re building two new aircraft carrier groups.
Sweden was once the military powerhouse of Europe. Then they got wise and backed off, and put their focus on domestic issues.
The U.S. needs to do the same thing.
It’s too cold in Scandanavia. If we’re going to have a Utopia let’s have one with warmer weather.
Norway and Denmark aren’t exactly peacenik countries. Sweden is really the outlier.
No. Similar policies can be seen to result in similar results in countries with greater population and diversity than the Scandinavian ones. It is just the excuse of the day, since its getting harder to maintain the “Its hell on earth there” story.
It is, however, possible that the US has a uniquely negative reaction to certain types of diversity.
Such as?
It’s not just lack of diversity and size, there are more involved social aspects to why Democratic Socialism works in Scandiwegia and won’t in Murca - Americans overall don’t really hold with the Law of Jante either, for instance.
I agree - it’s as much a cultural thing as anything else - transplanting structure alone just won’t take - it’s the same situation as gun control in USA vs some other countries - pointless arguing that what works in one place will work in another - the culture is enough to prevent that.
Diversity can fray the social contract, no question, it’s happening in Scandinavia too. The “utopia” liberals refer to doesn’t really even exist anymore. It peaked in the 1970s and in many policy areas the Scandi countries are to the right of the US now.
Size matters too, because size means diversity. There are no large countries without sharply differing political opinions by region. That’s why all large countries that are democracies choose to decentralize power more than smaller countries. The people of Alabama and New York will never agree, so most policy areas are left to them to decide for themselves. Same goes for Alberta vs. Ontario in Canada. Canada isn’t Scandinavia even though a lot of Canadians, possibly a majority, would like it to be a Scandi-style utopia, simply because Canada is too large and too diverse to be governed that way.
But the most important factor is immigration. Paul Krugman, a normally quite liberal economist has said, and this is not exactly a controversial statement, is that you can have a generous welfare state or a liberal immigration policy. You cannot have both. The US has chosen to welcome immigrants. A necessary step to establishing a Scandi-style social democracy is to limit immigration.
Sweden for example, doesn’t seem to accept migrants outside the EU except as asylum cases:
Perhaps someone with a different analysis of the numbers might have a better explanation, but it sure looks like asylum seekers make up the vast, vast majority of non-EU immigrants, whereas most immigrants to the US are not asylum seekers. In order to be like Scandinavia, we’d probably have to change our immigration policy to eliminate most economics-motivated immigration.
It appears to be a matter of not even comprehending why would someone want to move to Sweden who is neither a Swede nor an asylum-seeker (even moving there with your Swedish spouse is perceived by many as astounding) and, as a consequence, of the whole bureaucracy for immigration being geared toward asylum seekers. Note that this doesn’t mean everybody has that mindset; only that enough numbers are, that they drive the bureaucracy in that direction.
I worked on location in Sweden between June of 2014 and September of 2015, both included. “On location” means I wasn’t paid from Sweden (thank God, as I wasn’t able to open a bank account there). I’m a EU citizen. I wasn’t allowed to do the most basic things by myself due to the lack of a Swedish Tax/ID Number: I couldn’t even sign up for Swedish lessons, those also required the Number. Swedes would tell me “oh, Spain! I went there for Erasmus / to spend the summer / to visit my cousin who was there doing Erasmus and it was So Nice! I couldn’t believe it when they took me to get a local phone number and a bank account!” Well, I couldn’t believe how difficult it was to get those same things, but hey; bureaucracy, like all monsters, must be fed. When I tried to get a Swedish ID Number, I was given a form (in English; it was available in several languages) where among other things I could select if I wanted communication with me to be in several possible languages, including English. Communication always required me to hound down the gent handling my case; every single written item he sent me was in Swedish. And after more than half a year of sitting on his ass, his response was “you must speak with the asylum people for assistance”. Some of my Swedish coworkers facepalmed so hard it actually hurt.
The US is the only one of the countries where I’ve lived that came close to making the paperwork so difficult, but in the US I got lucky in that the first time I entered the country it was as a university student: I had my provisional SSN within a couple of days of setting foot in the country, the permanent one in less than a month.
Thread relocated from IMHO to Great Debates.
Nearly every country. Some examples:
-Germany
-France
-Italy
-United Kingdom
To forestall a silly objection: no, none of these countries are financial/social utopias. But all of them offer much stronger social safety nets than the US does.
Correction: the time I got the SSN was actually the second time I entered the country, but the previous time was a shorter visit that didn’t require me to do any paperwork other than go through Customs twice.
And they are also much smaller, much more homogoneous, are not as open to immigration, and most importantly and obviously, don’t have the same political consensus as the US does.
IMO the long term verdict is still out on all those Scandinavian welfare states. The premise of the welfare state is that people will still be motivated to work (to approximately the same extent) even in the absence of a horrific worst case scenario. This requires a cultural work ethic. But the culture takes time to change and the work ethic time to dissipate. So it’s possible that such cultures will eventually decline significantly, as the work ethic declines over time. I expect this to happen (unless other changes are made).
But I agree that the above can be impacted significantly by diversity. Because diverse cultures frequently have uneven distributions of poverty and levels of safety net usage. This gives the opportunity for more rapid disintegration of the work ethic, since those sectors where poverty is more common will be less influenced by the larger working culture than in a more homogenous society.
As a practical matter, what this means is that there are places in the US where the vast majority of the population is on some form of welfare, and where kids grow up assuming this is normal life. It’s much tougher to eradicate long term poverty and get people to grow up to be productive citizens in such cases. In a more homogenous and integrated culture this would not be true to the same extent.
I think in a few decades, we will look back at the argument of “the reason that we can’t have nice things is that there are too many different colors of people in our society” and shake our heads in shame.
Sweden is not a utopia. Because of its neutrality during WW2 and the money it made selling to the belligerents Sweden in the 1950s and 1960s was one of the richest countries in the world. It created an extensive welfare state in the 1960s and immediately started losing ground to other countries in economic growth. This period that lasted throughout the 1970s and 1980s is where they myths of the Swedish model come from. In the 1990s there was economic reform that cut spending and taxes and the relative performance of the Swedish economy was gotten better.
About 150 years ago about half of Sweden moved to the US. Today Swedish Americans have a average income 50% higher than Sweden as a country. This implies that switching to a Swedish style economy would have dire consequences for most Americans.