Question to ACists

[The Truth]

How do you explain the high standard of living in Sweden, Denmark and other Scandanavian countries? It would seem like these highly socialized countries should self destruct, no?

[TomCollins]

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How do you explain the high standard of living in Sweden, Denmark and other Scandanavian countries? It would seem like these highly socialized countries should self destruct, no?

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Give it another 20 years.

[tame_deuces]

I don't think there are any ACists who claim social democracy can't lead to a high standard of living. I've debated with a few of them, and I don't think that is what bugs them. They are opponents of the state, not social democracy.

Meaning that once the state is down some voluntary community would be more than free to make itself a social democracy if it so wished, well as far as I understand atleast.

[slickss]

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How do you explain the high standard of living in Sweden, Denmark and other Scandanavian countries?

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Who are these other Scandinavian countries, aside from Norway?

[Borodog]

Search for a post by me in the past few days including the word "ascandinavian".

Basically the economies in these countries are not as great as you are led to believe over all, they are getting worse, they do all right in per capita GDP but not real standard of living because of higher costs of living, in some ways they are actually *more free* than the US and other parts of europe, which helps to offset, and these kinds of comparisons totally violate ceteris paribus, making them useless without extremely in depth analysis.

[pvn]

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How do you explain the high standard of living in Sweden, Denmark and other Scandanavian countries? It would seem like these highly socialized countries should self destruct, no?

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Two things:

1) Nodic affluence is highly overestimated. They have a high GDP, but high cost of living.

The myth of Nordic affluence (in the NY Times, no less!)

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When my mother-in-law went to an emergency room recently, the hospital was out of cough medicine.

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In late March, another study, this one from KPMG, the international accounting and consulting firm, cast light on this paradox. It indicated that when disposable income was adjusted for cost of living, Scandinavians were the poorest people in Western Europe. Danes had the lowest adjusted income, Norwegians the second lowest, Swedes the third. Spain and Portugal, with two of Europe's least regulated economies, led the list.

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2) Nordic countries are much more homogenous than many other countries. People tend to object less to welfare programs when the free riders look like themselves.

[tame_deuces]

Hehe, that NY times article is pretty funny. If anything it shows some very big misunderstandings of cultural difference, esp the lunch thingy is damn pretty hilarious. I think you have to be from here to understand its cultural significance.

And as for living standards claims, the nordic countries top the HDR index which measures freedom of choice, ability to participate in your community, access to the resources you need for a good life. The US also always scores high on this - which probably shows that different things works for different cultures.

As Borodog said, direct comparison violates ceteris paribus and drawing logical conclusions is moot.

[Metric]

[Jamougha]

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Only Norway has oil.

[ALawPoker]

I'm not sure how this really applies to AC, since the difference between Scandinavian policy and, for example, the US is pretty small when compared with the difference between the US and AC. So it seems like your question should be directed at "capitalist leaning statists."

I mean, it shouldn't be a surprise that a relatively small country with rich allies would lead the world in GDP per capita anyways. You can find several US states of equal size who outperform the Scandinavian countries and then be all "zomg question for socialists."

How do you explain the prosperity of the US (despite an out of control foreign policy that has held us back), the collapse of the USSR, China's suckiness until they embraced capitalism, Hong Kong's prosperity, and Italy's new policy to give tax breaks to any male in his 20s or 30s who lives on his own because most of that demographic lives with their moms (lol). Questions for socialists!