Utopia Talk / Politics / How Scandinavia got great

Paramount Member	Sun Feb 16 04:45:13 This Is How Scandinavia Got Great By David Brooks Feb. 13, 2020 Almost everybody admires the Nordic model. Countries like Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland have high economic productivity, high social equality, high social trust and high levels of personal happiness. Progressives say it’s because they have generous welfare states. Some libertarians point out that these countries score high on nearly every measure of free market openness. Immigration restrictionists note that until recently they were ethnically homogeneous societies. But Nordic nations were ethnically homogeneous in 1800, when they were dirt poor. Their economic growth took off just after 1870, way before their welfare states were established. What really launched the Nordic nations was generations of phenomenal educational policy. The 19th-century Nordic elites did something we haven’t been able to do in this country recently. They realized that if their countries were to prosper they had to create truly successful “folk schools” for the least educated among them. They realized that they were going to have to make lifelong learning a part of the natural fabric of society. They look at education differently than we do. The German word they used to describe their approach, bildung, doesn’t even have an English equivalent. It means the complete moral, emotional, intellectual and civic transformation of the person. It was based on the idea that if people were going to be able to handle and contribute to an emerging industrial society, they would need more complex inner lives. Today, Americans often think of schooling as the transmission of specialized skill sets — can the student read, do math, recite the facts of biology. Bildung is devised to change the way students see the world. It is devised to help them understand complex systems and see the relations between things — between self and society, between a community of relationships in a family and a town. As Lene Rachel Andersen and Tomas Bjorkman put it in their book “The Nordic Secret,” “Bildung is the way that the individual matures and takes upon him or herself ever bigger personal responsibility towards family, friends, fellow citizens, society, humanity, our globe, and the global heritage of our species, while enjoying ever bigger personal, moral and existential freedoms.” The Nordic educators worked hard to cultivate each student’s sense of connection to the nation. Before the 19th century, most Europeans identified themselves in local and not national terms. But the Nordic curriculum instilled in students a pride in, say, their Danish history, folklore and heritage. “That which a person did not burn for in his young days, he will not easily work for as a man,” Christopher Arndt Bruun wrote. The idea was to create in the mind of the student a sense of wider circles of belonging — from family to town to nation — and an eagerness to assume shared responsibility for the whole. The Nordic educators also worked hard to develop the student’s internal awareness. That is to say, they helped students see the forces always roiling inside the self — the emotions, cravings, wounds and desires. If you could see those forces and their interplay, as if from the outside, you could be their master and not their slave. Their intuition was that as people grow, they have the ability to go through developmental phases, to see themselves and the world through ever more complex lenses. A young child may blindly obey authority — Mom, Dad, teacher. Then she internalizes and conforms to the norms of the group. Then she learns to create her own norms based on her own values. Then she learns to see herself as a node in a network of selves and thus learns mutuality and holistic thinking. The purpose of bildung is to help people move through the uncomfortable transitions between each way of seeing. That educational push seems to have had a lasting influence on the culture. Whether in Stockholm or Minneapolis, Scandinavians have a tendency to joke about the way their sense of responsibility is always nagging at them. They have the lowest rates of corruption in the world. They have a distinctive sense of the relationship between personal freedom and communal responsibility. High social trust doesn’t just happen. It results when people are spontaneously responsible for one another in the daily interactions of life, when the institutions of society function well. In the U.S., social trust has been on the decline for decades. If the children of privilege get to go to the best schools, there’s not going to be much social mutuality. If those schools do not instill a love of nation, there’s not going to be much shared responsibility. If you have a thin educational system that does not help students see the webs of significance between people, does not even help students see how they see, you’re going to wind up with a society in which people can’t see through each other’s lenses. When you look at the Nordic bildung model, you realize our problem is not only that we don’t train people with the right job skills. It’s that we don’t have the right lifelong development model to instill the mode of consciousness people need to thrive in a complex pluralistic society. http://www...ion/scandinavia-education.html
Paramount Member	Sun Feb 16 04:49:16 ” have the lowest rates of corruption in the world.” While there is probably less corruption in Scandinavian countries than in Southern and Eastern European countries and elsewhere, I have a strong feeling that corruption in Sweden has increased quite a lot during the past 10-15 years.
jergul large member	Sun Feb 16 06:03:49 Corruption is low only in relative terms. Lots of odd stuff still happens.
Nimatzo iChihuaha	Sun Feb 16 07:58:58 Similair explanation is given for the Japanese rise after Meiji restoration. Education surely is needed to facilitate, but the very idea of mobilizing the entire nation to switch from one cultural mode to another, is only possible provided no sigificantly large minority opposes your ideas, violently. I bring this up specifically because it seems to be a staple reaction (huehue) to revolutionary and rapid change. And something you can pretty much bet money on happening in hetrogenous populations. This experiment has been conducted (with varying results) in many places. So the least interesting thing to be said about scandinavia may be the ”folkbildnings” ideal. It only requires one intelligent leader, a patron of the arts or whatever to plant this seed, but for it to become a tree and bear fruits...
Rugian Member	Sun Feb 16 08:04:10 TL;DR "Scandinavians have a more communal outlook on life because the state does a great job propagandizing them from a young age in order to develop said outlook." Which is a reasonable hypothesis, by the way. In the age of authoritarianism and state-mandated educated programs, the public education system will inevitably play a major role in determining your ultimate beliefs set. There are plenty examples of this all over the world: -China (where young people are trained to be nationalistic and unquestionably loyal to the state) -Hong Kong (where the lack of patriotic education makes younger generations more resistant to rule by the PRC) -Taiwan (where patriotic education has resulted in younger generations being considerably more hostile to the PRC than their elder counterparts), -The US and UK (where leftwing educations result in young people being more favorable to socialism and progressive causes) Conditioning people during their most impressionable years is a powerful tool after all.
Habebe Member	Sun Feb 16 14:26:43 I dont think anyone claims that homogeneous areas are automatically prosperous, I think the argument is that they are less trusting societies which will make prosperity more difficult. The welfare states are more of a byproduct of a good economy than the cause.
Habebe Member	Sun Feb 16 14:31:07 Not to mention things like oil, Iran if you look at the midland Texas area they are very well off. Norway is thinking ahead and realizing that this cant be a forever giving abundance amd they are working to diversify the economy now, which is a smart move imo.
Habebe Member	Sun Feb 16 14:31:53 Disregard Iran. I dont know what I meant to say that my autocorrect changed to Iran.
patom Member	Sun Feb 16 15:45:17 I getting educated on Norway now. Just watched Ragnarok on Neflix and am currently into Lillyhamer. I suppose I can call myself an expert :) I have been disappointed that I haven't seen anyone scrounging on the streets yet. They are Socialist countries after all.
Habebe Member	Sun Feb 16 15:48:15 Patom, perhaps thats the reason they are so anti immigrant. Ps. Lillyhammer is cool
jergul large member	Sun Feb 16 16:00:35 Social democracies definitely cause prosperity. The nordic countries were piss poor when they started and relatively prosperous even before the first oil was taken out of the North Sea.
Habebe Member	Sun Feb 16 17:19:42 Jergul, I didnt mean to infer that there are not many other reasons historically, the region was once a shipping powerhouse which helped a lot with trade, good natural resources, skilled labor and quick adaptation of technology.
jergul large member	Sun Feb 16 17:40:46 Habebe The more income regular people have to spend, the bigger the economy. Its simply just good for an economy that people do not save excessively. Investor classes save excessively. Normal people generally do not. Decreasing income inequality was the driving force of nordic prosperity. Then you have all the other stuff.
Habebe Member	Sun Feb 16 17:51:00 Idk about the driving force. I could.be wrong im no expert, but currently I know oil is 1/5 of the economy.
Habebe Member	Sun Feb 16 17:53:21 Also generally low levels of immigration probably helps.Its why there is such a push about controlling immigration in the US.
smart dude Member	Sun Feb 16 23:11:46 historically 100% white, western people. done.
jergul large member	Mon Feb 17 00:41:37 habebe 7% of employment directly or indirectly. 7% of the State revenue. Immigration is bad because it increases income disparity for at least 3 generations. Slavery and military occupation/internal displacement/ethnic cleansing seem to be even worse as the income disparity becomes practically perpetual.
Habebe Member	Mon Feb 17 02:07:04 http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Norway#Fossil_fuels http://www.norskpetroleum.no/en/economy/governments-revenues/ http://ec.europa.eu/trade/policy/countries-and-regions/countries/norway/ Norway is in the global top 7 exporters of crude oil. The oil and gas sector constitutes around 18% of Norwegian GDP and 62% of Norwegian exports in 2018.
Nimatzo iChihuaha	Mon Feb 17 04:14:12 Jergul ”Its simply just good for an economy that people do not save excessively. Investor classes save excessively. Normal people generally do not.” Not really, the filthy rich investor class did not become rich hoarding/saving money, but by taking risks with other people’s money. This analysis is too simple to be useful. As the epithet indicates the money is invested in different ventures. Ventures that produce the crap the peon class ”needs” to consume, keeping the economy going.
jergul large member	Mon Feb 17 05:05:21 Nimi Its too simple to by useful in the same way Keynsian economics are too simple to be useful. More saving gives less spending. Less spending gives lower growth. I would be happy to make an exception for venture capitalists. The money they put into companies actually is spent developing business concepts.
patom Member	Mon Feb 17 05:26:35 Depends on the Capitalists. A lot of the Tax Break money that Trump said was going to be used to invest in equipment and building more manufacturing in the US has gone the way of Reagan's big tax break. Much of it went to buying back their own stocks.
Nimatzo iChihuaha	Mon Feb 17 06:53:10 Jergul I wouldn't know about that, but owning stocks isn't remotely similair to rich people some how depriving the economy of money. I paid someone for those stocks, it is a zero sum game, that person bought a car or paid their mortage or relaid the roof or bought another mansion or yes invested in a new venture. The ways in which money becomes functionally useless the way you describe are rare, and the people who engage in this are not cut from the same cloth as some kind of Investor class. Whatever hoarding is going on isn't going on at the hands of Investors, who are high maintenance and make sure the money is working for them.
Rugian Member	Mon Feb 17 06:57:58 It's worth noting that jergul is a wholesale opponent of the concept of investing as a tool for companies to raise money. Hence his love for transaction taxes and taxation of dividends and capital gains as ordinary income. If you have enough money to make an investment, you have too much money according to jergul. Just keep that in mind when you're debating him on this issue.
jergul large member	Mon Feb 17 07:20:48 Ruggy That is not my position at all. I would never argue in favour of the tax regime that lifted the US population into the middle class in the 40s, 50s and 60s. I am not a communist after all. Nimi That depends entirely of what % you think is working capital and what percent you think is speculative investment. If you think stock appreciation is going to make you money and not the dividend yield, then you are looking at a huge inefficiency in the economy. Its an expression of excessive savings by relatively few people.
Nimatzo iChihuaha	Mon Feb 17 10:00:40 Jergul Stocks are not money. The money that you paid someone with to buy the stock with, that is money. This is a quite important distinction. Having 1000 SEK worth of stocks isn’t the same thing as 1000 actual SEK. Somebody needs to pay me 1000 sek for my stocks, at which point I may take that money and put it in a shoebox, depriving the economy of 1000 SEK. This concerns of yours applies to a fraction of the money which is always being speculated with, by day traders and other assorted rent seekers, the investor class are not daytraders, they create value, generally.
jergul large member	Mon Feb 17 11:25:30 http://en....al_in_the_Twenty-First_Century Critique that if you like. Its the basis for my position.
Nimatzo iChihuaha	Mon Feb 17 11:30:32 I think I will leave that to the people in criticism section of the article, mkay?
jergul large member	Mon Feb 17 11:46:57 http://www...ide-to-abolishing-billionaires
Habebe Member	Mon Feb 17 15:12:43 Not direcrly related but I seen an article with Trump teying to foddle with a tax incentive to get more lower income people involved in investing.
Habebe Member	Mon Feb 17 15:20:27 http://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.usatoday.com/amp/4763945002
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