Daniel J Mitchell offers up a simplistic and misleading potted history of Sweden before asking the staggering stupid question “Why Is Obama Trying to Make America More Like Sweden when Swedes Are Trying to Be Less Like Sweden?” If you accept these premises, the natural answer would be that the optimal scope of the welfare state is to be more generous than what we have in the United States but less generous than what they have in Sweden.

Central Station, Stockholm (my photo, available under cc license)

Meanwhile, I’m always a bit surprised by things like the raw tribalism involved in American libertarians’ eagerness to embrace things like the Swedish center-right. It’s true that the government of Frank Reinfelt has been pursuing tax cuts, but they’re reductions to a level that’s stupendously higher than anything I’ve ever heard an American politician in a competitive election embrace. The current government states that “The objective of welfare policy is to reduce the gaps between different social groups while giving people security, the opportunity to develop and an acceptable economic standard.”

On the specific issue of health care, no politician in Sweden wants to eliminate universal coverage. Nor does any politician in Sweden want to introduce anything resembling the level of private health insurance that Barack Obama’s plan features. The right-wing government is introducing such radical free market reforms into the system as allowing for the existence of private-sector drug stores. Their health ministry (PDF) tells us that “Swedish health and medical care is based on the principles that care should be provided on equal terms and according to need, that is should be under democratic control and financed on the basis of solidarity.”

If these guys showed up in the United States, in other words, Mitchell would be calling them socialists.

Charles Lemos at MYDD has me reconsidering my position on the role of Poland’s odd political institutions in its disappearance as a state at the end of the 18th century. Lemos’ point is that while the fix may have been in for geographic and strategic reasons by the time of the Partitions of Poland, the Liberum Veto played a big role in Poland’s decline in the mid-17th Century, the series of events that set the stage for the later extinguishment of the state:

It is true that Poland’s geography, not just its location but the fact that the country is a flat hard to defend plain, made it ripe for invasion. Nonetheless, Poland had historically been able to fend off successive foreign invaders including the Mongols (three times), the Teutonic Knights, and the Russians without much difficulty before 1650. The country, however, had a harder time throwing off the Swedes. This was due to the introduction of the Liberum Veto in 1652 just three years before the start of the seven decade on and off war with Sweden. [...]

Based on the assumption that all members of the Polish nobility were absolutely equal politically, the Liberum Veto meant, in practice, that every bill introduced into the Sejm had to be passed unanimously. The political system found itself in a prolonged crisis that prevented Poland from developing a fiscal-military state, the model that allowed other European countries to wage war and defend themselves. The paralysis that enveloped the Polish state made it easy prey for rising powers who had developed centralized fiscal-militarty states to take advantage of Poland’s weakness.

Obviously, I’m not really well-versed in these events but that seems cogent enough to me. The story of Sweden’s 17th century moment in the sun as a great power is pretty interesting. I’ve read C.V. Wedgewood’s old book on The Thirty Years War but don’t know of much else on the subject that’s accessible.

King Carl Gustaf XVI of Sweden, Actual Head of State

Carl Bildt is Foreign Minister of Sweden. In the 1990s he was Prime Minister of Sweden. Today, he has an op-ed on internet freedom that opens with an anecdote:

A decade and a half ago, when I was prime minister of Sweden, then-President Bill Clinton and I had the first e-mail exchange between heads of state. Already our two nations were at the forefront of the technological revolution about to transform our world.

I don’t necessarily expect Americans to grasp the distinction, since our President is both head of state and head of government, but Sweden’s prime minister is not a head of state. The King of Sweden is the head of state and when he dies Crown Princess Victoria will take over.

As for his take on Internet freedom, I’m all for Internet freedom. But what does something like “We should now forge a new transatlantic partnership for protecting and promoting the freedoms of cyberspace” really amount to? I wish I could say that this nitpicking distracts from Bildt’s real point, but I’m not sure what his real point is.

Akamai’s latest “State of the Internet” report is out. The news that average Internet speed in the United States lags behind many other countries should be familiar by now:

In that light, it’s interesting to note that if you look at the world’s fastest cities the United States actually dominates. Here’s a list I made of the top ten cities:

The difference is that these are all relatively small places. The fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth fastest internet cities in Asia are all in South Korea and they include places like Seocho-gu and Masan that have many more residents than Sandy or Charlottsville.

Also note that the generally prevailing speeds in the Northeast are higher and comparable to the faster European countries, though not to the fastest Asian countries:

And just to reiterate, if population density and/or urbanization is the reason the US needs to be slower than Japan and Sweden you need to explain why internet speed in the District of Columbia is also slower than the internet in those countries.

Pete Davis mentions a new book that sounds interesting. He observes that we like to think of the United States as a land of opportunity, “but a new book, Creating an Opportunity Society, by Ron Haskins and Belle Sawhill of the Brookings Institution proves otherwise.”

That’s what we like to think, but a new book, Creating an Opportunity Society, by Ron Haskins and Belle Sawhill of the Brookings Institution proves otherwise. They took a close look at intergenerational mobility and found that 42% of American men with fathers in the bottom income quintile remain there as compared to: Denmark, 25%; Sweden, 26%; Finland, 28%; Norway, 28%; and the United Kingdom, 30%. They present a wealth of new and old research evidence to support the conclusion that if you’re born poor in America, you’re likely to remain poor.

This basic result has been known for quite some time, at least in liberal circles (conservatives like Greg Mankiw believe the U.S. is ruled by a genetic aristocracy). And the interpretation seems pretty clear. The high level of income inequality in the United States leads to highly unequal opportunities for American children, whereas the low levels of income inequality in Nordic countries lead to more equal outcomes.

Davis says the book “is not a liberal polemic,” but I’m not really sure where else any analysis of this issue would lead you. One of the co-authors, Ron Haskins, has definite conservative credentials so I’ll be interested to see what kind of conservative ideas are in here, but “make America more like Sweden” doesn’t strike me as a very promising foundation for bipartisanship.

A friend joked yesterday after a frustrating experience dealing with Comcast that “I think we need a public option for cable/wireless companies.”

But there’s a real issue here. The United States gets very mediocre results in terms of broadband price and speed compared to other industrialized countries. It’s true that some of this has to do with the difficulty of wiring a relatively sparsely-populated country. But lots of places in the United States are as dense as Stockholm, and in Sweden the average is 18.2 mbps, which you won’t find anywhere in this country. As Mark Loyd has written:

The United States will not meet President Bush’s goal of universal broadband by the end of 2007—not by a long shot. The number of subscribers to Internet services is growing faster than the adoption of “dial-up,” yet for the most part these subscribers are not connected to the broadband technology Congress described in 1996 as a two-way communications service capable of high-speed delivery of data, voice, and video.

This failure to connect over half the country to advanced telecommunications service is not a technological failure. It is a 21st century public policy failure. In the 1990s, policies established by the Clinton administration to encourage public/private telecommunications partnerships, to connect schools and libraries to the World Wide Web, and to allow competitive service providers onto the networks of the local telephone monopolies all sped up the deployment of broadband around most of the nation. These policies were either deliberately abandoned or hampered by the Bush administration.

The increasing noise from Washington about the lack of a U.S. broadband policy obscures the fact that a policy choice was made by the Bush administration to rely entirely on “market forces” to determine how and where advanced telecommunications services would be deployed. That policy has failed.

It’s no coincidence that the cable company is always a go-to liberal example of private sector dysfunction. I would ditch Comcast in favor of a rival cable company except . . . there isn’t a rival cable company that served by neighborhood. Nor does my window face the right direction for DirectTV. So it’s Comcast or nobody, and thus the quality of Comcast’s offerings and customer service tends to be extremely bad. Appropriate regulation and public investment have a big role to play in this field.

New Daily Beast column from yours truly takes a look at health care in Sweden and Denmark to put the Obama proposals in perspective and remind the interest groups looking to block reform that they’re actually turning down a very generous offer:

Whether reform passes this year or not, the status quo really is untenable. Something will have to change someday. And what Obama and Baucus are proposing is close to the minimum amount of change conceivable. If insurance-industry groups succeed in killing the bill, the lesson will be that appeasement hasn’t worked. And that may mean that next time around, reformers will start thinking big and try to put health care under democratic control and financed on the basis of solidarity. Industry may vehemently oppose even modest reforms, maybe trying to kill it off entirely. That would be an ugly fight that would mean years of delay in providing help to people who urgently need it. But unless insurers can recognize how much the powers that be are bending over backward to be nice to them, it might be the only way forward in the long run.

Here’s my earlier post on health care in Denmark and here’s health care in Sweden. The systems are similar, though I’d say Sweden’s is marginally better. The Swedish government’s English-language description of their system also includes my new favorite health policy catchphrase: “Swedish health and medical care is based on the principles that care should be provided on equal terms and according to need, that is should be under democratic control and financed on the basis of solidarity.”

Freshly returned from a great trip to Scandinavia, I can’t help but enjoy the FuckYeahScandinavia tumblr that I was first shown this morning. That said, no fan of northern Europe can avoid observing that several of the countries the tumblr covers aren’t technically “Scandinavian.” Americans often find this a bit confusing but Scandinavia, strictly speaking, only refers to Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. If you want to add in Iceland and Finland and miscellaneous extra territories (Åland, Faeroe Islands, Greenland) the word you’re looking for is “Nordic.”

I don’t totally understand why the distinction has been drawn this way—but roughly the point is that Finnish is a very different language from the others and that Iceland is clearly a geographically distinct phenomenon from the rest.

The larger point, however, is that the giant phone in this Robyn video is totally awesome. I also like that in Sweden health care is “under democratic control and financed on the basis of solidarity.”

The world standard for measuring educational achievement is the OECD’s PISA scores which reveal that Sweden does worse than world leaders like Finland, the Netherlands, and South Korea but better than the United States:

Nordic countries are often said to be highly homogeneous, which is true of Finland, but Sweden has more immigrants than the United States though of course much less poverty and inequality.

The most noteworthy aspect of Swedish education is a fairly robust school choice system. This is often described in the Anglophone press as involving “vouchers” in that any Swedish parent is entitled to take his or her children out of the state-run schools and put into another school, with the new school assigned the same level of per-pupil funding as a municipal school would have gotten. But these schools are more like what we call “charter schools”—they can’t have exclusive admissions policies and they can’t charge tuition above the value of the per pupil allotment.

The big difference is that many Swedish charters are run by for-profit firms. We’ve had some experiments with that in the U.S. and it hasn’t worked very well. Nobody’s really found a great way of making consistent profits running K-12 schools in America.

It’s not really clear to me, however, if Swedish schools are actually performing at a higher level than ours. If our child poverty level were where Sweden’s is, our kids’ test scores would be way higher. By contrast, in the Netherlands the child poverty rate is much higher than in Sweden—though of course much lower than in the United States—and the test scores are substantially better.

I’m staying on the island of Södermalm just south of Stockholm’s old city. At the north end of the island, right by the bridges to the old city, is Slussen a fairly interesting entry in the roadway interchange genre.

Its little spirals of road are noteworthy both for being somewhat tighter and smaller than you normally see, but also for what they tucked under and inside the interchange, namely a Metro station (Red and Green lines) plus a light rail stop, a stopping point for many buses, and even a ferry depot.

I think it’s about as good a job as you can do of this sort of thing and still you’re left with the fact that this kind of structure really has no place in a city. You should just do regular roads and a normal grid. This interchange is particularly odd since Stockholm is actually blessed with a lack of misguided urban freeway projects in its central core (it’s a different story on the outskirts) so it’s hard to see why this was even felt to be necessary.