The Nordic model was always about balancing a free market with social policies that increase quality of life. It was never full on socialism and the model never failed because this is still the case today. The problems facing the Nordic countries today are more related to immigration and the strain it puts on the model.
As a swede I can't say I notice any kind of economic boom.
When my parents were my age they could by a house on "normal jobs". Me and my wife are nowhere near buying a house close to Stockholm, even though both work full time.
My parents were travelling to other countries with me and my sibblings when we were young. I can only dream of going abroad with my own family.
😅 the Nordic wellfare state is built on capitalism. Not socialism. We have Social democracy NOT Socialist democracy. I live here (Sweden🇸🇪), so I know. I wouldn't want to be in the NYC people's shoes right now.
everything is warped in this video to make it seem all the success of sweden was the result of trade and low tax and all the problems were the result of high tax and welfare spending – like he makes it seem like the welfare state started in the 60s – when in reality it started in the 1930s. it was the combination of trade and incentives for business TOGETHER WITH the welfare state which made sweden into a powerhouse of growth. the problems that caused it to have to reverse course is the same all over the rich world – it is the result of the fact that in the 1970s, rich people in europe and the US ripped apart the system that was able to tax them and control the movement of capital. since that time we have a much harder time taxing rich people and corporations because now they can just move their wealth around, so as a result the welfare state is in collapse everywhere. the solution is reinstitute capital controls and wealth taxes, otherwise we’ll all be cattle to be milked by a tiny elite of billionaires as it used to be from 6000 years ago until 200 years ago with the advent of modern democracy
Sweden is really cooked. No working police, no working healthcare, the 0,1% are getting wealthier and since covid 99% has become poorer (according to official statistics). Even life expectency is dropping.
A diferença é que eles são ricos (sobra caixa pras empresas contratarem, comprarem máquinas e distribuírem renda) Já os paises pobres estrangulam as empresas com impostos mais altos que a capacidade delas de pagar. O resultado é informalidade, pobreza e baixa produtividade
both private schools(funded by the state) and some private care facilities are highly critisized as they don't do what they get paid for, there was a whole school where the pupils didn't get to graduate as the school hadn't supplied the pupils with enough lessons. and lets not talk about the stockholm housing crisis where housing is one of the least afordeble in eu and where the cheaply sell out of oublic housing was bought up by the baby boomers that have made huge profiits while still being in the public housing que with cheaper rents, the sell thier appartment or house and takes a cheaper rental excluding the young adults from cheaper rentals and due to the ridicules high prices buying appartments you would need help from parents to be able to afford the downpayment on your tiny studio flat. but sure there's more billionairs per capita then most countries which I guess is great for them.
Swede here. What a total BS video – nothing has really changed, except that the creator of this video has completely misunderstood how the Nordic model has ALWAYS worked. The Nordic model has always been a market-driven economy with a healthy element of a socially controlled welfare system, such as free education even in private schools, free healthcare for all regardless of private or public ownership, a robust pension system among other functioning social services. Taxes for wage earners have not changed at all as much as the video makes it seem. Marginal taxes were higher during the 70s and 80s, but we could deduct 100% of interest costs for e.g. investments in a private property, now we have lower marginal taxes but only 30% of interest costs can be deducted, so in the end the difference is very small. We have eight (8) political parties across the political spectrum that must be able to work together to implement changes, which means that any changes require a lot of compromise and it takes time to reach consensus and implement, which means slow processes and in practice very small changes, just as it should work in a real democracy. In addition, the political majority usually fluctuates between each election, and the currently incumbent right-wing coalition will most likely lose the election in September, and many of the reforms introduced during the mandate will be adjusted with a left-wing agenda.
This video is just completely misleading clickbait. Silly to have Kristersson as the face of Sweden there too when he's polling considerably below the red bloc in this year's elections. And the single headline you cite to build your narrative comes from the WSJ, hardly a neutral source. Much like the end of the European Union, the end of social democracy has been touted by conservatives for decades, in a country which continues to have a generous welfare state, unionization around 70% of the workforce and an income distribution that puts the US to shame.
As a health care worker in Sweden, this video is so wrong, private managed hospitals are making a profit from publicly funded (by taxes) health care system to outside Sweden, the system is getting chipped at year after year until the collapse is eminent, so they'd privatise the whole sector. They're already talking about private health insurance bound to jobs instead of healthcare as a right. Nothing rosy about this capitalistic shift that is happening in Sweden, which is one of the most unequal countries when it comes to wealth division, it has become a safe haven for billionaires from other countries because they don't pay taxes (the fair share!), so disappointed by the narrow angle of this video. It's true socialism is almost out but that's not a good thing!
It is the same predictable and pathetic cycle! Governments force collectivist experiments and endless tax burdens, driving away the very minds and capital that build prosperity, only to execute a radical U-turn after lost decades and failure, and claim intellectual triumph for rediscovering basic common sense…🤡 It so dumb and self-defeating. Yet, this exact delusion of over-regulation and the systematic strangulation of economic vitality is now being forced onto the entire EU. When will they realize that you cannot engineer prosperity from the top down? True abundance doesn't need political intervention; it simply requires the state to step back and let market forces align naturally.
socialism and capitalism isn't binary. you can exist on a scale between the two. sweden was definitely more socialist before they went more capitalist. I wish socialist could just understand that you can still be socialist even if you have some capitalist market features
This is so simplistic and biased. This video is basically a neoliberalists way of coping with a reality that doesnt align with his ideology; by focusing solely on a few variables while ignoring many much more significant and intervening ones. Utterly pathetic. But hey, there's still a fairly big audience for this that have been cultivated for decades by "think tanks" and media outlets financed by billionaires.
As both a Swede and a political scientist, I have to say that this is not a serious account of what Sweden was or is today. What you present here, @VisualPolitikEN, is essentially a libertarian redemption narrative. Sweden supposedly became wealthy through low taxes, nearly destroyed itself through collectivism and was finally saved by capitalism. It is a neat, dramatic and ideologically convenient story. It is also historically and analytically false.
The video contains just enough accurate information to appear credible, but embeds those facts in a fabricated narrative built from omitted context, category errors, selective comparisons and unsupported causal claims. Its treatment of Mamdani is a rhetorical smear, and its account of Sweden is political advocacy disguised as neutral explanation.
Let me explain why.
Some of your points are correct. Sweden did implement major reforms after the crisis of the early 1990s, including a stricter fiscal framework, pension reform, lower marginal tax rates, the abolition of inheritance and wealth taxes, broader stock market participation and greater use of private providers in publicly funded services. Many had broad political support, including from the Social Democrats, and several were necessary or successful.
But none of this proves your central claim that the Nordic model is disappearing because it did not work (0:36–1:22), or your later conclusion that it no longer exists because Swedes realised that it “simply doesn’t work” (19:28–19:58). The Nordic model has never meant abolishing markets, private ownership or private providers. It combines an open capitalist economy with comparatively high taxation, universal publicly funded welfare, extensive social insurance and a highly organised labour market. Swedish public expenditure still amounts to roughly half of GDP. Sweden reformed the Nordic model. It did not replace it with Thatcherism.
Nor was the Swedish crisis an isolated experiment proving that social democracy had failed. Its longer background lies in the breakdown of the postwar economic order during the 1970s. The oil shocks of 1973 to 1974 and 1979 to 1980 produced stagflation, slower growth, industrial restructuring and competitiveness problems across much of the developed world. Sweden was affected by the same upheaval. Its export industries came under pressure, inflation rose and governments used repeated devaluations to restore competitiveness.
This does not absolve Swedish policymakers. Sweden had serious domestic problems involving wage formation, inflation, fiscal policy and competitiveness. But presenting them as uniquely caused by welfare spending is historically indefensible. The immediate crisis of the early 1990s had more specific causes. Financial deregulation in the 1980s triggered a huge credit expansion, fuelling borrowing, speculation and a property bubble. When the boom ended, property companies failed and losses spread into the banking system. The international downturn, rising real interest rates, tax reform and the attempt to defend a fixed exchange rate intensified the collapse.
Similar banking crises affected Finland and Norway. This was not an isolated Swedish rebellion against a failed welfare state, but part of a broader Nordic boom and bust cycle after financial liberalisation. Your claim that Sweden had “stopped functioning” and therefore began dismantling the Nordic model (8:47–9:07) removes almost all of this context.
Your use of the 70% figure at 5:58–6:25 is particularly dishonest. Sweden’s total government expenditure did reach about 70% of GDP at the depth of the crisis, but that included transfers, rapidly rising unemployment expenditure and other automatic consequences of recession. It was not equivalent to the government consuming or investing 70% of GDP, nor was it the intended permanent design of the system.
You then call this temporary crisis peak “the perfect model of collectivism that Mamdani was aiming for” (6:20–6:25). Mamdani has advocated universal childcare, free buses, municipal grocery stores and a freeze on rents in rent stabilised apartments (0:26–0:39). He has not proposed that the United States reproduce Sweden’s emergency level of public expenditure during its deepest recession since the 1930s. Equating these things is not economic analysis. It is a rhetorical sleight of hand intended to associate municipal policies with economic collapse.
Your account of the 1990s crisis is therefore selective to the point of distortion. The welfare state faced genuine problems and required reform, but the crisis was not simply caused by excessive taxation and public spending, as your narrative implies between 5:30 and 8:51. Credit deregulation, a lending boom, a property bubble, a banking crash and defence of the fixed exchange rate were central. The famous 500% interest rate is also presented without adequate explanation (8:27–8:44). It was a temporary marginal central bank rate used to defend the krona. Swedish households and businesses were not generally paying 500% interest. Presenting the number without explaining what it represented is sensationalism rather than analysis.
At 9:07, you label the subsequent reforms “The Silent Revolution”, as though this were an established historical designation. It is not a standard term for Sweden’s reform period. In political science, “The Silent Revolution” is primarily associated with Ronald Inglehart’s theory of intergenerational value change, not with Sweden abandoning social democracy. Here, it functions as ideological branding, turning reforms in taxation, pensions, monetary policy, budget rules and public services into one coherent capitalist revolution (9:07–13:17). The reforms were real, but describing them as a single revolution that dismantled the Nordic model is your interpretation, not an established historical fact.
Your historical section is even less reliable. Sweden was poor by modern standards, mass emigration was real, and liberalisation, property rights and free trade were important to industrialisation. However, Sweden’s development cannot seriously be reduced to “Sweden became rich through low taxes” (3:03–5:24). Education, literacy, infrastructure, railways, technology, effective institutions, natural resources, export industries and social reforms were also fundamental. Low taxation was one feature of nineteenth century Sweden, not a sufficient explanation for its development.
The claim that Swedish life expectancy was once half the global average (3:15–3:29) is simply false. In the late nineteenth century, Swedish life expectancy was already substantially higher than the global average. The comparison with the Congo is also presented without credible measurement, definition or explanation. Saying Sweden was “poorer than the Congo” is meaningless unless you specify which territory, year and economic measure you are using.
There are numerous smaller distortions as well. Your presentation of ISK accounts as investments on which Swedes “pay no taxes on capital gains or dividends” (12:26–12:40) is misleading. ISK accounts are subject to annual imputed taxation above the tax free threshold. Your description of the pension reform also exaggerates the degree of privatisation (10:07–10:24). Only a relatively small portion of pension contributions goes into the funded premium pension, while the much larger income pension remains a public pay as you go system.
Sweden did not simply “privatise the public housing stock” either (17:41–17:49). Municipal housing companies remain major owners of rental housing. Private schools and clinics are also overwhelmingly tax financed and form part of universal public systems. Changing who operates a service is not the same as abolishing the welfare state.
Nor is the evidence concerning these markets as uniformly positive as you suggest (17:41–19:08). Sweden’s profit driven school system remains intensely controversial because of concerns about segregation, grade inflation, unequal conditions and the proportion of qualified teachers. Family choice does not prove that the system produces better or more equitable outcomes.
Most revealingly, you promise to discuss “what price Swedish society paid” (2:06–2:15), but largely omit growing inequality, segregation, housing shortages, pressure on public services and criticism of market reforms. Instead, billionaires, stock market wealth and Rolls-Royces are presented as evidence that prosperity has returned (16:08–17:19). Rolls-Royce ownership is not a measure of social welfare. More billionaires can just as easily indicate greater concentration of wealth.
Sweden undoubtedly has a dynamic private sector, deep capital markets, sound public finances and a successful entrepreneurial ecosystem. These are not contradictions of the Nordic model. A productive private economy capable of financing universal welfare has always been one of its foundations.
The intellectually honest conclusion is that Sweden liberalised, modified and financially stabilised its social democratic system following a severe banking and macroeconomic crisis. It did not abolish the Nordic model, and that model did not disappear because everyone discovered that it “didn’t work”.
Your conclusion (19:28–19:58) that Sweden abolished the Nordic model because it failed is an ideological fabrication. What you have produced is not a neutral explanation of Sweden’s development, but political advocacy presented as economic and historical analysis.
in the EU it's called social democracy (almost all EU countries run a version of this model)…dancing around the word ''socialist'' is stupid in this context (probably only serving US audiences with their feet, stones and gallons for measuring reality)
Thing is… None of this is possible if Sweden was a +350 million population country. The system would be overwhelmed and unsustainable. Not to mention, they have the European Union that helps their economy also.
I think that any government manage its people like this and take around 35–>60 percent taxes Becomes a cancer not a government and that is the same idea of socialism and communism government control everything which increases corruption ,prevent growth and weaken the people end up with weakened democracy which means people cant take control over again due to lack money or power And inequality between companies 20 percent tax and people shows the lie of social democracy
37 Comments
The Nordic model was always about balancing a free market with social policies that increase quality of life. It was never full on socialism and the model never failed because this is still the case today. The problems facing the Nordic countries today are more related to immigration and the strain it puts on the model.
NYC is dead so is London to be
By now, everyone with half a brain knows the formula for success or for failure. Yet, populism usually wins…
As a swede I can't say I notice any kind of economic boom.
When my parents were my age they could by a house on "normal jobs". Me and my wife are nowhere near buying a house close to Stockholm, even though both work full time.
My parents were travelling to other countries with me and my sibblings when we were young. I can only dream of going abroad with my own family.
And its the same for most of our friends.
😅 the Nordic wellfare state is built on capitalism. Not socialism. We have Social democracy NOT Socialist democracy. I live here (Sweden🇸🇪), so I know. I wouldn't want to be in the NYC people's shoes right now.
This comment section demonstrates why Europe will fall.
How could they be using an all-white idea of socialism? Why not an Islamic/African model of a kingdom?
everything is warped in this video to make it seem all the success of sweden was the result of trade and low tax and all the problems were the result of high tax and welfare spending – like he makes it seem like the welfare state started in the 60s – when in reality it started in the 1930s. it was the combination of trade and incentives for business TOGETHER WITH the welfare state which made sweden into a powerhouse of growth. the problems that caused it to have to reverse course is the same all over the rich world – it is the result of the fact that in the 1970s, rich people in europe and the US ripped apart the system that was able to tax them and control the movement of capital. since that time we have a much harder time taxing rich people and corporations because now they can just move their wealth around, so as a result the welfare state is in collapse everywhere. the solution is reinstitute capital controls and wealth taxes, otherwise we’ll all be cattle to be milked by a tiny elite of billionaires as it used to be from 6000 years ago until 200 years ago with the advent of modern democracy
Sounds soooo good, but what about crime?
Sweden is really cooked. No working police, no working healthcare, the 0,1% are getting wealthier and since covid 99% has become poorer (according to official statistics). Even life expectency is dropping.
A diferença é que eles são ricos (sobra caixa pras empresas contratarem, comprarem máquinas e distribuírem renda)
Já os paises pobres estrangulam as empresas com impostos mais altos que a capacidade delas de pagar. O resultado é informalidade, pobreza e baixa produtividade
Plus SAAB and ABBA, yes on the upswing.
ALLAHU AKBAR. Islam in every home in Sweden. In sha Allah. Every Swede will be Muslim.
I like my fridgid individualism. 👌🏼
I don't want to be near any
warm collectivism. 🤢
both private schools(funded by the state) and some private care facilities are highly critisized as they don't do what they get paid for, there was a whole school where the pupils didn't get to graduate as the school hadn't supplied the pupils with enough lessons. and lets not talk about the stockholm housing crisis where housing is one of the least afordeble in eu and where the cheaply sell out of oublic housing was bought up by the baby boomers that have made huge profiits while still being in the public housing que with cheaper rents, the sell thier appartment or house and takes a cheaper rental excluding the young adults from cheaper rentals and due to the ridicules high prices buying appartments you would need help from parents to be able to afford the downpayment on your tiny studio flat. but sure there's more billionairs per capita then most countries which I guess is great for them.
Please stop hyper capitalism in Sweden 😭😭❤💵
Highest wealth inequality in Europe and people think it's socialism. from a Swede
Communism will never work. You can have infinite money and it will still not work. Look at Venezuela.
Swede here. What a total BS video – nothing has really changed, except that the creator of this video has completely misunderstood how the Nordic model has ALWAYS worked.
The Nordic model has always been a market-driven economy with a healthy element of a socially controlled welfare system, such as free education even in private schools, free healthcare for all regardless of private or public ownership, a robust pension system among other functioning social services.
Taxes for wage earners have not changed at all as much as the video makes it seem. Marginal taxes were higher during the 70s and 80s, but we could deduct 100% of interest costs for e.g. investments in a private property, now we have lower marginal taxes but only 30% of interest costs can be deducted, so in the end the difference is very small.
We have eight (8) political parties across the political spectrum that must be able to work together to implement changes, which means that any changes require a lot of compromise and it takes time to reach consensus and implement, which means slow processes and in practice very small changes, just as it should work in a real democracy.
In addition, the political majority usually fluctuates between each election, and the currently incumbent right-wing coalition will most likely lose the election in September, and many of the reforms introduced during the mandate will be adjusted with a left-wing agenda.
This channel has really taken a nose dive in the last few months
Tax=money to politicians
Tax=set back
This video is just completely misleading clickbait. Silly to have Kristersson as the face of Sweden there too when he's polling considerably below the red bloc in this year's elections. And the single headline you cite to build your narrative comes from the WSJ, hardly a neutral source. Much like the end of the European Union, the end of social democracy has been touted by conservatives for decades, in a country which continues to have a generous welfare state, unionization around 70% of the workforce and an income distribution that puts the US to shame.
Social democrat or socialist are just names communist use before they have total control of the state.
Sverigestahn. Ugh
As a health care worker in Sweden, this video is so wrong, private managed hospitals are making a profit from publicly funded (by taxes) health care system to outside Sweden, the system is getting chipped at year after year until the collapse is eminent, so they'd privatise the whole sector. They're already talking about private health insurance bound to jobs instead of healthcare as a right. Nothing rosy about this capitalistic shift that is happening in Sweden, which is one of the most unequal countries when it comes to wealth division, it has become a safe haven for billionaires from other countries because they don't pay taxes (the fair share!), so disappointed by the narrow angle of this video. It's true socialism is almost out but that's not a good thing!
Not at all. The "right" just administrates the social democratic state. And they agree with the radical left in all social areas.
It is the same predictable and pathetic cycle! Governments force collectivist experiments and endless tax burdens, driving away the very minds and capital that build prosperity, only to execute a radical U-turn after lost decades and failure, and claim intellectual triumph for rediscovering basic common sense…🤡 It so dumb and self-defeating.
Yet, this exact delusion of over-regulation and the systematic strangulation of economic vitality is now being forced onto the entire EU. When will they realize that you cannot engineer prosperity from the top down? True abundance doesn't need political intervention; it simply requires the state to step back and let market forces align naturally.
In the US the middle class hasn't gotten richer since the 1970's
Social democracy is communism
socialism and capitalism isn't binary. you can exist on a scale between the two. sweden was definitely more socialist before they went more capitalist. I wish socialist could just understand that you can still be socialist even if you have some capitalist market features
This is so simplistic and biased. This video is basically a neoliberalists way of coping with a reality that doesnt align with his ideology; by focusing solely on a few variables while ignoring many much more significant and intervening ones. Utterly pathetic. But hey, there's still a fairly big audience for this that have been cultivated for decades by "think tanks" and media outlets financed by billionaires.
As both a Swede and a political scientist, I have to say that this is not a serious account of what Sweden was or is today. What you present here, @VisualPolitikEN, is essentially a libertarian redemption narrative. Sweden supposedly became wealthy through low taxes, nearly destroyed itself through collectivism and was finally saved by capitalism. It is a neat, dramatic and ideologically convenient story. It is also historically and analytically false.
The video contains just enough accurate information to appear credible, but embeds those facts in a fabricated narrative built from omitted context, category errors, selective comparisons and unsupported causal claims. Its treatment of Mamdani is a rhetorical smear, and its account of Sweden is political advocacy disguised as neutral explanation.
Let me explain why.
Some of your points are correct. Sweden did implement major reforms after the crisis of the early 1990s, including a stricter fiscal framework, pension reform, lower marginal tax rates, the abolition of inheritance and wealth taxes, broader stock market participation and greater use of private providers in publicly funded services. Many had broad political support, including from the Social Democrats, and several were necessary or successful.
But none of this proves your central claim that the Nordic model is disappearing because it did not work (0:36–1:22), or your later conclusion that it no longer exists because Swedes realised that it “simply doesn’t work” (19:28–19:58). The Nordic model has never meant abolishing markets, private ownership or private providers. It combines an open capitalist economy with comparatively high taxation, universal publicly funded welfare, extensive social insurance and a highly organised labour market. Swedish public expenditure still amounts to roughly half of GDP. Sweden reformed the Nordic model. It did not replace it with Thatcherism.
Nor was the Swedish crisis an isolated experiment proving that social democracy had failed. Its longer background lies in the breakdown of the postwar economic order during the 1970s. The oil shocks of 1973 to 1974 and 1979 to 1980 produced stagflation, slower growth, industrial restructuring and competitiveness problems across much of the developed world. Sweden was affected by the same upheaval. Its export industries came under pressure, inflation rose and governments used repeated devaluations to restore competitiveness.
This does not absolve Swedish policymakers. Sweden had serious domestic problems involving wage formation, inflation, fiscal policy and competitiveness. But presenting them as uniquely caused by welfare spending is historically indefensible. The immediate crisis of the early 1990s had more specific causes. Financial deregulation in the 1980s triggered a huge credit expansion, fuelling borrowing, speculation and a property bubble. When the boom ended, property companies failed and losses spread into the banking system. The international downturn, rising real interest rates, tax reform and the attempt to defend a fixed exchange rate intensified the collapse.
Similar banking crises affected Finland and Norway. This was not an isolated Swedish rebellion against a failed welfare state, but part of a broader Nordic boom and bust cycle after financial liberalisation. Your claim that Sweden had “stopped functioning” and therefore began dismantling the Nordic model (8:47–9:07) removes almost all of this context.
Your use of the 70% figure at 5:58–6:25 is particularly dishonest. Sweden’s total government expenditure did reach about 70% of GDP at the depth of the crisis, but that included transfers, rapidly rising unemployment expenditure and other automatic consequences of recession. It was not equivalent to the government consuming or investing 70% of GDP, nor was it the intended permanent design of the system.
You then call this temporary crisis peak “the perfect model of collectivism that Mamdani was aiming for” (6:20–6:25). Mamdani has advocated universal childcare, free buses, municipal grocery stores and a freeze on rents in rent stabilised apartments (0:26–0:39). He has not proposed that the United States reproduce Sweden’s emergency level of public expenditure during its deepest recession since the 1930s. Equating these things is not economic analysis. It is a rhetorical sleight of hand intended to associate municipal policies with economic collapse.
Your account of the 1990s crisis is therefore selective to the point of distortion. The welfare state faced genuine problems and required reform, but the crisis was not simply caused by excessive taxation and public spending, as your narrative implies between 5:30 and 8:51. Credit deregulation, a lending boom, a property bubble, a banking crash and defence of the fixed exchange rate were central. The famous 500% interest rate is also presented without adequate explanation (8:27–8:44). It was a temporary marginal central bank rate used to defend the krona. Swedish households and businesses were not generally paying 500% interest. Presenting the number without explaining what it represented is sensationalism rather than analysis.
At 9:07, you label the subsequent reforms “The Silent Revolution”, as though this were an established historical designation. It is not a standard term for Sweden’s reform period. In political science, “The Silent Revolution” is primarily associated with Ronald Inglehart’s theory of intergenerational value change, not with Sweden abandoning social democracy. Here, it functions as ideological branding, turning reforms in taxation, pensions, monetary policy, budget rules and public services into one coherent capitalist revolution (9:07–13:17). The reforms were real, but describing them as a single revolution that dismantled the Nordic model is your interpretation, not an established historical fact.
Your historical section is even less reliable. Sweden was poor by modern standards, mass emigration was real, and liberalisation, property rights and free trade were important to industrialisation. However, Sweden’s development cannot seriously be reduced to “Sweden became rich through low taxes” (3:03–5:24). Education, literacy, infrastructure, railways, technology, effective institutions, natural resources, export industries and social reforms were also fundamental. Low taxation was one feature of nineteenth century Sweden, not a sufficient explanation for its development.
The claim that Swedish life expectancy was once half the global average (3:15–3:29) is simply false. In the late nineteenth century, Swedish life expectancy was already substantially higher than the global average. The comparison with the Congo is also presented without credible measurement, definition or explanation. Saying Sweden was “poorer than the Congo” is meaningless unless you specify which territory, year and economic measure you are using.
There are numerous smaller distortions as well. Your presentation of ISK accounts as investments on which Swedes “pay no taxes on capital gains or dividends” (12:26–12:40) is misleading. ISK accounts are subject to annual imputed taxation above the tax free threshold. Your description of the pension reform also exaggerates the degree of privatisation (10:07–10:24). Only a relatively small portion of pension contributions goes into the funded premium pension, while the much larger income pension remains a public pay as you go system.
Sweden did not simply “privatise the public housing stock” either (17:41–17:49). Municipal housing companies remain major owners of rental housing. Private schools and clinics are also overwhelmingly tax financed and form part of universal public systems. Changing who operates a service is not the same as abolishing the welfare state.
Nor is the evidence concerning these markets as uniformly positive as you suggest (17:41–19:08). Sweden’s profit driven school system remains intensely controversial because of concerns about segregation, grade inflation, unequal conditions and the proportion of qualified teachers. Family choice does not prove that the system produces better or more equitable outcomes.
Most revealingly, you promise to discuss “what price Swedish society paid” (2:06–2:15), but largely omit growing inequality, segregation, housing shortages, pressure on public services and criticism of market reforms. Instead, billionaires, stock market wealth and Rolls-Royces are presented as evidence that prosperity has returned (16:08–17:19). Rolls-Royce ownership is not a measure of social welfare. More billionaires can just as easily indicate greater concentration of wealth.
Sweden undoubtedly has a dynamic private sector, deep capital markets, sound public finances and a successful entrepreneurial ecosystem. These are not contradictions of the Nordic model. A productive private economy capable of financing universal welfare has always been one of its foundations.
The intellectually honest conclusion is that Sweden liberalised, modified and financially stabilised its social democratic system following a severe banking and macroeconomic crisis. It did not abolish the Nordic model, and that model did not disappear because everyone discovered that it “didn’t work”.
Your conclusion (19:28–19:58) that Sweden abolished the Nordic model because it failed is an ideological fabrication. What you have produced is not a neutral explanation of Sweden’s development, but political advocacy presented as economic and historical analysis.
Sweden , the only country where I've seen blonde 1.85cm tall supermodels driving public buses.
in the EU it's called social democracy (almost all EU countries run a version of this model)…dancing around the word ''socialist'' is stupid in this context (probably only serving US audiences with their feet, stones and gallons for measuring reality)
Thing is… None of this is possible if Sweden was a +350 million population country. The system would be overwhelmed and unsustainable. Not to mention, they have the European Union that helps their economy also.
I think that any government manage its people like this and take around 35–>60 percent taxes
Becomes a cancer not a government and that is the same idea of socialism and communism government control everything which increases corruption ,prevent growth and weaken the people end up with weakened democracy which means people cant take control over again due to lack money or power
And inequality between companies 20 percent tax and people shows the lie of social democracy
John Kennedy understood that lower taxes increased activity, which translated into higher net revenue.