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What the US can learn from the Nordic countries - stpioc - 08-08-2016
From Project Syndicate
Hillary Clinton and the Scandinavian-American Dream
COPENHAGEN – This week, Hillary Clinton will address the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia to accept her party’s presidential nomination and present its platform. When she does, she will define her vision of, among other things, the social contract in America.
It will be a crucial moment. The relationship between Americans and their government is a burning issue today, and two of Clinton’s fellow candidates – Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, and Bernie Sanders – have, each in his own way, challenged her on it.
When Sanders defended Denmark’s social-welfare state during a Democratic primary debate in October 2015, Clinton scoffed, “We are not Denmark.” True, the United States is not Denmark. But it is not wrong to ask what makes Scandinavian welfare economies so successful, and what Americans can learn from them.
The short answer is that Scandinavian countries provide their people with work that pays a decent enough wage to sustain healthy and happy lives. One need not be an economist to understand that a country’s wealth depends, to a large extent, on the proportion of the population that is doing productive work in high-value jobs.
According to OECD country rankings by employment, the top seven countries worldwide have welfare economies. Four of them are Nordic countries: Iceland, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (the other three are Switzerland, New Zealand, and Germany). What’s more, in only five OECD members do more than 70% of women participate in the workforce: the four Nordic countries and Switzerland.
Specifically, welfare economies have been successful in expanding the scope of work, and of the labor market, to make jobs available to segments of the population that otherwise would have lacked access to well-paid employment. Some measures give workers more opportunities; others ensure that workers are freed up to pursue those opportunities.
For example, welfare-economy countries provide free education for all and skills training for any age, so that workers can move up the labor-market value chain; social security for the unemployed, so that a temporary loss of work does not become a personally catastrophic event; and highly developed systems of care for children, the elderly, and vulnerable members of society, so that workers do not have to choose between employment and caring for loved ones.
These economies’ capacity to provide work is not undermined by their strong social safety nets. On the contrary, precisely because temporary unemployment is not a disaster for those affected by it, the labor market is more flexible and predictable. This makes it easier for employers to hire and fire, and easier for employees to seek out the best job for the best pay.
This “flexicurity”-based labor market is a key defense against the full effects of globalization and open borders. It may well be true that the free exchange of goods and services benefits an economy as a whole; but experience from recent decades shows that, in most countries, the benefits are not evenly distributed. This sense of unfairness has fueled growing discontent and frustration among those who have seen their real wages fall, their jobs disappear, and their social benefits shrink because of tax evasion or a larger pool of recipients that includes immigrants.
And now that anger over the effects of globalization is boiling over and rattling the very foundations of Western societies. Seen in this light, Brexit, the growth of populist parties throughout Europe, and the surge of support for Trump and Sanders in the US should not be a surprise. After all, it is a virtue of democracy that those who suffer from growing inequality and vanishing opportunities can express their grievances in elections.
Scandinavian welfare societies are not immune to populism, nationalism, or nativism, and each country has its political extremes. But with higher employment and lower inequality, challenges to the social contract itself are far more rare than they are elsewhere – particularly the US.
Of course, extended social-welfare systems require higher taxes to finance a larger public sector, the scope of which is constantly debated. But the electorates in these countries generally support the central idea – and they do so for a good reason. These systems level the playing field and allow individuals to pursue their dreams. This, fundamentally, is why so many Scandinavians are employed and why so many want to hold on to the current system.
Social welfare makes the American dream come true. Clinton should take a second look; she might find something to learn from Denmark after all.
RE: What the US can learn from Denmark - stpioc - 04-03-2017
Quote:It’s official. Denmark – as well as being the world’s best country to live in for women with the second-happiest people and one of the best healthcare systems in Europe – has the most contented babies. Or, at least, the ones who cry the least. According to research published in the Journal of Pediatrics, Danish, German and Japanese babies cry the least, while British, Canadian and Italian babies cry the most.British babies cry the most, Danish babies the least. Why? | Society | The Guardian
“I’m not surprised,” Danish parenting expert and co-author of The Danish Way of Parenting Jessica Joelle Alexander tells me. “The first year of a child’s life is considered so important in Denmark and that’s such a different perspective to other countries. Danish parents are much less stressed because they get good maternity and paternity leave. The vibe is much calmer and, if mothers are getting more time off, that goes hand in hand with less stress, more contact, good routines and less crying.” She pauses before throwing in a final tip: “Oh, and Danish babies sleep outdoors a lot.”
RE: What the US can learn from Denmark - stpioc - 01-22-2018
The Robots Are Coming, and Sweden Is Fine
In a world full of anxiety about the potential job-destroying rise of automation, Sweden is well placed to embrace technology while limiting human costs.
By PETER S. GOODMAN DEC. 27, 2017
GARPENBERG, Sweden — From inside the control room carved into the rock more than half a mile underground, Mika Persson can see the robots on the march, supposedly coming for his job here at the New Boliden mine.
He’s fine with it.
Sweden’s famously generous social welfare system makes this a place not prone to fretting about automation — or much else, for that matter.
Mr. Persson, 35, sits in front of four computer screens, one displaying the loader he steers as it lifts freshly blasted rock containing silver, zinc and lead. If he were down in the mine shaft operating the loader manually, he would be inhaling dust and exhaust fumes. Instead, he reclines in an office chair while using a joystick to control the machine.
He is cognizant that robots are evolving by the day. Boliden is testing self-driving vehicles to replace truck drivers. But Mr. Persson assumes people will always be needed to keep the machines running. He has faith in the Swedish economic model and its protections against the torment of joblessness.
“I’m not really worried,” he says. “There are so many jobs in this mine that even if this job disappears, they will have another one. The company will take care of us.”
In much of the world, people whose livelihoods depend on paychecks are increasingly anxious about a potential wave of unemployment threatened by automation. As the frightening tale goes, globalization forced people in wealthier lands like North America and Europe to compete directly with cheaper laborers in Asia and Latin America, sowing joblessness. Now, the robots are coming to finish off the humans.
But such talk has little currency in Sweden or its Scandinavian neighbors, where unions are powerful, government support is abundant, and trust between employers and employees runs deep. Here, robots are just another way to make companies more efficient. As employers prosper, workers have consistently gained a proportionate slice of the spoils — a stark contrast to the United States and Britain, where wages have stagnated even while corporate profits have soared.
“In Sweden, if you ask a union leader, ‘Are you afraid of new technology?’ they will answer, ‘No, I’m afraid of old technology,’” says the Swedish minister for employment and integration, Ylva Johansson. “The jobs disappear, and then we train people for new jobs. We won’t protect jobs. But we will protect workers.”
A Cushion for Innovation
Americans tend to dismiss Nordic countries as a realm of nanny-state-worshiping socialists in contrast to the swashbuckling capitalists who rule in places like Silicon Valley. But Sweden presents the possibility that, in an age of automation, innovation may be best advanced by maintaining ample cushions against failure.
“A good safety net is good for entrepreneurship,” says Carl Melin, policy director at Futurion, a research institution in Stockholm. “If a project doesn’t succeed, you don’t have to go broke.”
Eighty percent of Swedes express positive views about robots and artificial intelligence, according to a survey this year by the European Commission. By contrast, a survey by the Pew Research Center found that 72 percent of Americans were “worried” about a future in which robots and computers substitute for humans.
In the United States, where most people depend on employers for health insurance, losing a job can trigger a descent to catastrophic depths. It makes workers reluctant to leave jobs to forge potentially more lucrative careers. It makes unions inclined to protect jobs above all else.
Yet in Sweden and the rest of Scandinavia, governments provide health care along with free education. They pay generous unemployment benefits, while employers finance extensive job training programs. Unions generally embrace automation as a competitive advantage that makes jobs more secure.
Making the United States more like Scandinavia would entail costs that collide with the tax-cutting fervor that has dominated American politics in recent decades.
Sweden, Denmark and Finland all spend more than 27 percent of their annual economic output on government services to help jobless people and other vulnerable groups, according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The United States devotes less than 20 percent of its economy to such programs.
Safety Nets Compared
Scandinavian countries are among the biggest spenders on unemployment benefits, health care and parental leave, whereas the United States spends less than the average on its social safety nets.
[img]file:///C:/Users/ADMINI~1/AppData/Local/Temp/enhtmlclip/Image.png[/img]
Most recent data available for each country | Source: Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation | By The New York Times
For Swedish businesses, these outlays yield a key dividend: Employees have proved receptive to absorbing new technology.
This is especially crucial in mining, a major industry in Sweden. Wages are high, with pay and working conditions set through national contracts negotiated by unions and employers’ associations. Boliden’s mines have some of the world’s lowest-grade ore, meaning it contains minute quantities of valuable minerals. The prices are set by global markets.
“We have every reason not to be competitive,” says Boliden’s chief executive, Lennart Evrell.
The only way for the company to ensure profit is to continually increase efficiency. This is why Mr. Persson and his co-workers in the control room will soon be operating as many as four loaders at once via joysticks.
Boliden
The company is pressing ahead with plans to deploy self-driving trucks, testing a system with AB Volvo, the Swedish automotive giant, at a mine in the town of Kristineberg. There, Boliden has expanded annual production to close to 600,000 tons from about 350,000 tons three decades ago — while the work force has remained about 200.
“If we don’t move forward with the technology and making money, well, then we are out of business,” says Magnus Westerlund, 35, vice chairman of a local union chapter representing laborers at two Boliden mines. “You don’t need a degree in math to do the calculation.”
At the mine below the frigid pine forests in Garpenberg, 110 miles northwest of Stockholm, Mr. Persson and his co-workers earn about 500,000 krona per year (nearly $60,000). They get five weeks of vacation. Under Swedish law, when a child arrives, the parents have 480 days of family leave to apportion between them. No robot is going to change any of that, Mr. Persson says.
“It’s a Swedish kind of thinking,” says Erik Lundstrom, a 41-year-old father of two who works alongside Mr. Persson. “If you do something for the company, the company gives something back.”
Daunting Job Projections
That proposition now confronts a formidable test. No one knows how many jobs are threatened by robots and other forms of automation, but projections suggest a potential shock.
A 2016 study by the World Economic Forum surveyed 15 major economies that collectively hold two-thirds of the global work force — about 1.86 billion workers — concluding that the rise of robots and artificial intelligence will destroy a net 5.1 million jobs by 2020.
A pair of Oxford University researchers concluded that nearly half of all American jobs could be replaced by robots and other forms of automation over the next two decades.
When automated teller machines first landed at bank branches in the late 1960s, some foresaw the extinction of humans working in banks. But employment swelled as banks invested the savings into new areas like mortgage lending and insurance. Similar trends may play out again.
Three years ago, Soren Karlsson quit his job on the business side of a Swedish newspaper to start United Robots, a venture that one might initially think was aimed at ruining the lives of his former colleagues: He developed a robot, named Rosalinda, that scans data about sporting events to yield news stories.
Soren Karlsson, the founder of United Robots in Malmo, Sweden, developed a robot that produces sports news stories. What does the president of the Swedish Union of Journalists think? “We have always tried to applaud and embrace new developments.”
“The stories are not as colorful as a human would write,” he says.
But his robots never break for lunch. Today, Mr. Karlsson has six people working at his offices in the city of Malmo. He expects that Rosalinda will write 100,000 stories this year for various Swedish media outlets, bringing his company revenue of about 5 million krona (about $590,000).
At the Swedish Union of Journalists, no one seems concerned. Rosalinda is mostly adding coverage that did not exist before — stories about high school floor hockey games, middling soccer matches.
“We have always tried to applaud and embrace new developments,” says the union president, Jonas Nordling. “We can’t just moan about what is happening.”
Yet even if robots create more jobs than they eliminate, large numbers of people are going to need to pursue new careers.
Sweden and its Nordic brethren have proved successful at managing such transitions. So-called job security councils financed by employers help people who lose jobs find new ones.
One such council in Stockholm, the TRR Trygghetsradet, boasts that 83 percent of participants have found new jobs this year. Two-thirds have landed in positions paying the same as or better than their previous jobs.
But some worry that the system could be overwhelmed by the impact of automation. The number of students older than 35 has fallen by nearly one-fifth in recent years at Swedish universities, which have curtailed enrollment of midcareer laborers while focusing on traditional degree programs.
“That’s a kind of warning signal for us,” says Martin Linder, president of Unionen, which represents some 640,000 white-collar workers.
Wireless internet and tablet computers are among the technological advances that workers at the Boliden mine have welcomed. “For us, automation is something good,” a local union leader says.
Maintaining Sweden’s social safety net also requires that the public continue to pay tax rates approaching 60 percent. Yet as Sweden absorbs large numbers of immigrants from conflict-torn nations, that support may wane. Many lack education and may be difficult to employ. If large numbers wind up depending on government largess, a backlash could result.
“There’s a risk that the social contract could crack,” said Marten Blix, an economist at the Research Institute of Industrial Economics in Stockholm.
For now, the social compact endures, and at the Boliden mine, a sense of calm prevails.
The Garpenberg mine has been in operation more or less since 1257. More than a decade ago, Boliden teamed up with Ericsson, the Swedish telecommunications company, to put in wireless internet. That has allowed miners to talk to one another to fix problems as they emerge. Miners now carry tablet computers that allow them to keep tabs on production all along the 60 miles of roads running through the mine.
“For us, automation is something good,” says Fredrik Hases, 41, who heads the local union chapter representing technicians. “No one feels like they are taking jobs away. It’s about doing more with the people we’ve got.”
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RE: What the US can learn from the Nordic countries - stpioc - 04-16-2019
Quote:“The short version of the story is that Sweden and other Nordic countries ... have high taxes and they have fairly good economic performance,” Torben Andersen, a professor in the Department of Economics and Business Economics at Aarhus University in Denmark, told CNBC. “And the simple explanation is that you cannot judge the effect of taxes without knowing what they are financing.” Sweden is known to have some of the highest taxes in the world. At the same time, unemployment is low and the country has posted better GDP numbers than the United States in recent years. Here’s how a country with fewer than 10 million people pulled it off.Taxes and Sweden: How one country deals with high taxes without hurting growth
There is a video in the link explaining things..
RE: What the US can learn from the Nordic countries - Admin - 07-23-2019
Quote:Raising your kids in Estonia is easier than in most countries around the world, according to the latest report by UNICEF. Estonia ranks highest for family-friendly policies in OECD and EU countries together with Sweden, Norway, Iceland and Portugal. Switzerland, Greece, Cyprus, United Kingdom and Ireland rank the lowest. According to the report, Estonia offers mothers the longest duration of leave at full pay at 85 weeks, followed by Hungary (72 weeks) and Bulgaria (65 weeks). The United States is the only country included in the analysis with no national paid leave policy for mothers or fathers.Estonia, Sweden, Norway and Iceland rank highest for family-friendly policies according to UNICEF - Work in Estonia
Quote:Taxes are a big political issue the United States. Progressive Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have proposed higher taxes on wealthy Americans to help fund generous state welfare programs. Sweden, and other Nordic countries, are often now used as successful examples of nations that collect high taxes without hurting employment or their economies. Here's a look at how Sweden pulls it off.Taxes in Sweden: How one Nordic country balances growth with high taxes
RE: What the US can learn from the Nordic countries - Admin - 02-15-2020
Quote:Being allowed to marry has led to a drop in the number of gay men and lesbians taking their own lives in two Scandinavian countries, according to a new study. A 46-per-cent fall in suicides among people in same-sex marriages was recorded by comparing two time periods in Denmark and Sweden – from 1989 to 2002, and 2003 to 2016.Legalising gay marriage caused dramatic fall in suicides across Sweden and Denmark, study finds | The Independent
RE: What the US can learn from the Nordic countries - Admin - 03-20-2020
Quote:The annual United Nations World Happiness Report released its 2020 edition today, revealing that the Nordic country is number one once again. Since the first report in 2012, only four countries have claimed the top spot: Denmark in 2012, 2013 and 2016, Switzerland in 2015, Norway in 2017, and now Finland in 2018, 2019 and 2020. The 2020 report ranked 156 countries by how happy their citizens perceive themselves to be, based on their evaluations of their own lives.Finland crowned world’s happiest country for third year running | The Independent
Finland came top by some margin, followed by Denmark, Switzerland, Iceland and Norway. All the Nordic countries appeared in the top 10. The UK missed out on the top 10, coming in 13th place, while the US came in at number 18. “The World Happiness Report has proven to be an indispensable tool for policymakers looking to better understand what makes people happy and thereby to promote the wellbeing of their citizenry,” said Jeffrey Sachs, one of the report’s editors. “Time and again we see the reasons for wellbeing include good social support networks, social trust, honest governments, safe environments and healthy lives.”
RE: What the US can learn from the Nordic countries - Admin - 05-24-2020
Quote:President Trump thunders that Democrats are trying to drag America toward “socialism,” Vice President Mike Pence warns that Democrats aim to “impose socialism on the American people,” and even some Democrats warn against becoming, as one put it, “[expletive] Denmark.” So, before the coronavirus pandemic, I crept behind [expletive] Danish lines to explore: How scary is Denmark? How horrifying would it be if the United States took a step or two in the direction of Denmark? Would America lose its edge, productivity and innovation, or would it gain well-being, fairness and happiness?Opinion | McDonald’s Workers in Denmark Pity Us - The New York Times
Danes pay an extra 19 cents of every dollar in taxes, compared with Americans, but for that they get free health care, free education from kindergarten through college, subsidized high-quality preschool, a very strong social safety net and very low levels of poverty, homelessness, crime and inequality. On average, Danes live two years longer than Americans. A Big Mac flipped by $22-an-hour workers isn’t even that much more expensive than an American one. Big Mac prices vary by outlet, but my spot pricing suggested that one might cost about 27 cents more on average in Denmark than in the United States. That 27 cents is the price of dignity.