We need to be more like Sweden (it's not what you think Corbynistas)

There's a picture we have of Sweden as, depending on our political prejudice, some sort of social democratic world of joy or else a sort of stifling, controlling, high tax dystopia. I suspect that we don't think of this:

Stockholm produces the second-highest number of billion-dollar tech companies per capita, after Silicon Valley, and in Sweden overall, there are 20 start-ups—here defined as companies of any size that have been around for at most three years—per 1,000 employees, compared to just five in the United States, according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). “What you see is that start-ups have a high survival rate in Sweden, and they have relatively fast growth,” Flavio Calvino, an OECD economist, told me. Sweden also ranks highest in the developed world when it comes to perceptions of opportunity: Around 65 percent of Swedes aged 18 to 64 think there are good opportunities to start a firm where they live...

Somehow the image of Sweden as a free-wheelin', creative place filled with start-up tech businesses runs counter to our stereotype of the socialist haven. So what's driving it?

Maybe this has something to do with it?

Sweden’s reforms were a response to a financial crisis in the 1990s, when GDP growth sank, unemployment spiked, and the government, in an effort to avoid devaluation of its currency, raised interest rates to 500 percent. To jump-start economic growth, the government deregulated industries including taxis, electricity, telecommunications, railways, and domestic air travel to increase competition, according to Persson.

Along with privatising primary schools, hospitals and old people's homes. And there's more:

The reforms of 1991 lowered corporate income taxes from 52 percent to 30 percent. (Sweden’s corporate tax rate today, at 22 percent, is much lower than the U.S.’s 39 percent, though few companies actually pay a rate that high.)

Gasp! It gets better too...

In the 2000s, Sweden also got rid of its inheritance tax and a tax on wealthy people, which further incentivized people to earn large sums of money and, often, invest it back into the economy. “There was more capital available, so angel investors started to appear,” Braunerhjelm said. Today, there are significant tax breaks for starting and owning a business; for example, entrepreneurs can now have a larger share of their income taxed as capital income, which has a lower tax rate.

So privatisation, deregulation, ending taxes on investment and cutting taxes on rich people seems to work. For sure there are other factors too - a strong welfare state, good education, high levels of technical literacy and the end of protectionism (joining the EU will have helped a bit here) - but it's a lesson that, if we want a successful, wealthy and open modern society that cares it's not done by attacking markets. Quite the reverse.

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How to save the high street - don't employ anybody

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So it seems:

Customers simply use their cellphones to unlock the door with a swipe of the finger and scan their purchases. All they need to do is to register for the service and download an app. They get charged for their purchases in a monthly invoice.

The shop has basics like milk, bread, sugar, canned food, diapers and other products that you expect to find in a small convenience store. It doesn't have tobacco or medical drugs because of the risk of theft. Alcohol cannot be sold in convenience stores in Sweden.

"My ambition is to spread this idea to other villages and small towns," said Ilijason. "It is incredible that no one has thought of his before."

He hopes the savings of having no staff will help bring back small stores to the countryside. In recent decades, such stores have been replaced by bigger supermarkets often many miles (kilometers) away.

Of course nothing is quite as simple as this - the shelves still have to be stocked and someone has to manage that stock, deliver that stock and handle customers. But the principle - that the simple process of buying a loaf of bread and some cheese can be entirely dehumanised - still stands and means that the advantage supermarkets have over local stores is diminished.

However, it does seem to me that the big losers in this battle (perhaps not in Sweden though) aren't the big hypermarkets with 100,000 lines and sophisticated delivery systems but rather the expanding market of small convenience stores run by those same stores. I suspect that, while this system will challenge 24-hour opening, the market for crisps and baby food at three in the morning is pretty limited.

Interesting stuff though.

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Modern urbanism defined - build places people don't want to live in and call it 'sustainable development'

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I can understand dense urban development when there's not a lot of spare land and values are very high. But sometimes it just reveals the ideology of urbanists to be unpleasantly directing and controlling. Here's an example - the relocation of the Swedish town of Kiruna:

“Either the mine must stop digging, creating mass unemployment, or the city has to move – or else face certain destruction. It’s an existential predicament.”

So Kiruna (familiar to us 'A' level geography students as the best example of a town that simply wouldn't be there were it not for an essential natural resource - iron ore) needs to move. But the proposed replacement is a classic example of what you get when trendy architects meet 'sustainable development' and state control:

The current town is a sprawling suburban network of winding streets, home to detached houses with gardens. White’s plan incorporates a much higher-density arrangement of multistorey apartment blocks around shared courtyards, lining straight axial boulevards, down which the icy winds will surge.

It is an opportunity, say the architects, for Kiruna to “reinvent itself” into a model of sustainable development, attracting young people who wouldn’t have stayed in the town before, with new cultural facilities and “visionary” things such as a cable car bobbing above the high street. But it is a vision that many of the existing residents seem unlikely to be able to afford.

Kiruna is in the middle of nowhere - quite literally. It only exists because of the reserves of magnetite and, if you don't want to stay and dig the stuff up, you're going to head south pretty sharpish. Why on earth would young people stay in a small town where it's dark for half the year when they can go to Stockholm?

There was no need at all to build this sort of trendy version of 'Stalinist Baroque' - the authorities could have simply parcelled up and handed out building plots to residents. But that would have been too free, open and democratic for the urbanists. They'd much prefer some choice and living room but will be getting the high rise, high rent apartments the state dictates. This is the sort of world the fans of garden cities and sustainable living want. It's not what people want.  But what do we get?

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Social immobility...

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Fascinating this:

Seven to ten generations are required before the descendants of high and low status families achieve average status. Thus in modern Sweden the descendants of the eighteenth-century nobility are still heavily overrepresented -- 300 years later -- among higher social status groups: doctors, attorneys, the wealthy, members of the Swedish Royal Academies. In the United Kingdom, the descendants of families who sent a son to Oxford or Cambridge around 1800 are still four times as likely to attend these universities as the average person. Social mobility rates have also been relatively impervious to government policy. They are no higher in societies like Sweden, with generous interventions in favor of the children of disadvantaged families, than in the more laissez-faire United States. For that matter, they are no higher in modern Sweden than in eighteenth-century Sweden, or medieval England.

It reminds me of a friend, a scion of an old and wealthy family, whose self-description was "downwardly mobile".

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