Swedish Haiku

Still bloody freezing
Swedish winter never ends
My glass half empty.

From Sweden's News in English, although the link seems to be dead, and thanks, Sally.

Also this--not so hot Haiku but cool story:

Ursula got paid
Bathing in hot winter sun
It wasn't Fredrick
Story

Alfa-Betty Olsen Makes a Dog's Breakfast Tasty Meal...

...out of stuff she gets at Ikea (link). The Wichita bureau, with strong midwestern/Scandinavian roots, chimes in:

[For the holidays] we made Swedish meatballs (onion, pork and beef), lefse (bought at the store and like eating a paper napkin with butter), Jell-O (of course - that's salad in Minnesota), Swedish potato sausage (even the Greek won't eat it), Norwegian rice pudding, mashed potatoes made from real live potatoes, and corn. Corn has become a Swedish vegetable. At least in Minnesota. I'm sure my grandparents would have recognized most of those odd combinations of fish and potatoes (I note the absence of lefse - which Sue used to make on occasion when she couldn't find it - the stuff in the store tends to be tough; she has one recipe from an old Lutheran Church that starts with 'peel 100 lbs of potatoes') but the palate got cleaned up by the time that it got to my generation. There is one story about one cousin serving 'sil salad' - basically herring salad - as a main course and most of my mother's generation going on strike.

And as a kid, I endured the annual lutefisk dinner at church - where they served meatballs to the heathen of my generation - but it involved great quantities of drawn butter, lutefisk, meatballs, multiple courses of Jell-O in all colors imaginable (and with all sorts of canned fruit).

Actually, my own mother and I used to make Swedish pork (=bread) sausage together--one of the few things we did with complete amiability. But we drew the line at head cheese.

Swedish Taxes

Mark J. Perry is scandalized ("Yikes!") that "Tax Freedom Day" arrived in Sweden only on August 8 (link), making Sweden again one of the (but not "the") most highly taxed country in the Western world.

This is a fairly standard mantra among libertarian groupies. And I can't quarrel with the data. And I'm just as glad I'm not there. And I see no reason for a tax regime in the US that imposes such a burden.

But there's an embarrassing fact for tax critics to gag on: the Swedes don't seem to mind all that much. Nobody suggests that this burden is imposed on them by a foreign imperial power, or gaggle of gangster kleptocrats. Granted that the Social Democrats get about 30 percent less vote than they got 30 years ago, and the (former) right-wing party have taken up a lot of that slack--but the former right-wing party has renamed itself "the Moderate Party" and shows no disposition at all to dismantle the traditional Swedish welfare state--only to "reduction of the public-sector growth rate" (per Wiki) which is one of those political mantras you can't recite without a giggle.

I can think of two or three reasons why the Swedes might be disposed to hang on to their old ways. One is ethnic homogeneity. Granted that the population has changed over the generation, and granted the Sweden has a fair amount of racial tension and outright racial conflict--still it retains a sense of common identity that we've perhaps never enjoyed in the United States.

Another--perhaps a subset of the first--is that Sweden seems to have a long tradition of communal cooperation. Many have noted that the Scandinavians are about the only people have ever run a "socialist" government that anybody else would be willing to live under--think Wisconsin, Minnesota, the Dakotas. Going further back--I'm riffing now, but I think I'm onto something--I gather that the tradition of the Viking marauder* was in large measure a communal ethos: local folks built the boat, and manned it, and split up the swag.

And second (or third) Sweden's the kind of environment where a lot of the "taxation" can be thought of as a kind of group buying, where the government organizes the volume purchase of goods and services the taxpayers would buy anyway (think what happens in the US in tightly organized UMC suburbs). This perspective necesarily raises question about which services could be better privatized, and Sweden has a lot of that kind of discussion. But framed in this way, the issues become a lot less poisonous than they might in societies where "taxation" might be seen as wealth transfer --or worse, wealth transfer from locals to strangers.
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*He's back!

Why Were the Swedes So Responsible?

I and some relatives have been sharing emails, etc., about our Swedish ancestors--the Lindquists--who came to this country in the 1860s (I think) via Rhode Island (apparently greast grandpa worked in "a velvet mill," a new concept to me when I joined this coversation, but one I know more about now (link)). I'm still curious how hey/they brought it off. Contract labor? Recruited abroad? Too late (I assume) for outright indentured servitude?

But the inquiry also impelled me to focus on an inquiry about the larger context. In Global Capitalism (2006), Jeffry Frieden provides somke background. He shows how development of rail infrastructure after 1840 and particularly after 1865 led to a collapse in worldwide transportation costs and a revolution a lot of markets, not least wheat--made it economical to ship wheat

from Kansas or the Ukrain to European cities, destroying the market for domestic marginal-land producers like the Swedes. But it also opened up the market for other Swedish resources:

Sweden, a great success story of this period, illustrates the central role of economic integration in the second wave of industrial development. The country was one of western Europe's poorest in 1870, but rapid growth elsewhere increased demand for Sweden's exports, especially of lumber and simple wood products such as safety matches. The timber boom allowed Sweden to build new machinery, and other goods. Industrialization in Sweden was also fueled by foreign loans, which financed some 90 percent of the government's borrowing; much of the foreign cpaital went, directly or indirectly, to build up the country's rialroads, utilities, and port facilities. For Sweden, as for the other new industrializerrs, modern manufacturing went hand in hand with access to foreign masrkets, foreign technology, and foreign capital.

--Jeffry Frieden, Global Capitalism 77-8 (2006)

My question, untouched on by Frieden, is why Sweden actually used the new wealth to build new infrastucture, unlike so many other countries where it just disappeared into plutocrats' Swiss bank accounts (or up their noses, which amounts to the same thing). A possibility is that the Viking countries have kind of a "tradition of communism"--apparently piratical raiding ships were built by collaborative family/kin groups, back in the 11th century [it's a side issue, but I have long wondered how Sweden went form being one of the most bellicose nations (under Gustavus Adolphus) to being one of the most pacific).]

Another wrinkle is that literacy was, I believe, comparatively high. I don't have the data at my fingertips, but I believe it goes something like this: Go to 1850 and give England a wealth index of 100; the literacy index would be about 50. In Sweden, the wealth index was somewhere between 5 and 20, but the literacy index was 100

In any event, all this explains how when I took my own mother back to Sweden in 1978, she kept talking about how poor the Swedes were, while everything we saw around us bespoke a country richer than the US.