Goodbye Swedish model.(Sweden After the Swedish Model: From Tutorial State to Enabling State)(Book Review)

Mauricio Rojas, Sweden After the Swedish Model: From Tutorial State to Enabling State, Timbro, June 21, 2005 (timbro.com)

For decades, self-styled progressives and leftists have hailed the "Swedish model" as a working example of a social arrangement whereby a nation can achieve economic success and high living standards while maintaining a massive welfare state. Few, however, have noticed that Sweden itself has abandoned the Swedish model. Lund University professor Mauricio Rojas explains the rise and fall of the Swedish model in a book published by the Swedish think tank Timbro.

The Swedish word for the Swedish model is folkhemmet--a conflation of folk (people) and hem (home). It began, Rojas says, manyyears ago as Sweden's failed agrarian state industrialized. Rojas calls the model a "tutorial" which envisions government as a noble "ruling power ... that both creates the preconditions for a good life and guides the citizens towards it." From its flowering in the mid 1930s until the middle of the 1970s, this Swedish arrangement provided low unemployment, high growth, and the famous social welfare system. Rojas suggests that "its main power lay in its ability to intertwine the past with the future ... to preserve Sweden's distinctive traditions while exploiting the material prosperity ...