The descendants of Scandinavian migrants on the other side of the Atlantic live in a very different policy environment compared with the residents of the Scandinavian countries. The former live in an environment with less welfare, lower taxes and (in general) freer markets. Interestingly, the social and economic success of the descendants of Scandinavian migrants in the US is on a par with or even better than their cousins in Scandinavia
Pointer from Tyler Cowen. This is political incorrectness, squared. It argues that the Scandinavian welfare state is not the success that its reputation advertises. And it implicitly assumes that some groups enjoy genetic and/or cultural advantages relative to others.
My guess is that few progressives would accept the factual claims and analysis of the author. But if they did, and they wanted to maintain the oppressor-oppressed axis, might they argue that moving to America enables Scandinavians to profit more from being an oppressor class than they are able to profit from remaining in Scandinavia?
And, a welfare state may work better if x, y, and z.
While there are some that use the oppressed oppressor framework, I don’t see this as common but more a caricature. A more neutral view would be one of the powerful and powerless. Oppression suggests an outward objective while power, even though exerted outwardly, is internally motivated.
Both considerations suggested are reasonable. The greater the provision of social services, the lower the income necessary for an equivalent standard of living. Our inflated education and healthcare costs consume much of any income difference. At the same time larger markets will allow higher specialization, greater opportunities and productivity, and higher incomes. No need for more arcane explanations.
You have the good fortune to not have my Facebook feed…
Obviously, American-Scandinavians are forced to exploit the poor against their better judgment.
Let’s not casually assume that Scandinavians who emigrated to the United States and Scandinavians who remained in Scandinavia were identical. Perhaps the ones who left tended to be more rapacious—”Let’s move to America and join the oppressør class!”—than those who stayed behind.
I once saw a graph, posted or in an article by Warren Myers at Coyote Blog which shows, on a PPP basis, the relative income of individuals in the the US and Sweden, showing how the top verses the bottom (and middle) of the income groups of both countries faired relative to each other. The bottom 10% of the Swedes were better off, while the top 90% of Americans were better off. The gap was very large for the top 25% of each country, while it narrowed quite a bit at the very top.
If anyone has a link to that chart I would love to see it.
Given Sweden is less corrupt, spends less on defense, has far fewer immigrants from 3rd world countries, and the average resident of Sweden is likely better educated (based on proficiency with math and language), I think it makes it hard to argue the Swedish “system” is not inferior.
“…few progressives would accept the factual claims and analysis of the author.”
For purposes of deciding whether I should read the monograph, is this your way of saying “The statistics seem cherry-picked and the arguments only modestly persuasive” or of saying “The paper seems very cogent but of course one can’t expect to change peoples’ minds with arguments”?
Between those, I would guess.
Progressives, it would seem, would be unlikely to accept “Swede in X” as an instrumental variable- because to a certain extent to be a progressive is to not do that.
What remains of the analysis?
I’m afraid Sanandaji might be overstating his case here. Scandinavian Americans do have relatively high incomes, but not exceptionally so when compared to other white Americans.
According to the list of median household incomes by ancestry on Wikipedia (itself taken directly from ACS data on the Census site), Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish Americans all have median incomes of $61k to $62k. (People who report their ancestry as “Scandinavian” are higher, at $66k, but I believe this kind of report is uncommon.)
Meanwhile, looking at the most common white ancestries reported in the 2010 Census, we have reported median household incomes of:
German: $59k
Irish: $59k
English: $59k
American: $47k
Italian: $64k
Polish: $63k
French: $55k
Scottish: $64k
Scotch-Irish: $57k
Dutch: $54k
So it looks like Scandinavians, at $61k to $62k, are indeed on the high end here, but not overwhelmingly so: they’re a bit higher than the three largest ancestries (German, Irish, and English), vastly higher than the infamously downscale self-reported “Americans”, and a bit lower than Italian and Polish at $63k to $64k.
The high Polish median income might be due to those of Jewish descent from Poland (the ancestry question does not, I think, distinguish them from ethnic Poles), though ethnic Poles themselves are a famously prosperous and well-assimilated group. But the high Italian median income is especially awkward for the Sanandaji interpretation. Most Italian immigrants to the United States were from Southern Italy, which had (and continues to have) one of the cultures least conducive to prosperity in all of Europe. Given that their income trumps that of most other large ancestries in the US now, this is a huge data point making it tougher to interpret the (income,ancestry) pattern via persistent cultural characteristics like Sanandaji wants. The one caveat is that Americans of Italian descent are relatively concentrated in the Northeast, which is a high wage (and high price) area; adjusting for that, it’s possible that their median income is not quite so high.
Indeed, making broad geographical adjustments, Scandinavian Americans probably do come out fairly well here. They immigrated largely to the upper midwest, not an area with especially high average incomes, and yet they persist in having median incomes mildly above the rest of the pack for white Americans. Given the extent of admixture (are many people really pure-blooded Scandinavian Americans anymore?), this would understate the actual contribution. Still, in any interpretation it’s not *as* dramatic a difference as Sanandaji makes out.
Let me continue by pointing out where the serious difference in incomes is: along racial lines.
The Wikipedia tabulation of median household incomes, unfortunately, does not have a listing for non-Hispanic whites, but let’s use the common median income of $59k for Germans, Irish, and English Americans as a proxy. And let’s use Mexican Americans, which comprise a majority of Hispanics in the US, as a stand-in for the broader Hispanic population. Then we get:
Asian American: $68k
White American: $59k
Total population: $52k
Mexican American: $41k
Native American: $39k
African American: $39k
The difference between Asians and whites at the top and the Hispanics and African-Americans at the bottom is absolutely brutal, far larger than any systematic variation within the white population.
The ratio of US to Swedish GDP per capita at PPP is about 1.187. If we use the ratio of median household incomes among ancestries as a crude proxy for the ratio of GDP per capita generated (many potential problems with this in both directions, but I suspect it isn’t too far off overall), then the ratio of white to all Americans is 1.134, and combining the two we get that white Americans exceed Swedish GDP per capita at PPP by about 35%.
This is an enormous difference; to put it in perspective, proportionally it is roughly as large as the current ratio between Sweden and the poorer and recession-wracked Spain. Furthermore, given how much of Sweden’s measured “GDP” is provided by the government rather than the market, I’d say that this probably understates the true disparity. Now, on the other hand, it isn’t completely fair to compare white US performance with overall Swedish performance, given that Sweden has non-natives too; but Sweden’s disadvantaged minority groups are, for now, much smaller, as it neither has an ugly legacy of slavery nor does it share a border with a large much poorer country to the South.
Basically, if white America was transported into a Swedish polity and economy, I highly doubt they would feel more prosperous; if non-Asian minority America was, then they might do better, but it’s not clear that the Swedish model would work for them either (it’s certainly struggling for some immigrant groups right now).
This all reinforces a big, important hidden fact about America vs. the rest of the world – namely, that when you hone in on white America alone, you get a remarkably prosperous and high-performing group along many dimensions, and many (though not all) of the US’s traditional disadvantages in international comparisons disappear or reverse.