See U.S. Can't Import the Scandinavian Model by Megan McArdle.
"Ah, Scandinavia, Nordic paradise. Nowhere else seems to so easily
combine a very progressive welfare state with high levels of growth.
It's no surprise, then, that it is the darling of international indices
of everything from happiness to prosperity.
In vain do the more libertarian-minded rejoinder that Swedes have the same poverty rate in America as in Sweden,
that small homogenous countries are probably better able to support a
cradle-to-grave welfare state than large, heterogenous ones, that tiny
countries are more likely to generate outlying results than bigger ones
(which looks fantastic if you drop the outlying underperformers from your sample),
and that however splendid Norway may be, "tiny population nestled atop
huge fossil fuel deposits" is probably not a strategy that the U.S. can
emulate. What are you gonna believe -- some long-winded explanation, or
this simple number that's right in front of your eyes?
Dan Drezner makes another point,
however, that is not raised often enough: There's reason to think that
the Scandinavians may be able to pair their high levels of government
spending with a decent growth rate precisely because the U.S. does not
follow their lead.
Let me explain. In the simplest terms, economic growth is population
growth, plus productivity growth. How do nations get more productive?
Well, one way is to find a lot of lucrative fossil fuel deposits in the
North Sea. But let's accept that this is not going to be a widespread
ticket to prosperity. Most of the way we get more productive is to
innovate in some way (and indeed, the technology that discovered and
recovered the Norwegian oil is itself an innovation.)
Where does innovation mostly come from? Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson and Thierry Verdier, the academics whom Drezner cites, argue
that it disproportionately comes from economies where "incentives for
workers and entrepreneurs results in greater inequality and greater
poverty" . . . i.e., the United States. Those innovations, however,
don't make just us more productive; they filter out to the rest of the
world.
Now, you can quarrel with the academics' model, and indeed, many
people have. But even if you think they are wrong about needing
inequality-producing incentives to drive innovation, there remains a
kernel of truth: When it comes to growth, Scandinavia's economic policy
simply doesn't matter as much as U.S. economic policy, so it's hard to
draw good lessons from it for other, larger countries.
Globally, this is simply obviously true, but even locally, it will
always be the case that most of the innovations that drive Scandinavian
growth will have to come from outside their borders, simply because
their populations are so tiny compared to the hundreds of millions of
other rich-world people who are living on the current innovation
frontier. It is also true that their economies will be far more
vulnerable to things that happen elsewhere -- witness the problems the Norwegian economy is experiencing as oil prices decline
(thanks to the North American shale oil revolution, and the response it
triggered from OPEC). In other words, the government can really screw
things up, if it wants to, but it can't likely meaningfully increase the
rate of growth above the level of innovation that the global system
will support.
And if you think that Acemoglu, Robinson and Verdier are right, then
Scandinavia simply doesn't need to focus on innovation, as long as the
United States is willing to carry that weight. Which suggests that the
Scandinavians may be crazy like a fox. But that doesn't mean that the
rest of us can join them in the henhouse."
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