Millennials are shattering the oldest rule in politics

 From the FT

“If you are not a liberal at 25, you have no heart. If you are not a conservative at 35 you have no brain.” So said Winston Churchill. Or US president John Adams. Or perhaps King Oscar II of Sweden). Variations of this aphorism have circulated since the 18th century, underscoring the well-established rule that as people grow older, they tend to become more conservative.

The pattern has held remarkably firm. By my calculations, members of Britain’s “silent generation”, born between 1928 and 1945, were five percentage points less conservative than the national average at age 35, but around five points more conservative by age 70. The “baby boomer” generation traced the same path, and “Gen X”, born between 1965 and 1980, are now following suit.

Millennials — born between 1981 and 1996 — started out on the same trajectory, but then something changed. The shift has striking implications for the UK’s Conservatives and US Republicans, who can no longer simply rely on their base being replenished as the years pass.

It’s not every day that concepts from public health analytics find a use in politics, but if you’re a strategist on the right, then now might be a good time for a primer on untangling age, period and cohort effects(opens a new window). Age effects are changes that happen over someone’s life regardless of when they are born, period effects result from events that affect all ages simultaneously, and cohort effects stem from differences that emerge among people who experience a common event at the same time.

This framework is used to understand differences in a population and whether they are likely to be lasting. This makes it perfectly suited to interrogating why support for conservative parties is so low among millennials and whether it will stay there.

Let’s start with age effects, and the oldest rule in politics: people become more conservative with age. If millennials’ liberal inclinations are merely a result of this age effect, then at age 35 they too should be around five points less conservative than the national average, and can be relied upon to gradually become more conservative. In fact, they’re more like 15 points less conservative, and in both Britain and the US are by far the least conservative 35-year-olds in recorded history.

On to period effects. Could some force be pushing voters of all ages away from the right? In the UK there has certainly been an event. Support for the Tories plummeted across all ages during Liz Truss’s brief tenure, and has only partially rebounded. But a population-wide effect cannot completely explain millennials’ liberal exceptionalism, nor why we see the same pattern in the US without the same shock.

So the most likely explanation is a cohort effect — that millennials have developed different values to previous generations, shaped by experiences unique to them, and they do not feel conservatives share these.

This is borne out by US survey data showing that, having reached political maturity in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, millennials are tacking much further to the left on economics than previous generations did, favouring greater redistribution from rich to poor.

Similar patterns are evident in Britain, where millennials are more economically leftwing than Gen-Xers and boomers were at the same age, and Brexit has alienated a higher share of former Tory backers among this generation than any other. Even before Truss, two-thirds of millennials who had backed the Conservatives before the EU referendum were no longer planning to vote for the party again, and one in four said they now strongly disliked the Tories.

The data are clear that millennials are not simply going to age into conservatism. To reverse a cohort effect, you have to do something for that cohort. Home ownership continues to prove more elusive for millennials than for earlier generations at the same age in both countries. With houses increasingly difficult to afford, a good place to start would be to help more millennials get on to the housing ladder. Serious proposals for reforming two of the world’s most expensive childcare systems would be another.

UK millennials and their “Gen Z” younger cousins will probably cast more votes than boomers in the next general election. After years of being considered an electoral afterthought, their vote will soon be pivotal. Without drastic changes to both policy and messaging, that could consign conservative parties to an increasingly distant second place. 

john.burn-murdoch@ft.com, @jburnmurdoch

 I expect most people get more conservative as they age.  I have not: I used to believe in neo-liberalism, and now I do not.  I am more progressive than I was 50 years ago.

The death of the nuclear family

A fascinating piece from Business Insider.

For most of the 20th century, the word "family" in America evoked a predictable picture of cookie-cutter cleanliness: the happily married husband and wife, their 2.5 kids, and one improbably well-behaved golden retriever, all under the same roof. But the nuclear family has steadily eroded over the last 50 years.

The first major death knell came with the 1973 oil crisis and the two-year recession that followed, which signaled the end of the West's postwar prosperity boom. Since then, the nuclear family has crumbled piece by piece. In 1970, more than two-thirds of American adults between 25 and 49 lived with a spouse and at least one kid. By 2021, only 37% of adults fit the bill, Pew Research found.

Although it may be premature to declare the nuclear family officially over, the model is beginning to look more like a fringe lifestyle choice than the bedrock of American society.

The demise has sparked no shortage of (often racist, sexist, and homophobic) political backlash. From Elon Musk, the father of 11 kids, to the failed GOP presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy, defenders of so-called "traditional family values" decry the potential economic hazards of plummeting birth rates and the social disorder caused by unruly men without wives to rein them in. Some even argue that the nuclear family is the cornerstone of democracy itself.

Others, meanwhile, have eagerly cheered on the shift away from the stifling gender politics of the four-person norm. Critics include radical family-abolition scholars such as M.E. O'Brien, whose 2023 book "Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care" argues that the contained family structures "cannot carry the immense burden of work placed on them." On the other end of the political spectrum, in an early 2020 cover story for The Atlantic, the conservative columnist David Brooks declared the nuclear family "a mistake." Since the onset of the pandemic, the looming cloud of skepticism hanging over the whole concept of the "nuclear family" has only thickened.

Like it or hate it, the future of the family has never appeared so uncertain. For a society structured around the ideal of the nuclear family, its demise has left everyone wondering: What happens now?

The article continues here.  It's well worth a read, and to me, explains why old white men are so conservative ---- they feel threatened by the shift in society.  Whereas they were once the pinnacle of society, now others --- women, Blacks and gays --- have risen.  Things have shifted, and continue to shift.  And the "ideal" society they revere, which in fact only existed for a few decades in this form, which they however see as the only way society can be organised, is changing, irreversibly.  Expect the culture wars to continue.  Futilely. 

14 years of Tory austerity

 A video summing up an in-depth article by The New Yorker about 14 years of Tory rule in the UK ---  the last toxic convulsion in the death-throes of neo-liberalism.    Yet, like communists in the 1950s, who, when it was pointed out to them that communist economies weren't working, answered that that was because they weren't communist enough, conservatives say that if only they were even more conservative, the economy would improve. 

Britons now blame Brexit for everything

 I think the Conservative Party deserves a lot of blame too.  Austerity, neo-liberalism, cutbacks, tax cuts for the rich:  none of these has worked.  Brexit was a supremely silly idea, but the far-right ideologues who loved it wouldn't listen to anyone else.  They knew better.  Except they were hopelessly wrong.  The same is true of neo-liberalism.  40 years of experience has showed that it has failed.

The Tory water privatisation scam

 Dunno who created this.  Kudos to them.

And the Right wonder why socialism is once again respectable, and why young people are moving Left.

People aren't moving right as they age, any more

 From a tweet by Matthew Sheffield

Millennials aren't moving rightward as they've aged, unlike Gen X, Boomers, & Silents. This is a good piece on the trend, but it doesn't note that the WW2 generation had a similar left loyalty. The common factor? Both gens got screwed by oligarchs.

https://archive.is/20221230225501/https://www.ft.com/content/c361e372-769e-45cd-a063-f5c0a7767cf4

The FT's trenchant Brexit video

Long time readers of this blog will know that I have always thought that Brexit was a disastrously stupid policy.  This trenchant video by the FT (Financial Times -- not known for its far-left nature) demonstrates just how bad it has been for the UK economy.  Britain is poorer because of Brexit.  As the video says, "it's like a slow leak from a tyre".  Then the neo-liberal ideologues in the Conservative (Tory) Party produced a budget which suddenly led to the tyre blowing out.  Disastrous.  And since no one can admit just how bad it is, it's hard to see how it can be fixed.  Ideology has triumphed over pragmatism, leading to the UK going backward.

The Queen's governments

 By Martyn Turner

Tory war on woke

The Tories are the Conservative Party, in the UK.  The Party is having a leadership contest.  I love the demented drawings, which capture exactly the essence of the two very unattractive contenders,

The cartoon is by Steve Bell

Lurid, graphic sex

 A cartoon by Nick Anderson

The great wages suppression is destroying trust

 From The New Daily

Ask nearly any employer or read the Australian Financial Review and you’ll be told Australian wages are too high.

It’s a claim the federal government listens to and is acting upon, working to weaken wages growth – one of the policies worsening inequality here.

Yet a smarter employer might answer a little differently: They would like their wage costs to be lower so their profits could be higher, but they wish other employers would pay their employees more so that those employees – consumers – could buy more stuff.

Weak domestic consumption – the inevitable result of weak real after-tax wages growth – has been our biggest domestic economic problem for several years.

Pent-up demand during COVID and the government’s cash splash is providing a temporary Band-Aid for consumer spending, but that will pass soon enough, leaving the underlying problem worse.

The Reserve Bank has been hoping – in vain – for stronger wages growth for half a dozen years.

Two years ago, RBA governor Philip Lowe was calling for caps on public sector wages increases to be removed, with wage rises of 3 per cent in both the public and private sector “a reasonable medium-term aspiration”.

“My view is that a further pick up in wages growth is both affordable and desirable,” he told the House economics committee.

Instead of various public-sector wage rise caps being lifted, some state governments have reacted to COVID by introducing wage freezes.

The Morrison government is removing the cap – but that’s a ruse to cover cutting real wages.

Instead of a cap, public servant wages rises are linked to private sector movements, the government fully aware private-sector wages growth has collapsed and will remain weak with higher underemployment and unemployment.

On top of reducing penalty rates, encouraging greater casualisation and promising euphemistically phrased “greater industrial relations flexibility”, it adds up to wages suppression while profits overall are rising.Dr Michael Keating exposed the shallowness of Treasury’s neoclassical model of the wages v jobs argument back in May when a wages freeze was being pushed.

“We’ve had 17 interest rate cuts in the past decade, the Treasury and Reserve Bank have continued to forecast wage growth while taking the cash rate all the way down from 4.75 per cent to close to zero,” he wrote in The Conversation.

And the forecast wage growth never happened.

Very large increases in real wages could certainly dent economic growth, as it did in the early 1970s.

“But mostly, wage rises boost consumer demand by more than they cut business investment,” Dr Keating wrote.

“Indeed, they can actually push business investment higher. This is because profits are often more responsive to the increase in capacity utilisation that results from increased consumer demand than to a lower profit share.

This seems to explain the economic stagnation we have experienced since the global financial crisis. Low wage growth has held back consumer demand, which has also held back business investment.”

The resistance to paying higher wages is continuing to play out most publicly in the agricultural sector, with farmers relying on Pacific Islanders and backpackers to work for less than Australians will accept.

During the 2019 election campaign, then finance minister Mathias Cormann attacked Labor’s “living wage” proposal with the standard line that higher wages would mean higher unemployment.

Labour force flexibility was government policy.

Wages suppression has broader implications than economic growth, though. In a broader speech than normally associated with RBA governors, Dr Lowe explored the importance of “the community’s trust that real living standards will improve over time” in a 2018 speech.

Not everyone was sharing the positive assessment of economic growth that year. Dr Lowe produced a graph that showed why: Since 2012, there had been little change in real hourly earnings.

“The wage increases that have occurred have been broadly matched by inflation,” he said – and missed the fact that the real world was worse than that, because he overlooked the impact of the tax system.

As repeatedly explained in this space, a wage rise that matches inflation means take-home real wages – living standards – fall thanks to the tax man.

That regular mistake aside, Dr Lowe ventured into the role wages suppression plays in sowing the seeds of Trumpism: “Flat real wages are diminishing our sense of shared prosperity. The lack of real wage growth is one of the reasons why some in our community question whether they are benefitting from our economic success.

“This is not a uniquely Australian story. A similar thing has happened across most of the advanced economies.

“As a result, too many citizens around the world have diminished trust in the idea that the policies that have underpinned growth over the past 30 years are working for them.

“They feel more uncertain about the future and, in some countries, are also having to deal with very high housing prices. This unease is despite unemployment rates in many advanced economies being the lowest in many decades.

“The diminished trust in the idea that living standards will continue to improve is a major economic, social and political issue. It underlies some of the political changes we are seeing around the world. It is also making it harder to implement needed economic reform. It is in our collective interest that this trust is restored.”

Unfortunately, there is no sign of the Morrison government being committed to restoring that trust. The government seems to listen more closely to those who say wages are already too high.

Plunging renewable electricity costs lead AGL to dump gas.

 From Melbourne's The Age newspaper

Energy giant AGL is preparing to mothball one of four units at South Australia’s biggest gas-fired power station as the influx of large-scale renewable energy and rooftop solar power continues to price fossil fuels out of the market.

AGL has notified the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) it will take the unit at its Torrens B power station offline in October, citing “challenging conditions” that do not support the viability of operating all four generation units.

AGL’s move is the latest sign of the accelerating clean-energy transition driving down wholesale electricity prices to the point where coal and gas are unable to compete, and comes as the federal government presses on with plans for Snowy Hydro to build a $600 million taxpayer-funded gas-fired power plant at Kurri Kurri, NSW.

Average wholesale power prices in South Australia fell sharply last year, from $122 per megawatt hour in 2019 to $51, according to the Australian Energy Regulator, which attributes the fall to high levels of rooftop solar generation and mild summer conditions. In the first three months of the year, the average cost of power per megawatt-hour fell below $0 between 10am and 3.30pm, when rooftop solar is a major contributor to the grid.

Quarterly volume weighted average price by contribution of price bands - South Australia

Source:Australian Energy Regulator

The Right, which has spent a lot of time and energy complaining that renewables would drive up electricity prices, has been silent about this.  I wonder when opposition to renewables became a litmus test for being conservative?  I wonder how long it will take them to acknowledge the facts?

Facebook doesn't censor conservatives

 Whatever they say.

From NiemanLab.

“Right-leaning pages consistently earn more interactions than left-leaning or ideologically nonaligned pages.” Conservatives have long complained that their views are censored on Facebook. Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah said in Congressional hearings this week that fact-checking — like the labels that Facebook and Twitter attach to false posts — count as censorship: “When I use the word ‘censor’ here, I’m meaning blocked content, fact-check, or labeled content, or demonetized websites of conservative, Republican, or pro-life individuals or groups or companies.” (Censorship is the suppression of speech or other information on the grounds that it’s considered offensive or questionable. The studies below make it very clear that these stories are not being suppressed.)

The idea that right-leaning content is actually censored — that people are prevented from seeing it — is “short on facts and long on feelings,” as Casey Newton has written. This week, a couple stories and studies focused showed again that conservative content outperforms liberal content on Facebook. (See also: Progressive publication Mother Jones’ recent claims, with that its traffic was throttled as Facebook tweaked its algorithm to benefit conservative sites like The Daily Wire instead.)

For instance:

At the end of August,Dan Bongino, a conservative commentator with millions of online followers, wrote on Facebook that Black Lives Matter protesters had called for the murder of police officers in Washington, D.C. Bongino’s social media posts are routinely some of the most shared content across Facebook, based on CrowdTangle’s data.

The claims — first made by a far-right publication that the Southern Poverty Law Center labeled as promoting conspiracy theories — were not representative of the actions of the Black Lives Matter movement. But Bongino’s post was shared more than 30,000 times, and received 141,000 other engagements such as comments and likes, according to CrowdTangle.

In contrast, the best-performing liberal post around Black Lives Matter — from DL Hughley, the actor — garnered less than a quarter of the Bongino post’s social media traction, based on data analyzed by Politico.

Read the original article in full.  It's worth it.

The 'radical' left

 

Mass deaths means your economy is stuffed

 From The Guardian

No recession is easy but the Covid recession must make governments around the world nostalgic for the usual ones where you just slash interest rates, shovel out money into the economy and do all you can to get things moving.

OK, it’s never that simple and invariably things take longer to recover than they did to fall, but at least there is an established pathway to follow.

And sure, conservative governments always seem to think the pathway involves cutting taxes and reducing expenditure earlier than they should, but at least even they will pretend to be Keynesians for a little while.

But the current pandemic recession has been much tougher because of ... well, the pandemic. This recession is as much about health as it is about economics.

It is hard to stimulate the economy and get people working when health restrictions prevent that occurring.

It has led some (mostly conservative) commentators to argue there is a necessary trade-off between higher economic growth and fewer deaths. It also led to a pretty morbid and generally ignorant discussion about how governments will have to decide how much each life is worth.

And yet analysis of the performance of OECD nations, which make up the major advanced economies in the world, shows this thinking is completely wrong.

What we find instead is a clear link between higher numbers of deaths from the virus and a weaker economy.

The United Kingdom and Spain, which aside from Belgium have lost the most citizens per million to the virus within the OECD, are also the worst performing economies.

In the 12 months to June, the UK’s economy crashed 21.7%, while Spain dropped 22.1%. You might be able to argue that was worth it if it had meant lives were saved, but the UK has suffered 611 deaths per million while Spain is up to 622.

At the other end of the scale, South Korea has had just 6.3 deaths per million and its GDP has fallen a “mere” (mere is very relative in these crazy times) 2.8%.

Australia at the end of August finds itself in a good position, both health-wise and economically, compared with nations such as Canada, France, Mexico and Italy.

The performance of the Scandinavian nations is also quite instructive.  Sweden, which bizarrely became the poster-child of the free-market/anti-lockdown crew, has suffered 577 deaths per million and yet its GDP fell by 7.7%, worse than its neighbours Norway (down 5.3%), Finland (down 6.3%) and much the same as Denmark’s 7.8% fall.

And yet those three nations have had much fewer deaths – Denmark is the worst at 107 per million.

The data show that there is not a trade-off between deaths and economic growth – rather the two work together. Regardless of restrictions, if people are dying in large numbers your economy is stuffed.

Deal well with the health crisis and you can deal much better with the economic one as well.

[See an earlier article with similar conclusions]

Achieving a 50% cut in emissions

Toyota RAV4 plug-in hybrid, with 60 k's of electric range

This is from a comment I wrote about a piece in Melbourne's The Age newspaper.  It's specifically about Australia, but the same forces are operating everywhere.  A 50% cut in emissions by 2035 is easy.  The next 50% (to be achieved by 2050) might be a little harder.

In 2009, new-build solar cost 3.1 times as much as new-build coal (US data, Lazard). Now it costs 1/3rd. The ratio has completely inverted. In fact, in several countries, new-build wind and/or solar are cheaper than the *operating* cost of coal power stations. In other words. it costs more to dig up, transport and burn the coal than it does to build a new wind/solar farm from scratch. The implication is that for *economic* reasons, coal power stations are going to be closed down over the next decade. The government could, were it not a wholly-owned subsidiary of coal companies, make a virtue of the inevitability of this. "See, we're cutting emissions by a third! Aren't we green! We really care!"  Not that they do, of course.

What about the variability of wind/solar? Three points:

1. Wind and solar are complementary, in fact negatively correlated. The wind often blows when the sun doesn't shine, for example during winter in southern states. So a 50/50 wind+solar powered grid has an output profile much closer to baseload than either by itself.
2. A continent-wide grid produce much less variable output than a local one. When the wind isn't blowing in western Victoria, it is in east Gippsland. When it's raining in Sydney, it's sunny in Broken Hill or Port Augusta.
3. Battery cost are plunging. Over the last 30 months, they've fallen 60%, even after the cost impact of the fall in the A$. Storage costs are falling fast, which means the costs of "firming" the grid are too. It is now normal in the US for new solar farms to come with 4 hours of storage. As battery costs continue to slide--they should halve again over the next 3 years--solar farms will add even more storage to allow them to provide power overnight (o/n demand is 2/3rds of day demand, so in principle, 8 hours of storage will be enough)

One final point. Already simple hybrids cost only $1500-$2000 more than their (automatic/CVT) petrol equivalents (for example, the 2020 Toyota Corolla sedan), but they use 40-50% less petrol in urban driving. If your fuel bill is $100 per month, the higher cost of the hybrid engine will pay for itself within 3 years. And transitioning our vehicle fleet to simple hybrids will cut total emissions by another 10% (transport emissions are ~20% of the total.)  Plug-in hybrids are even more fuel efficient, cutting tailpipe emissions by 80% plus.  They cost just a couple of thousand dollars more than an ordinary hybrid.  A small tweak to the tax system could cut emissions from transport by 75%.

By 2030 or 2035, we could cut emissions by 50%, at no extra cost to ourselves. And look good while doing it.  But our conservative government is so beholden to fossil fuel interests that it cannot bring itself to acknowledge this.

Australia: renewables pushing down electricity prices

From Bloomberg:

Record-high renewables growth is transforming Australia’s electricity landscape, pushing out coal plants and lowering prices and emissions.

Solar and wind output during the fourth quarter within the five jurisdictions that make up the National Electricity Market increased 39% from a year earlier, the Australian Energy Market Operator said Monday in its quarterly report. That helped cut power-generation emissions 5% to the lowest in data going back to 2001 and slashed wholesale prices by almost a fifth.

“Record variable renewable energy generation growth in 2019 is expected to continue into 2020, as the large amount of new capacity currently being accredited is likely to reach full generation by mid-2020,” AEMO said in the report. “During December 2019 (and into January 2020), extreme heat, generator and transmission line outages, and bushfires tested the NEM power system and led to price volatility.”

Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s government has faced increased criticism over its lack of a coherent climate policy following the devastating bushfires that swept across the country this summer. Over the weekend it confirmed its staunch support of the coal industry in the face of a growing backlash against the fuel by giving financial backing to a study into a new plant.

Renewables growth is reducing the need for coal in Australia. Source: AEMO

It's typical of conservatives, who used to be the most pragmatic and evidence-driven people on the political spectrum, that the evidence that renewables are cheaper than coal is ignored because of their cult-like obsession with coal.

Petro industry begs for protection from from climate impacts

From ClimateCrocks:

As the nation plans new defenses against the more powerful storms and higher tides expected from climate change, one project stands out: an ambitious proposal to build a nearly 60-mile “spine” of concrete seawalls, earthen barriers, floating gates and steel levees on the Texas Gulf Coast. 

Like other oceanfront projects, this one would protect homes, delicate ecosystems and vital infrastructure, but it also has another priority: to shield some of the crown jewels of the petroleum industry, which is blamed for contributing to global warming and now wants the federal government to build safeguards against the consequences of it. 

The plan is focused on a stretch of coastline that runs from the Louisiana border to industrial enclaves south of Houston that are home to one of the world’s largest concentrations of petrochemical facilities, including most of Texas’ 30 refineries, which represent 30 percent of the nation’s refining capacity. 

Texas is seeking at least $12 billion for the full coastal spine, with nearly all of it coming from public funds. Last month, the government fast-tracked an initial $3.9 billion for three separate, smaller storm barrier projects that would specifically protect oil facilities. 

That followed Hurricane Harvey, which roared ashore last Aug. 25 and swamped Houston and parts of the coast, temporarily knocking out a quarter of the area’s oil refining capacity and causing average gasoline prices to jump 28 cents a gallon nationwide. Many Republicans argue that the Texas oil projects belong at the top of Washington’s spending list.

“Our overall economy, not only in Texas but in the entire country, is so much at risk from a high storm surge,” said Matt Sebesta, a Republican who as Brazoria County judge oversees a swath of Gulf Coast. 
But the idea of taxpayers around the country paying to protect refineries worth billions, and in a state where top politicians still dispute climate change’s validity, doesn’t sit well with some. 

“The oil and gas industry is getting a free ride,” said Brandt Mannchen, a member of the Sierra Club’s executive committee in Houston. “You don’t hear the industry making a peep about paying for any of this and why should they? There’s all this push like, ‘Please Senator Cornyn, Please Senator Cruz, we need money for this and that.'” 

Normally outspoken critics of federal spending, Texas Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz both backed using taxpayer funds to fortify the oil facilities’ protections and the Texas coast. Cruz called it “a tremendous step forward.” 

Once work is complete on the three sections, they could eventually be integrated into a larger coastal spine system. In some places along Texas’ 370-mile Gulf Coast, 18 feet is lost annually to erosion, threatening to suck more wetlands, roads and buildings into rising seas. 

Protecting a wide expanse will be expensive. After Harvey, a special Texas commission prepared a report seeking $61 billion from Congress to “future proof” the state against such natural disasters, without mentioning climate change, which scientists say will cause heavier rains and stronger storms. 

Just three points:

• These were the same ppl who funded denialist thinktanks, websites and politicians.  And now they have the sheer effrontery to demand public money to fix the problem they themselves have caused.  Meanwhile, direct US subsidies to fossil fuels total $20 billion a year.
• Conservatives prate about the need to control spending, when it applies to poor people.  But are always up for billions of dollars of funding and subsidies for corporations.  Strange that.
• The cost of climate mitigation ($61 billion for Texas alone!  And that's before inevitable cost blow-outs) is way higher than what it would have cost to switch to renewables.  Pathetic.

Texas flooding in 2019.  Source: CNN

Viking economics

Scandinavia provides an alternative vision of economics and democracy to the kind of red-in-tooth-and-claw version that the USA practices, and which neo-liberals and economists have tried to make the standard ideology around the world.  Though policies differ in detail from country to country within Scandinavia, the general picture is one of high taxes, comprehensive welfare states, low inequality, low crime, low unemployment, free education and free health, and according to surveys, some of the happiest people in the developed world.  Despite all these things that the neo-liberal right deeply despises, somehow they also manage to have reasonable per capita growth (for developed countries—developing countries tend to have higher growth).

From the Sydney Morning Herald:

I’d like to tell you I’ve been away working hard on a study tour of the Nordic economies – or perhaps tracing the remnant economic impact of the Hanseatic League (look it up) – but the truth is we were too busy enjoying the sights around Scandinavia and the Baltic for me to spend much time reading the books and papers I’d taken along.

But since I always like telling people what I did on my holidays (oh, those fjords and waterfalls we saw while sailing up the coast of Norway to the Arctic Circle!), I’ve been looking up facts and figures in a forthcoming book comparing the main developed countries on many criteria, by my mate Professor Rod Tiffen and others at Sydney University (including me).

But first, the travelogue. Prosperous countries have a lot in common but Scandinavia is different. I have seen the future and, while some might regard it as political correctness gone mad, it looked pretty good to me.

One aspect in which the Nordics (strictly speaking, Finland isn’t Scandinavian because it’s a republic rather than a monarchy and because the Finnish language bears no relation to Danish, Swedish or Norwegian) are way more advanced is the role of women.

All of them have had female prime ministers or presidents, they have loads of female politicians and we were always seeing women out at business functions with their male colleagues.

Governments spend much more on childcare and they’re big on men actually taking paid paternity leave. They have “family zones” in trains and we were struck by how many men we saw by themselves pushing prams.

They’re much more relaxed on sexual matters. These days, any new building in Sweden will have unisex toilets, with rows of cubicles and not a urinal to be seen. Neat way of sidestepping debates about which toilet transgender people should use.

The Nordics are well ahead of us on environmental matters. They’re bicycle crazy (a big health hazard for tourists who don’t know they’re standing in a bike lane) and drive small cars.

They’re obsessed with organic food and even hotel guests are expected to recycle their paper and plastic. One hotel we stayed at in Copenhagen was so concerned to save the planet its policy was to make up the rooms only every fourth day.

The Norwegians have made and, unlike the rest of us, saved their pile by selling oil to the world but you get the feeling it troubles their conscience. So, like the other Nordics, they have ambitious targets to move to renewables and, to that end, are making more use of carbon pricing than most other countries.

The truth is, I’ve long wanted to see Scandinavia for myself. It’s a part of the world that most politicians and economists prefer not to think about. Why not? Because its performance laughs at all they believe about how to run a successful economy.

Everyone in the English-speaking economies knows big government is the enemy of efficiency. The less governments do, the better things go. The lower we can get our taxes, the more we’ll grow.

Just ask Scott Morrison. As he loves to say, no one ever taxed their way to prosperity. What’s he doing to encourage jobs and growth? Cutting taxes, of course. That’s Economics 101 – so obvious it doesn’t need explaining.

Trouble is, the Nordics have some of the highest rates of government spending in the world and pay among the highest levels of taxation but have hugely successful economies.

The Danes pay 46 per cent of gross domestic product in total taxes, the Finns pay 44 per cent, the Swedes 43 per cent and the Norwegians 38 per cent (compared with our 28 per cent).

Measured by GDP per person, Norway's standard of living is well ahead of America's. Then come the Danes and the Swedes – at around the average for 18 developed democracies (as are we) – with the Finns just beating out the Brits and the French further down the list.

The Nordics are also good at managing their government budgets.

We all know unions are bad for jobs and growth and we’ve succeeded in getting our rate of union membership down to 17 per cent. Funny that, the Nordics still have the highest rates (up around two-thirds), so, do they have lots of strikes? No.

The four Nordics are right at the top when it comes to the smallest gap between rich and poor, with Canada, Australia, Britain and the United States right at the bottom.

Other indicators show that (provided you ignore the long snowy winters) the Nordics enjoy a high quality of life and not just a high material standard of living.

Note this, I’m not claiming that the Scandinavians are more economically successful because of their big government and high taxes. No, I’m saying that, contrary to the unshakable beliefs of many economists and all conservative politicians, there’s little connection between economic success and the size of government.

So how do the Scandis do it? I read this on the wall of an art museum in Aarhus, Denmark: “In a society we are mutually interdependent. Strengthening the spirit of community, we improve society for all of us as a group but we also provide each individual with better opportunities for realising his or her own potential.”

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Note: US population growth rates are higher than Scandinavian

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So deeply are the neo-liberal tenets held in Anglophone countries that no matter how much evidence is produced showing that the Scandinavian model works, I doubt that we will ever move towards their system.  Sad.

Plastic straw men

Cartoon by Jen Sorensen