Kicking. Squealing.
Paul Krugman responded to Ross Douthat’s recent column by making a familiar argument about the social welfare safety net:
So here’s the question: isn’t this exactly the kind of economy that should have a strong welfare state? Isn’t it much better to have guaranteed health care and a basic pension from Social Security rather than simply hanker for the corporate safety net that no longer exists? Might one not even argue that a bit of basic economic security would make our dynamic economy work better, by reducing the fear factor?
Now, none of this will bring back traditional mores — but that’s really a different issue. In Sweden, more than half of children are born out of wedlock — but they don’t seem to suffer much as a result, perhaps because the welfare state is so strong. Maybe we’ll go that way too. So?
What is it with liberals and Sweden? While it is true that Sweden has a higher unmarried female birthrate, it also has a lower percentage of single-parent households. According to the U.S. Census, in 2008, 40.6% of all U.S. births were to unmarried women. In Sweden, the figure was 54.7%.
However, of all households with children, 29.5% in the U.S. had only one parent compared to Sweden’s 18.7%. So Sweden has less marriage and more cohabitation and more two-parents households. Krugman would have to convince us that intact households are a result of a stronger welfare state.
The more interesting question is why Swedes don’t distinguish much between marriage and cohabitation. The obvious answer is that Sweden and the Nordic countries are more secular and therefore don’t think that marriage is a special designation. This has relaxed social pressure on public policies towards marriage:
During the 1960s, “the tendency” to marry when pregnancy occurred began not to be “the tendency.” By the late 1980s when a majority of all births were out-of-wedlock and two-thirds of first births in fact were out-of-wedlock, “the tendency” had clearly become not to marry when pregnancy occurred. The explanation for Swedes having such a high level of out-of-wedlock births is that childbearing has become disconnected from formal marriage as it never was before the second half of the 1960s. There are now no legal distinctions between married and cohabiting couples in Sweden except that women married before 1990 are allowed certain spousal benefits that women married after that date are not.
So the next interesting question is why do Swedes tend to stick together without the inducement of marriage?
Sweden is the dream of libs for what their perfect state would look like: generous social lib govt programs, miliant feminism, and all white.
Whenever libs bring up Sweden, a good retort is that they have a small population, large resource base, and an all white population (that they’re undermining w/Muslim immigration). It is unfair to compare the 10 mil Swedes to the 310 mil US population that has a virtual 40 mil person Mexico and 40 mil person Sub-Sahara African country within its 310 mil. Sweden is an apples to oranges comparison, and completely ridiculous to compare to the US. This is why econ analysts who used Sweden’s bank crisis as a blueprint for what the US should have done in ’08-’09 are a bit misguided since Sweden is so small.
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Very interesting. It looks like there has been a steady rise in single-parent households in both Sweden and the US since 1980, with only the past decade being the exception in Sweden.
Do we know for sure that a non-single-parent household means both biological parents are living with the child? It seems like it would be complicated to code situations like where mom has two kids by two different fathers and is living with one of them. I’d want to be sure that “mom + child + unrelated boyfriend” wasn’t being coded as two-parent household. If it really is true that unmarried couples who have children stay together to raise their children, that would be amazing and worthy of study!
Children have long been destabilizing (likely to result in break-ups) for cohabiting couples, but have recently become destabilizing even for married couples in the UK; I have argued that this is because marriage no longer has any real legal force, a hypothesis that would be undermined by the Swedish data. I wonder what the situation is with children in Sweden – whether a couple having a child is more or less likely to stay together than one who successfully avoids reproducing.
BTW GLP, it’s just one space after the period now. (Look at any NYT article.) Two spaces is a relic of the typewriter age. Even Heartiste changed over several years ago.
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/01/space_invaders.html
Sweden also has a birthrate of 1.67. So all their wonderful marriage-less cohabitation is leading straight to extinction.
Heh, I just read Krugman’s piece, and was thinking about how fallacious the Swedish argument is, when I noticed your post about the very same topic in my RSS reader.
Swedes should not be compared to Americans in general, but to Swedish Americans (about 1/3 of all Swedes moved to America in late 19th century). When you do that, Sweden does not look that hot.
Sweden has liberalized economically a good deal from the 70s on, so the socialist Utopia that U.S. liberals worship from afar doesn’t really exist. Also, many cracks in the Swedes welfare system are showing because of advanced immigration policies.
Reptilian Krugman a lying liar? A dissembling dissembler? Who would have thought the man capable of such a thing!
Anyhow, re: Sweden’s lower rate of single parent households, if it’s true that the unmarried man in the house is the bio dad of the kids and not just an unrelated boyfriend of the mom, then the likeliest explanation for this seeming riddle has nothing to do with the welfare state and everything to do with the average Swede’s lower sociosexuality, a characteristic which is largely genetically inherited.
Then, too, there is the fact that Sweden’s lack of racial diversity (until recently) ensures that the overarching culture remains mostly homogenous in its ability and preference to shame unmarried mothers from attempting to raise their kids alone, and to shame unmarried fathers from abandoning those kids.
I would love to hear Krugman, or even Douthat for that matter, discuss this topic openly and honestly one day. (Not holding breath…)
I saw in USA today perhaps two years ago a statistic saying that Swedish children born out of wedlock are less likely to see their parents break up before their 18th birthday than American children born in wedlock. I think this means that American children are doomed no matter what, especially if they are born out of wedlock. Swedish children are doing fine, especially the ones who are born in wedlock, but even the ones born out of wedlock are doing okay.
sweden is beomong more vibrant and diverse wo will shall see if its model holds up
BREAKING: Sweden has higher percentage of Swedes
not for long
more Men of Color are immigrating by the day and white women crave Cock of Color
http://www.rooshvforum.com/thread-2113.html
haha, COC: Cock of Color.
Let’s follow the money. In the US, the unwed mother is awarded the welfare (Medicaid, phones, food stamps, WIC, section 8 housing, etc.) She has the power of the purse over the FOB/BabyDaddy.
Is it possible that Sweden awards the baby’s welfare to the unwed FOB? Does the mother stay with FOB because he’s the conduit for welfare? just speculating.
Sweden isn’t nice because of socialism. It’s nice because it’s full of Swedes.
A Scandinavian economist once stated to Milton Friedman: “In Scandinavia we have no poverty.” Milton Friedman replied, “That’s interesting, because in America among Scandinavians, we have no poverty either.”
As well, men don’t like being forced to raise kids who are not theirs by the government. But if those kids don’t look like them, sound like them, or act like them, they get extremely hostile and uncooperative. Sweden is now finding this out the hard way.
Swedes and Jews have a real affinity, the Minneapolis-Manhattan axis. Bernadine Dohrn was half Jewish and Swedish, a near lethal combination. Swedes tend to be very conformist and egalitarian, for instance my Swedish mother would rather lose a limb than embarrass herself in front of the neighbors. Jews are equally egalitarian, at least among other Jews, that may explain the affinity.
Oh Lordy! Sweden again!
First of all, Sweden, as a nation, has decided on ethnic suicide, plain and simple. They are being over-run by the worst Third World scum. They have feminized their men to the point where they are like women with penises. This is why Swedish women get attracted to “men of color” (though the phenomenon, as usual with such things, is greatly exaggerated).
Economically, the Left likes to maintain the canard of a “Socialist” Sweden that is an economic success, but that’s a lie. This lovely Swedish woman will explain it all to you in five minutes.
Socialism was an economic failure in Sweden, as it is everywhere else. Sweden dropped from 4th richest to 9th richest nation rapidly starting in the 70s when socialism kicked in. But that started to change in the 90s when Sweden brought in, among other thing, school vouchers! To say nothing of partially privatized Soc Sec, lower income taxes, repealed death tax and sound money policies.
In other words, a straightforward smart capitalist program. Result? Great success!
So they got their economics right. Social policy, however, is ringing a death knell.
Sweden had virtually no under class till about 10 years ago(Imported through immigration). Things like 2 parent families, marriage, ect are all things primarily needed to reduce the dysfunction of the under class of a nation. American has had a large under class since the immigration booms of the mid to late 1800s. Adding american blacks and Hispanics brings the total under class to a very large percentage of the american population.
“Swedes and Jews have a real affinity, the Minneapolis-Manhattan axis. Bernadine Dohrn was half Jewish and Swedish, a near lethal combination. Swedes tend to be very conformist and egalitarian, for instance my Swedish mother would rather lose a limb than embarrass herself in front of the neighbors. Jews are equally egalitarian, at least among other Jews, that may explain the affinity.”
This is a product of the post-1945 order described by half-Jewish Moldbug and many others:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Minneapolis#Politics.2C_corruption.2C_anti-Semitism_and_social_change
It’s always a good thing to disinter buried history:
http://youngstranger.blogspot.com/2008/04/anti-semitic-capital-of-america.html
“Might one not even argue that a bit of basic economic security would make our dynamic economy work better, by reducing the fear factor?”
For every person who decides to start a small business because they know the safety net will catch them if they fail, there will be 100 more who choose to just slack off and live a lifestyle of cheap beer and Call of Duty. Generous welfare benefits also attract all the scum of the 3rd world to come settle here. That kind of policy only works with a small, homogeneous nation that isn’t afraid to shame people who choose dependency over responsibility. Krugman knows this and is lying through his teeth.
“So?”
What a fucking cunt. Any person who actively roots for single parenthood to be the norm is evil. Also he acts as if we don’t know the disastrous results of single parenthood.
Anti-racist: your posts are so poorly written, in this case seven mistakes in only sixteen words, that you’d really be well advised to just remain silent till you have a much closer acquaintance with English.
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