From the way it sounds, the program of social democracy nearly destroyed the country. I would take Piketty's nostalgia for those times with a grain of salt.
If it turns out that Piketty's history is incorrect, then the past failure of such plans should make us cautious about trying them again.
However, I do believe that any ideas that people want to try because they believe human behavior has changed are guaranteed to fail.
Also the “social democracy” you talk about is still there. University education is still free. Social democratic programs have not been completely destroyed.
Don't know exactly what you mean by that, but OK.
> You can gather any number of “experts” on any given topic to give you any form of a story you’d like to tell...
Trivially true. Are the arguments sound? Are the basic facts correct? Those are the questions that matter.
> Also the “social democracy” you talk about is still there.
Arguable, but in any case certainly not to the degree it was in the 70's. Why?
> University education is still free. Social democratic programs have not been completely destroyed.
And yet the documentary claims that there is still a very high-level of student debt in Sweden. Not because of the education, but in order to subsist while going to college.
I'm not sure if I'd call that a documentary. The makes describe themsevles as "comedy news show" who are "equal-opportunity offenders":
https://www.wetheinternet.tv/:
> ABOUT US
> We the Internet TV isn't your average comedy news show: we're equal-opportunity offenders with new videos every week on current events, politics, and culture. You might call us a safe space for satire. Or you might call us something else in the comments section. We make fun of everyone—especially you—so don't say we didn't warn you!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomperipossa_in_Monismania
Next election the social democrats lost it for the first time in 40 years.
Sweden today is very different from the 70s, politically.
[1] Not far right as in Nazism, but as in pro capitalism, state intervention is communism (boo hiss!).
Perhaps, but something still has to explain why the nordic countries are considerably less socialist than they were in the 70's.
> That was the time when the nordic countries built their succesful system that's in place today and is widely held in high regard.
The argument in the documentary is that the wealth and success was built prior to the period of social democracy, and that abandoning the system was the necessary step to avoid collapse.
Claiming SD was abandoned is a pretty drastic interpretation. Strong unions, employee representation in company boards, high income transfers and health/parental/pension/unemployment benefits, free education, wide popular acceptance of high taxation, big public spending on culture/public broadcasting/civic education etc is still all there and popular even though the daily political rhetoric is much less red than it was when these were all first implemented. Keep in mind that in the multi-party nordic systems the right of center parties are much to the left of US democrats, even the anti immigration parties aren't attacking the welfare state.
You could say that this is the end goal of SD, it's just the new normal and the pragmatic good solution to running a society, when the system is in place there's less need to have a lot of SD flag waving. People will defend the policies just on pragmatic grounds, without feeling there's ideology involved.
Other nordic countries, like the market economy of Denmark[1]?
> Claiming SD was abandoned is a pretty drastic interpretation.
I think it would be pretty drastic to claim that the political situation has been largely unchanged from the 70s, which is the period of Social Democracy which Piketty is defending.
[1]https://www.investors.com/denmark-tells-bernie-sanders-to-st...
Yes of course things have changed a lot from the 70s, I agree about that, but the strong welfare state is alive and well, though is under attack, and has wide popular support.
My claim is that the Social Democracy that Piketty suggests we return (the kind that was present in the 70s/80s) was rejected by Sweden, and for very sound reasons, and that his positive view of those times should be taken with some degree of skepticism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cato_Institute
Continuing with wikipedia: Sweden is a competitive and highly liberalized, open market economy. The vast majority of Swedish enterprises are privately owned and market-oriented, combined with a strong welfare state involving transfer payments involving up to three-fifths of GDP.[27][28] In 2014 the percent of national wealth owned by the government was 24%.[29]
So again this is not the Soviet type of socialism(which I've lived through) but strong welfare state is definitely part of Sweden.
This means I have to assign this a low-magnitude coefficient of trust (not a high-magnitude negative coefficient[1]).
That means what you're describing could well be true. I just don't know it based on who's saying it.
0: Compare http://web.archive.org/web/20090402090751/http://www.cato.or... with what I knew at the time
1: The classic "There is no gold buried here" is a high-magnitude negative coefficient
Nonetheless, I see what you mean about high vs. low magnitude coefficient trust. Personally, I don't assign a particularly high-magnitude coefficient for Cato either. However, I don't assign a particularly high magnitude coefficient to any economic/political think tank. For two reasons:
1. Economics is not a science in any meaningful sense of the word. There is no empirical process for falsifying theories; there is merely a dialectic. Now, the dialectic can be more or less rigorous, but there is an upper-bound to the level of certainty that dialectic can provide.
2. Everyone has an agenda. This is inescapable when it comes to politics. The best we can hope for is that all parties demonstrate some self-awareness of that fact.
Relative to plenty of other sources, I would say that Cato ranks relatively well. At the very least, they are one of the most respectable libertarian sources, and should probably be taken seriously (even if you disagree with them).