Tag: IPA Review

A review of The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger by Marc Levinson (Princeton University Press, 2006. 392 pages)

Strictly, the father of the modern international shipping container, Malcolm Mclean, didn’t invent his own invention. It wasn’t even new.

When the shipping container was first deployed on McLean’s converted World War II tanker Ideal X in 1956, experiments with its ancestors had been being conducted for nearly a century. British and French railway operators tried using custom-made wooden boxes for household furniture shipment in the second half of the nineteenth century. After the First World War, entrepreneurs experimented with interchangeable truck bodies and steel containers for railroads.

The problem was simple: none of these efforts ever demonstrated any cost savings to transport. Malcolm Mclean’s innovation was not the box itself, but the systematised, standardised, international network of shipping containers, freighting massive quantities of goods speedily and efficiently across the world.

Marc Levinson’s The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger illustrates clearly how great risks are taken by entrepreneurs when entrenched interests and government regulators conspire against them. Even after these opponents are dispatched, technological and economic uncertainty plague the entrepreneur just as much as the vaunted ‘first-mover advantage’ blesses him, perhaps more.

The story of the shipping container is the story of the opponents of innovation.

Unions

Before the shipping container, the job of a longshoreman was brutally physical. Longshoreman could utilise winches to load and unload ships, but, as the unsorted cargo was dumped on the dock after its trip by railway or truck, and squeezed into every irregular space in the ship’s hold, human force was resorted to more often than not. Levinson quotes a former pier supervisor: ‘Because they had to bend over to do that, you’d see these fellows going home at the end of the day kind of like orangutans. I mean, they were just kind of all bent, and they’d eventually straighten up the next day’.

Not only this, but as pallets were packed and unpacked to squeeze into irregularly shaped cargo holds (the shipping fleet used after the war was mostly converted military surplus, not custom-made cargo vessels) damage — and ‘damage’ — were common. Longshoremen would pride themselves on such skills as the ability to tap whiskey form a sealed cask supposedly stored deep in the ship’s hold.

Automation, in its full-blooded shipping container form, came as a shock to the highly parochial and defensive maritime unions. Containerships could be loaded and unloaded in one-sixth of the time it took for traditional cargo ships. Sealed containers dramatically reduced theft. More disturbingly, containerisation required one-third of the labour. When the first shipping line asked to hire a smaller work gang in New York, the unions announced boycotts. The industry was to become bogged down in union disputes for ten years after the Ideal X first sailed.

Levinson details carefully the internecine rivalries of competing unions and the negotiations needed to relax the rigid contracts which had dominated maritime work. The radical changes that were re-negotiated slowly modernised the docks, but also spurred a massive boost in productivity for non-containerised cargo loading, as employers were suddenly given the capacity to change previously entrenched work practices on the docks. The casual conditions and practices were, in the ensuing decades, converted into highly paid, highly structured and highly secure jobs. But one unionist lamented: ‘the fun is gone’.

Regulators

Unions desperate to preserve existing work practices present a huge challenge for entrepreneurial innovation, but, as Mclean and other adopters of the shipping container discovered, the challenge posed by regulators can be even larger. By the mid-twentieth century, the United States’ Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) had developed a firm regulatory structure which was being undermined not only by the nascent shipping container, but also by the increasing dominance of trucking.

The ICC, which regulated the rates and services of both trains and interstate trucks, struggled to adjust its regulations to the new dynamics of trucking and shipping. Rates were previously set depending on the commodity being carried, but in an era of homogenous containers distinguishable only by weight, this rate-setting principle began to make less and less sense.

But the ICC’s primary error was not practical but philosophical. The ICC’s brief, which was reiterated in the Transportation Act of 1958, was to block the chimeras of unfair or destructive competition. In the highly dynamic transport industry of the 1950s and 1960s, this instruction encouraged the ICC to protect existing operators from innovative practices such as the shipping container, and ‘piggy-backing’ — that is, placing a truck’s body on rail for the long legs of its journey.

A regulator briefed to defend an industry against ‘destructive’ competition — a phrase which is antithetical to an entrepreneurial economy — is not uncommon. It is just as antithetical to economic growth. Regulatory frameworks which are built around specific technologies or business models have no reason to promote innovation within that industry, and firms which benefit from the confines of those frameworks have every reason to prevent or resist change.

After a lengthy series of court decisions and regulatory pronouncements, the full influence of containerisation, which both ripped up the transport industry and pumped up the world economy, is obvious.

Levinson spends time trying to tease out the quantitative benefits of the box — as he notes, ‘a near impossible task’ — but he quotes Edward L. Gleaser and Janet E. Kohlhase who argue that, ‘it is better [now] to argue that moving goods is essentially costless than to assume that moving goods is an important component of the production process’.

Levinson convincingly credits McLean’s shipping container as a major, if not definitive, cause of the boom in world trade since the 1960s.

Ports

There was a boom for the international economy, but like so many economic revolutions, the benefits were diffuse. There were definite losers, particularly if you were a mayor in a town traditionally based around a port. The new breed of ship quickly outgrew the available space in ports designed before the container. Furthermore, older ports tended to have entrenched unions with just as entrenched antagonism towards change.

But some of the largest problems for older ports stemmed from the rapid change in business models caused by dramatically cheaper ocean transport. Immediately, the cost advantages of a factory location in New York, right next to the port, were eliminated. Between 1967 and 1976, New York lost a quarter of its factories and one-third of its manufacturing jobs.

In 2006, with ‘essentially costless’ transportation, it is possible to distribute the production of goods across the globe. The sudden rise of ports at Busan in Korea and La Havre in France and new ports at Felixstowe in England and Tanjung Pelepas in Malaysia, capable of processing super-sized container ships is just as much a factor in the deindustrialisation of the Western world as is industrial relations.

Once the impact of containerisation was clear, traditional port cities unleashed vast sums of money during the 1970s and 1980s to upgrade their infrastructure. In some cases they were successful. Seattle’s docks saw 10 per cent less cargo in 1960 than 1950, but had managed to resuscitate their traffic by the 1970s. Others, such as New York, tried and failed to do so.

But by the 1990s, not even the largesse of government was sufficient to make or break ports. Seven of the top 20 ports in 2003 had seen little or no traffic in 1990. Tanjung Pelepas, which now handles three and a half million 20-foot containers a year, did not exist in 1990. These new ports are mostly privately financed and managed — as Levinson describes them, ‘investments in globalisation’. As container ships inevitably grow, new ports will be built to service them.

In 2006, the revolution in international transport is obvious, but not complete. All innovation is incremental; steady computerisation and automation is cutting down the time spent at port and streamlining the processes. Reduced paper handling in Australian ports, and the reduction in manpower and human error it has brought, has already brought greater productivity for shipping lines. The upheaval brought about by containerisation has cleared many of the entrenched obstacles to change.

For the dock culture in the old, traditional, highly-unionised ports, the fun may be gone, but the benefits to all consumers brought about by costless shipping are clear.

Review of Adam Smith and the pursuit of perfect liberty, by James Buchan (Profile Books, 2006, 288 pages)

If an economic philosopher is to be judged by his sound bites, then Adam Smith’s best lines come not from his great masterpieces, but from a paper delivered in 1755, as reported by a friend:

Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes and a tolerable administration of justice.

All governments which thwart this natural course, which force things into another channel, or which endeavour to arrest the progress of society at a particular point, are unnatural, and to support themselves are obliged to be oppressive and tyrannical.

Twenty years later, his masterwork An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations would contain nothing so radical. James Buchan’s short intellectual biography of Adam Smith pivots around the publication of his Wealth of Nations and the earlier The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Spartanly but engagingly written, Buchan depicts an Adam Smith cursed by ill-health for his whole life. The racy novelist Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni, who befriended him while he stayed in France, described him as ‘ugly as a devil’ – she hated his voice and found him terribly absent-minded, but loved his sentimental philosophy.

Buchan describes in his introduction how both sides of politics have tried to claim themselves as the heirs of Adam Smith – long adored by the free-market right, reform-minded Social Democrats now try to co-opt his legacy. Buchan chastises both Alan Greenspan and Gordon Brown for inappropriately calling upon Smith’s ghost, but it would be interesting to see where the biographer ultimately stands on this.

Certainly Smith was not a dogmatic libertarian by modern standards. He saw a role for the State in education, if under a peculiar justification. The division of labour, he worried, would make the poor into specialised idiots, men who were ‘mutilated and deformed’. Public education would help alleviate their intellectual isolation, and lower the chances that their minds could be corrupted by the baser elements of political thought. He had a remarkably unenlightened view of women, but subsequent feminist authors made much of his theories by applying them more equitably.

Buchan rightly makes note of the misuse of what has wrongly become Smith’s signature term ‘the invisible hand’. Indeed, the ‘invisible hand’ was rarely used in Smith’s writings, only once in each of the Wealth of Nations and The Theory. An out-of-context quotation from the Wealth of Nations has imparted upon it the meaning it has for modern commentators: an economic actor is ‘led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.’ Smith, in this case, is talking about merchants who choose to store their wealth at home rather than overseas for security purposes, and therefore raise the aggregate wealth of their home nation.

However misquoted or misunderstood, the ‘invisible hand’ has since become the universal metaphor for the workings of a free market. Buchan notes that while Adam Smith was not a particularly religious man, his metaphor helped illuminate his message to his students, most of whom were training for religious careers. The Theory is peppered with such references: Smith refers to the Great Superintendent, the Great Conductor, Benevolent Nature and the Superintendent of the Universe.

But, co-opted by economics teachers as a metaphor for Hayekian spontaneous order, its use just about gives the game away. If all that is required to shift resources efficiently throughout an economy is an omniscient designing mind, could not a sufficiently enlightened public servant, equipped with the best technology and intellectual expertise, do well enough to make it worth trying? But it is the process of voluntary exchange that creates the order of a market, and without perfect omniscience, no planner could replicate its results.

While the metaphor holds, it also leads to unfortunate hubris on the part of planners who presume to replicate the invisible hand with their visible fist.

A short postscript he wrote for his friend David Hume’s autobiography, who had attacked the religious sensitivities of establishment England at the time, caused Smith much greater problems than the Wealth of Nations, which had attacked the entire British commercial system. Buchan’s brief overview of Smith’s life gives us an engaging account of this man whose greatest work is now gathering the controversy it deserves.

A review of Privacy without Principle: The Use and Abuse of Privacy in Australian Law and Public Policy by Brett Mason (Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2006, 228 pages)

Privacy is a strange concept. Few debates over new technologies, changes in social structure or security measures are free from appeals to the right of citizens to conduct their affairs without surveillance, from either the corporate or the political sector.

As Brett Mason argues in Privacy without Principle: The Use and Abuse of Privacy in Australian Law and Public Policy, privacy has become a term of convenience for advocates of one or another political position.

The term itself has little conceptual core. Mason traces the variety of methods by which legislators, judiciaries and commentators have attempted to define the core of privacy — what is it that we are trying to protect? Privacy could be control of information regarding oneself, or deeply personal information that one may not wish to be made public. Privacy could be a manifestation of the autonomous individual, or could be the protection of intimacy.

In order to make consistent public policy decisions which respect the notion of privacy, legislators need an unambiguous and comprehensive definition. But none of the answers listed above, Mason argues, are conceptually clear, and provide little guidance for practical policy decisions. How, then, is the concept of privacy used in Australian politics? Mason singles out two debates within the last few decades — the 1994 Human Rights (Sexual Privacy) Act and the 1986 Australia Card Bill. Both of these debates exhibit the critical flaws in privacy discourse.

For example, why was privacy the vehicle upon which to legitimate homosexuality? While not always consistent with a liberal society, from a historical perspective, the state has always had an interest, or at least believed it had an interest, in the sexuality, sexual acts and reproductive habits of its citizens. The Human Rights (Sexual Privacy) Act sought to remove homosexuality from the interests of the state, but by hanging the act upon the concept of privacy, it did gay rights movement’s cause a great disservice.

The 1994 legislation posited that homosexuality was acceptable, as long as it was a private or intimate matter. If privacy is the foundation of the state’s interest in homosexuality, homosexual ‘legitimacy’ is premised on a staying in, rather than out, of the closet.

Mason also raises some other, challenging questions. For instance, if privacy determines the state’s interest in individual sexuality, does it follow that all (non-coercive) sexual acts are also legitimised? Such a formula would seem to legitimise acts which policy-makers may prefer not to condone, for instance, incest. It is unfortunate that the debate over the government’s interest in homosexuality in Australia led to a debate over what distinguishes homosexuality from incest. Advocates of gay rights are not well served by such appeals to privacy.

The Australia Card debate, and indeed, subsequent debates about national identification cards, have similarly used the concept of privacy loosely, often to their detriment. In this sense, George Orwell has done civilisation a great disservice. Both sides of politics ask a great deal of contemporary governments.

Government services need to be efficient. The terms of property have to be clearly defined. Laws need to be uniformly and rigorously enforced. Citizens need to be secure and, argue many from the progressive side of politics, they also need to be protected against their own choices.

Privacy is an inadequate focus of the debate over the relationship between the state and its citizens. That relationship, particularly in a time when social regulation and legislative paternalism are on the rise, needs to be closely examined.

But the doctrine of privacy against all else — undefined and unchallenged — does such a debate a great disservice.

Since William Lane’s disastrous attempt in the mid-1890s to create a socialist Australia in Paraguay, Australian social-democrats have looked offshore for their idols. This year marks the twentieth anniversary of the trade union mission to Scandinavian countries which culminated in the Australia Reconstructed report, a report which extolled Sweden above all others as a nation of unsurpassed social-democratic virtue. Since then, it has been used as an aside in numerous speeches, op-eds and policy papers – ‘If Sweden can do it, why can’t we?’

But does Sweden vindicate the Social-Democratic model? Sweden, and its Scandinavian neighbours, have long been touted as the archetypal well-functioning welfare states — stable, democratic, and, most indicatively, competitive. Ericsson and Ikea, models of successful globalising companies, originate in Sweden. Both symbolise innovation and international competitiveness, Eric-sson the high-tech mobile phone industry (joined by its regional competitor, (joined by its regional competitor, the Finish Nokia), and Ikea, the radical- and Ikea, the radically consumer-centric model of low-price, semi-disposable furniture.

But competitiveness in global markets is clearly not the major appeal of these Scandinavian countries to those who lean left around the world. Instead, it seems to hold the holy grail of social-democratic politics — record-high levels of social spending, a ‘consensus’ model of democratic governance, and internationally incomparable levels of trade union involvement in the political process.

It is no surprise that the Scandinavian model is much referenced as the ideal. Australia Reconstructed, presented a contrarian case to boost welfare and labour market restrictions at just the time Australia was moving away from that model. In May this year, RMIT academic Andrew Scott presented a paper to Melbourne University’s Contemporary European Research Centre arguing that the Scandinavian model described by Australia Reconstructed still had much to offer Australian policy-makers.

As the report is, in Scott’s words, ‘still the most comprehensive policy manifesto ever published by the Social-Democratic left in Australia’, its influence in the union movement and left-of-centre parties in Australia more generally is still significant. Scandinavian idolatry has lasted well into the twenty-first century. In the past six months, Stephen Smith has used Sweden as an example to attack recent workplace reforms. Wayne Swan has used it to condemn Australia’s R&D policy. In a speech in Melbourne to the Australian Institute of Company Directors late last year, Kim Beazley argued that social-democracy can still work, because Nokia and Ericsson produce high-quality phones. Praise for the Scandinavian model is a regular feature of Parliamentary and intellectual debate around the country.

But the tributes paid to the Scandinavian, particularly the Swedish, model by the ACTU researchers came at a peculiar moment in Swedish history. While not yet self-evident, it was clear that the Swedish model was in trouble. The Business Council of Australia, who replicated the ACTU’s Nordic retreat in October 1986, found that the Swedish economy was in dire trouble, having begun a slow but perceptible decline since the beginning of the 1970s and, even in the economic environment of the 1970s and 1980s, was more prone to stagflation than other comparable nations around the world. (A summary of the findings by the BCA, ‘Avoiding the ‘Swedish Disease’, by the head of the mission, Peter McLaughlin, appeared on these pages in April 1987.)

Less than five years after the debate over Australia Reconstructed, Sweden’s economy nearly collapsed. The economy went into deep recession, official unemployment figures skyrocketed, and the budget deficit rapidly increased. The economic crisis forced sharp cuts in welfare expenditure, and stopped to a halt the welfare expansion that had characterised the country over the previous few decades.

It is true that many other nations, Australia included, experienced economic crises at this time. But it is also the case that the source of these crises was more often than not the outdated social-democratic restrictions on the economy. The magnitude of the crisis in Sweden was therefore remarkable – the more inflexible you are, the less ready you are for the fall.

A brief history of the Swedish Model

Sweden is, surprisingly to outside observers, one of the great examples of liberal modernisation in the world.

Until relatively late by Western standards, the Swedish people were agrarian and dispersed. The aristocratic and political elite had little control over the economy. A series of land redistribution reforms in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries broke up the feudal villages and set the stage for what became a modernisation with an unusually wide popular base. A massive liberalisation of economic barriers was instituted mid-century, beginning with the liberalisation of shipping and mining in the 1830s, until 1864, when the final barriers to trade and enterprise were eliminated.

Democratic reforms and the removal of aristocratic privileges followed from the 1860s onwards. Having shut down the old monopolies, strengthened rights to private property, and removed regulatory barriers and corporate subsidies, Sweden experienced one of the most rapid modernisations and industrialisations in the developed world.

With rapid growth, came calls for increased social regulations. In 1912, a universal workers protection law was passed, followed by a basic pension, universal accident insurance, new poor and unemployment relief system, and significant increases in health funding.

Out of this newly urbanised and industrialised state, was forged the famous Swedish ‘consensus’. Says Swedish Historian Emil Uddhammar:

public expansion during the 20th century (has) taken place without any consistent opposition, on grounds of principle, by any party … The expansion of public power has taken place without any significant controversies.

The consensus which grew out of the rapid growth of the late nineteenth century, it seems clear now, was fundamentally opposed to the reasons for that growth. Instead of embracing the liberal democratic model which had brought it such sudden wealth, it emphasised the role of the State in creating the preconditions for the best possible life, in organising the economy and society for common ends. This grandiose project was known by the motherly phrase folkhemmet, a combination of folk (people), and hem (home) — the all-embracing welfare state.

This consensus was only possible because the Social-Democrat Party, which held power in Sweden for most of the twentieth century, and whose vision of Sweden most informs the Swedish model, separated with its previous orthodox-Marxist ideals and co-operated with business, viewing its capacity for wealth-generation as the economic source by which it could construct folkhemmet. In co-operation with the strong trade union movements which guaranteed constant pay improvements, the Swedish consensus was born.

It was not until the Second World War, however, that the full force of folkhemmet could be mustered. Wrote Ernst Wigforss, the Finance Minister at the end of the war:

The important thing is that we felt our experiences during the war had given us new and decisive arguments for a bolder social policy being both economically feasible and politically justifiable … While realising that the difficulties were greater in peacetime, one could still unhesitatingly make reference to wartime experiences. Our resources were greater perhaps than most people had suspected. Would it not be possible, with a completely different strength from previously, to appeal to people’s feeling for the greatness of a common peaceful task of construction?

Having a fully functioning industrial base and a largely unharmed civilian population within reaching distance of the devastated continent turned out to be sufficient support to sustain record high levels of employment and steady, if not particularly impressive, growth.

As the consensus, and the faith in the Swedish model, grew, the level of social spending and state intervention matched it. The historian Arne Ruth writes:

The planning mentality was accepted on a scale, which even its keenest advocates in the thirties could hardly have imagined. The already dead-straight highway of Swedish industrialism was asphalted into the condition commonly known as the Swedish model. It was so outstandingly successful that virtually all criticism was silenced for decades. Through its very success it tended to exterminate all other options, all the objections great and small, which could have helped to correct its bearings in time. It killed history, not least. The planners extrapolated their graphs for decades ahead.

By the mid-1970s, as the 1987 BCA report indicated, it was possible to perceive deep flaws in the Swedish economy. Industrial employment had declined since the mid-1960s, and was similarly declining in importance to the economy. Absolute employment growth in the industrial sector culminated as early as 1965.

The core of the folkhemmet, lavish welfare entitlements, began to show its flaws during the 1960s and 1970s — so much so that Astrid Lindgren, the children’s author of, among other things, Pippi Longstocking, in 1976 wrote Pomperipossa in Monismanien, a fable about how the title character Pomperipossa lives out her life on welfare payments and never has to write another book.

As Mauricio Rojas, author of Sweden after the Swedish Model: From Tutorial State to Enabling State, writes, Sweden’s progressive taxation and welfare policies had changed Sweden’s ‘basic distributive principle from “equal pay for equal work” to “equal pay (or in-come) regardless of work”.’

What Australia can learn from Sweden

In the early 1990s, Sweden faced the fruits of four decades of social-democratic governance. Unemployment rocketed up from 2.1 per cent in 1990 to 12.5 per cent in 1993. The Swedish consensus, at least at this stage, was, however, largely intact — broadly supportive of an extensive, redistributive state.

This set of pressures — a devastating economic crisis, without a significantly reduced support for a large welfare system — inspired Swedish governments in that decade to institute a series of major innovative reforms to the government provision of social services.

In 1990, as part of a series of reforms to decentralise government services, the Swedish municipalities were given full financial control of the compulsory and the upper secondary schools. In 1992, this was followed by the introduction of what could roughly be described as a school voucher system, a major reform to the education system which has been advocated by liberal policy makers around the world for a long time. In Sweden, this consisted of an obligation on the municipalities to give independent schools 85 per cent of the cost of educating a child in the municipal schools, and giving parents the right to choose the right school for their children. Subject to maintaining certain educational standards, all independent schools are eligible for this funding.

For advocates of school choice in Australia, the empirical results from the adoption of such a system in Sweden have served as a vindication. A series of studies has found that competition between education providers has improved educational outcomes. As F. Mikael Sandström and Fredrik Bergström find in their paper ‘School Vouchers in Practise’:

Greater competition improves the standards of public schools. The wide scope of reform of the system for financing primary education makes the Swedish experience particularly interesting. Sweden has left a system with virtually no parental influence over school choice, and an almost complete dominance of public schools. A voucher system, where parents are allowed to choose any school approved by the National Agency for Education, has been put in its place. Independent schools receive funding on close to equal terms with public (municipal) schools. A widespread concern among opponents of school choice is that competition will hurt the public schools. The present study shows this fear to be without foundation.

For an Australian observer, it is interesting to learn that the school voucher system implemented in Sweden has been embraced by the teachers’ unions themselves. According to the head of the Swedish Teachers Union, Lärarförbundet, teachers were ‘a little suspicious at first’, but have come to embrace the new system — which not only gives parents choice of education institutions, but grants teachers greater choice of potential employers.

Nevertheless, their Australian counterparts continue to oppose them, arguing that such an innovative policy model is a mere ‘smokescreen to avoid tackling real equity issues in schools … the best way to improve schools is to improve public schools’.

Although not as advanced, Sweden has also made significant inroads into health care reform. The mid-1990s witnessed a series of slow but unmis-takable moves towards greater choice and competition in health care. By 2002, health authorities were utilising an extensive internal market, purchasing services from more than 2,000 medical providers in the Stockholm region alone. Most of these are medical practitioners.

Swedish health care analyst Johan Hjertqvist argues that given the unpromising state of international health care, these reforms ‘may represent the biggest privatisation of health care services production ever in the long history of socialised medicine’. Even emergency care is moving towards private ownership, as previously government-controlled emergency hospitals corporatise in preparation for their eventual privatisation.

Sweden has a pension scheme not dissimilar to Australia’s, where citizens are given ownership of part of the pension savings and the freedom to choose which funds to invest in.

It should be clear by this stage that the impression of Sweden as a social-democratic wonderland is incomplete at best. Like Australia, the nation is going through a long period of economic reform and rejuvenation. Privatisation has been a recurring theme. The postal monopoly was abolished in 1993, having been challenged in Stockholm by a private company, CityMail, which had been operating since 1991. Water services have been privatised throughout many municipalities since the mid-1990s.

In a setback in 2004, the national government banned the further privatisation of public hospitals. However, this year, the opposition conservative coalition has agreed to privatise a huge range of state-owned companies, indicating the continued appeal of liberal economic reform.

The harsh reality of the Swedish utopia

Many, but not all, of these reforms have been embraced by the Swedish public and have been integrated into the ‘consensus’. However, their history and the circumstances from which they were born make it clear that they were creations of necessity — possibly because of a public recognition of a crisis within the welfare state and the need for reform in services.

Despite these many changes, the welfare state remains largely intact, sustained by the largest tax burden in the OECD — 50.6 per cent of GDP, down from roughly 70 per cent in 1993. The consequences of such continuing massive government weight on the economy are entirely predictable and unsurprising — Swedish exceptionalism has not expelled economic man.

Although growth is high compared with the rest of Europe, since 1998 the economic recovery has, unfortunately, been only partial, and accompanied by a number of disturbing trends.

The crisis of the early 1990s threw a much larger segment of the population from 20 to 64 years of age on to some sort of aid or social security, from just over 700,000 in 1990 to nearly 1,200,000 in 1994. Since then, however, despite a significant economic recovery over the last ten years, this has only dropped moderately — in 2003, more than one million out of a total of 5.2 million within that age bracket of people were the recipients of wealth transfers.

Similarly, a significant growth in absenteeism due to illness has coincided with the reduction in unemployment levels. None of these trends will be un-familiar to those acquainted with general critiques of the welfare state, and despite the sentiments expressed by advocates of a similar model for Australia, are well in evidence in Sweden.

Mauricio Rojas states that:

A country like Sweden that provides broad and generous social benefits, necessarily assumes that, on the one hand, its citizens are willing to work and contribute a high percentage of their income to the State coffers and, on the other hand, will not misuse or take advantage of the subsidy systems. It is simply assumed that the people and State build this relationship on a strong foundation of decency and social solidarity. However, this moral foundation is showing visible and worrying cracks. Sweden in general and social democracy in particular are currently suffering what can be called a widespread moral crisis…

Sweden is similarly held back by a series of regulatory fashions whose time is certainly past. For instance, much Swedish housing is governed by a unique rent regulation system characterised by a collective bargaining system analogous to collective bargaining in labour markets. While the 1990s saw significant migration into metropolitan areas, the combination of restrictive planning laws and this collective bargaining system saw very little growth in housing construction, as well as the rise of a significant (although nearly impossible to measure) black market in rental contacts. Despite this, reform is opposed by the strong tenants union.

The effects of the still-strong Swedish model extend well past the predictable. The combination of the corporatist relationship between business and government and the expansive welfare state influences the structure of the nation’s industries, disincentivising certain industries over others.

For instance, by looking at job generation and the Swedish IT industry, the economist Dan Johansson has found that the nation’s large and centralised institutions systematically discriminate against innovative and small firms in favour of larger, older ones. Industrial subsidies and support have been confined to more traditional industries such as farming, construction and manufacturing; furthermore, even within these industries, the taxation system favours older, capital-intense firms with strong institutional links to the state.

Despite highly visible and publicised international successes such as Ericsson, and record high levels of public R&D spending, the Swedish economy is not the innovative one presented by supporters of Australia Reconstructed. Ericsson itself, along with Telia (Sweden’s largest telecommunications network operator), dominate the IT industry within the country at the expense of smaller, independent companies. Indeed, out of the 50 largest private firms, not one of them was established less than 35 years ago. Thirty-one were established before the First World War. The ownership of these firms has been concentrated in a small group of banks and families.

The well-established link between a strong welfare state and low levels of entrepreneurship is, despite the protestations of Kim Beazley, clearly in evidence in Sweden. As the Swedish economist Magnus Henrekson notes, ‘the entrepreneur is largely an alien in the Welfare State’.

The Scandinavian idol

Sweden is as good a test case for models of the political economy as policy makers are going to get. Until relatively recently it has been ethnically homogenous. Before the introduction of the welfare state it was small, yet highly industrialised and prosperous. It was not significantly affected by the wars which engulfed its European neighbours. It is untroubled by non-economic internal strife.

But despite all these advantages, the social-democratic model fares as well as theory predicts — unable to diminish the disincentives of universal welfare, unable, with a rigid and inflexible labour market and taxation system, to deindustrialise and reorientate the economy toward more entrepreneurial and technologically advanced sectors, and unable to increase productivity at the rate needed to maintain living standards in the long term.

Why is Swedish and Scandinavian idolatry so prevalent in Australian political debate? It is used by political ideologues as corroborative evidence that increases in state spending and welfare can work. Close examination, however, reveals it to be no exception to general political and economic principles.

It is also curious that its advocates neglect to mention its highly successful experiments in school choice and other market reforms.

But if social democracy doesn’t work in Sweden, few other nations present lynchpins on which to hang the dreams of social democrats in Australia — few, at least, with comparable social freedoms and democratic institutions, unlike the frustrating totalitarianism in Cuba. As the foregoing analysis has shown, Swedish idolatry is a chimera, little more than a rhetorical trick, and has little bearing on reality.