Effects on USA if 'Scandinavian Economic Model' was in use from 1900?
- Thread starter WILDGEESE
- Start date
How do you form a homogenous ethnic-national State from 1900? Yes, of course, but genocide (at home) lies outside the SSM.
How do you liquidate the immediatist left (IWW, etc) into labourism?
How do you liquidate the anti-labourist bourgeoisie without a general liquidation of existing bourgeois and their replacement with a nomenklatura?
Scaring the US elite sufficiently without replacing them is too damn hard. Even in 1936-1946 labourism wasn’t incorporated institutionally. Honestly I think Big Bill as interim workplace coordinating committee (all-American) is more likely than an agreement by bosses that labourism keeps a lid on class discontent.
How do you liquidate the immediatist left (IWW, etc) into labourism?
How do you liquidate the anti-labourist bourgeoisie without a general liquidation of existing bourgeois and their replacement with a nomenklatura?
Scaring the US elite sufficiently without replacing them is too damn hard. Even in 1936-1946 labourism wasn’t incorporated institutionally. Honestly I think Big Bill as interim workplace coordinating committee (all-American) is more likely than an agreement by bosses that labourism keeps a lid on class discontent.
BigBlueBox
Banned
To add to this point, how do you get 45 states, each zealously guarding their rights, to agree to hand over enough power to the federal government in order to establish a centralized, bureaucratic state? How would you even create this state, ignoring constitutionality and local resistance?
In the US's case, it would probably look like one minor bit of Denmark and a good part of Icelandic devil's socialism (better explanation of the latter here). With probably some vaguely proto-fascist overtones. That would be the general trend overall, with considerable regional variation (i.e, New England and the Upper Midwest coming closer to the Scandinavian stereotype and the South probably looking more like South Africa under apartheid).
GeographyDude
Gone Fishin'
As I understand, the Scandinavian Model is a loosey-goosey form of socialism, pretty much where labor gets a built-in seat at the table?
If you accept your concept of socialism being compatible with continued private capitalism and the state acting in the long term interests of private capital as a whole instead of in particular, and if you qualify the same regarding the sellers of labour, the labour fakirs, benefitting more collectively than privately.
Zaibatsu of labour, including the state interpenetration and oligopolistic nationalism.
As far as abolition of mans exploitation by man meh
Depends how you define Scandinavian (or Nordic) economic model. I would say you should, for starters, redefine the period from 1950's onwards, as 1900 Scandinavian countries did not have any vestige of the welfare state, or on the contrary. As for "socialism" that's bonkers. While Social Democrats and even Communist parties have had influence upon development of Nordic models it's not solely their fault or accomplishment. Furthermore, it's mostly by performance of the private sector that the welfare state has been funded.
As for GDP per capita, if you take the performance in 1960 and extrapolate the effects till today, the performance would have been roughly the same. Public debt would be much lower. (Taking Iceland and Norway as outliers, public debt in Nordic countries is ca. 35-55% GDP against 104% in US). Health care would be much better. (Although I would guess that US health care system could be fixed without having as much public intervention as in the Nordic countries.)
As for GDP per capita, if you take the performance in 1960 and extrapolate the effects till today, the performance would have been roughly the same.
But it all depends on how do you like the people to conduct their everyday lifes and how would that do with the American ethos? There would be much less rich people and much less poor people? Perhaps less universities on top of the world league lists but more "better average" universities? What party would hope for that? What kind of parties would surface if the voting reached Nordic levels, ca. 75-90%?
And how about the future? Would more eqalitarian US have the same magnetic power for immigration of highly skilled people? Or would there be a stagnating population with it's different set of problems?
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IMO best POD is no Taft-Hartley act (filibuster, you silly Democrats!) and/or a successful Operation Dixies.
A Cradle-to-Grave Big Government is a non-starter, you would simply get an earlier Reagan Revolution.
But a self-sustained, unionized welfare state, protected by close/agency shop, is the best you could get. And you can get everything you want: unionized healt-care, unionized scholarship, unionaized Fox News (I am not jocking, you need your voice in the media arena, as Nixon understood when he suggested Fox News).
(I must confess I am biased there: as a Kalechian-leninist, I know that the Gvmt. gives, the Gvmt. takes but hey, the union is yours).
High turn-out always favours popular parties, i.e. blue-collar parties.
In the UK, higher turn-out favoured Labour and today probably brexiteers (the blue labour ones).
In Italy, in 1976, voted 93,4% of the voters and it was the best succes for PCI since the Constitutional election of 1946 (turn-out 89,1%).
EDIT: in fact, one of the butterfly of the TL i am writing is a labourist SCotUS who repeal Taft-Hartley on commerce and free-speech clauses and, then, a full unionized welfare state instead of Big Society.
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Optical_Illusion
Banned
In the present day, Scandinavian models tend to promote more negative selection of migrants with lower market skills (see - http://ftp.iza.org/dp9164.pdf) while more unequal US model tends to promote relatively more high skilled migration. So where you have industries that were born from attracting high skilled migration (either by migrants who come with skills then bring new products from born culture, or contribute to centres of innovation), you would probably see less of this and probably more of the "same old, same old" at the top.
Present day Scandinavian models tend to promote higher wealth inequality in terms of top decile share within Europe as well, it seems. It's not clear why this is, whether this is because at the middle, a lot of decommodification don't see the need to accrue wealth, or whether the incentives in the system skew against accruing wealth even though people want, or because it is eroded by transfer. But for whatever reason Scandinavia tends to relative what seems like high wealth inequality (https://www.businessinsider.com/why...e-of-the-highest-inequality-in-europe-2014-10.
Health differences seem like an unknown - I tend to presume the US's status as having low life expectancy relative to wealth inputs is mostly due to a combination of the Baumol Effect (non-tradeable services become relatively more expensive as everything else in tradeable sectors becomes more efficient, and the US is very efficient in those), US having lots of spare cash on the supply side (relative to less wealthy Europeans), and being early adopters in affluence and risk takers with low interest in safety improving regulation across a bunch of measures. They smoked more, earlier, ate more obesity and diabetes causing food, had less focus on mandatory vehicle safety requirements, etc. Eventually that accumulates an effect. I would tend to think that would happen regardless of system - they'd still have relatively poor health and spend relatively high amounts, under a more socialized healthcare system.
Presuming you're talking about something like the post-mid century Scandinavian model. In the late 19th century, Scandinavia was of course generally a more unequal place in terms of incomes than the USA. (see - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4651453/ - "Unlike today, Norway had a more unequal income distribution in the nineteenth century than did the United States (in 1900)").
Present day Scandinavian models tend to promote higher wealth inequality in terms of top decile share within Europe as well, it seems. It's not clear why this is, whether this is because at the middle, a lot of decommodification don't see the need to accrue wealth, or whether the incentives in the system skew against accruing wealth even though people want, or because it is eroded by transfer. But for whatever reason Scandinavia tends to relative what seems like high wealth inequality (https://www.businessinsider.com/why...e-of-the-highest-inequality-in-europe-2014-10.
Health differences seem like an unknown - I tend to presume the US's status as having low life expectancy relative to wealth inputs is mostly due to a combination of the Baumol Effect (non-tradeable services become relatively more expensive as everything else in tradeable sectors becomes more efficient, and the US is very efficient in those), US having lots of spare cash on the supply side (relative to less wealthy Europeans), and being early adopters in affluence and risk takers with low interest in safety improving regulation across a bunch of measures. They smoked more, earlier, ate more obesity and diabetes causing food, had less focus on mandatory vehicle safety requirements, etc. Eventually that accumulates an effect. I would tend to think that would happen regardless of system - they'd still have relatively poor health and spend relatively high amounts, under a more socialized healthcare system.
Presuming you're talking about something like the post-mid century Scandinavian model. In the late 19th century, Scandinavia was of course generally a more unequal place in terms of incomes than the USA. (see - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4651453/ - "Unlike today, Norway had a more unequal income distribution in the nineteenth century than did the United States (in 1900)").
In early 1900s the Nordic countries had minimal public sectors, and all of them had really antagonistic relations between employers and unions. A lot of factors - world wars, economic difficulties of 1930s, massive emigration, expansion of suffrage, industrialization, desire to create a credible alternative of the Soviet model for voters and so forth - resulted to gradual compromises that led to the creation of what was generally known as the Nordic model.
Similar development in a country like US is not impossible, but the indegrients, reasons and end result would all be rather different.
Similar development in a country like US is not impossible, but the indegrients, reasons and end result would all be rather different.
I mean, the fundamentals definitely were there, the US just went in a different direction sometime in the first part of the 20th century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Civic_Federation
I read, some time ago, a paper from perhaps the 1950's that compared the social models of the United States and Sweden and it spent quite a bit of time highlighting the great differences. And this was from a time when most people would think of them as the most comparable! This was before the great liberal swing of the US in the 1980's and 1990's, before the real meaty part of the social democratic swing of the Swedes in the 1970's and 1980's, but they were still quite different. One of the key differences the author highlighted was how the Swedish unions and business organizations had evolved something much more like a symbiotic relationship over the first half of the century, while the US union-management relationship was very antagonistic. The decline and collapse of the NCF in the US is a good place to look for points of departure for a timeline where the US moves in a much more Scandinavian direction. A US where unions are mostly thought of as business partners by employer organizations is going to be much more likely to grow towards the levels of unionization seen in Sweden, for example (the US peaked at ~30 some % in the 1950's, Sweden has been over 80% union for most of the 20th century).
marathag
Banned
This was baked into the NLRB, provided by National Labor Relations Act of 1935. Company Supported Unions, common in Europe and a few in the USA, were now illegal.
The very setup of that new Act made for only adversarial relations between Labor and Management, as well as a blind eye toward corruption and outright criminal control of some Unions(looking at you, Teamsters)
The SSM is a lot like ikea.
Everyone gets a couch. Everyone gets a roof. Most are small shit and cheap. But the top of the line might be fundamentally good but it isn’t extravagant.
It makes a profit. It exploits Estonians. It is run by fascists wearing a bag over their head for plausible deniability. The workers have to smile. It’s obligatory.
Everyone gets a couch. Everyone gets a roof. Most are small shit and cheap. But the top of the line might be fundamentally good but it isn’t extravagant.
It makes a profit. It exploits Estonians. It is run by fascists wearing a bag over their head for plausible deniability. The workers have to smile. It’s obligatory.
AFAIK, the CSU were forbidden because they de-evolved in "yellow dogs" unions, very very similar to a mod-ruled union, but the mob is the employer.
May I dissent?
Symbiotic relation existed in US companies too, expecially in the bigger ones like Boeing or Benthelan Steel.
IMHO, it is more important to highlight that unionization has been low in the US since the very beginning: union force is in the number. The worst blow to union power was the prohibition of union security clauses, secondary strikes and boycott.
Any other difference (no welfare state, no workers party, ecc...) is a consequence of low unionization: no one is going to protect you but yourself (in a union) . This, of course, has been perverted in lupo laboratori lupus, but again, if the union has no power nor enforcing power, why should a worker act solidarly?
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One of the main reasons for the different history of unions in the US stems from the fact that during the first decades of previous century, the unions in Scandinavian were able to create nation-wide organizations that in turn led to creation of nation-wide employer organizations. The result of this consolidation was a political situation that made wide-ranging legislation and negotiations easier.
It is a problem of measures (he he...): i think unionize a continent is very hard. Even today, EU confederation of union is a joke, despite strong labour tradition.
In fact, EU has a bad influence in union: as US companies moved in Southern ununionized States in the '80s, EU companies are moving in Eastern ununionized States.
The only 2 ruling of EUJC about labour law (Laval and Wiking Line) states that a union cannot stop the free movement of capitals and goods (the so-called Four Freedoms...).
And I prefer not to talk about €-led social dumping, I would flame easily...
Again, the only feasible POD is no Taft-Hartley - or better its SCotUS repeal.
It's been decades since the lecture course about the history of labour unions in the US, so these are more personal views than carefully studied facts. But in my view the forces that were arrayed against unionizing in the US were both formidable and influential. The wider geopolitical situation also had a strong effect to the political atmosphere in the US. I'd go as far as argue that WW1 and its aftermath were the primary reasons for Taft-Hartley. Without the wartime and postwar repressions, the wider labour movement would have had better chances to consolidate themselves and most importantly gain enough allies in the Congress to secure their position against anti-union legislation.