Dat inequality

[eugmac]

Why is it that the statistics show countries with more socialist policies like Norway or Canada has higher social mobility than the US?

[wufwugy]

Why is it that the statistics show countries with more socialist policies like Norway or Canada has higher social mobility than the US?

I tried finding it again a while ago but had no luck. It was a post where Scott Sumner compiled data showing that the US has done better over the last 30 years than all of these countries. We all know the stories about how since the 80s, income to the non-rich has fallen, and that is misleading since it has fallen more in regions that haven't done supply-side reforms in order to keep up with the natural fall due to reasons like competition from the East.

That aside, Norway and Canada don't have more socialist policies than the US, just more well-run ones. For the most part, US has the same level of monopoly of industries like healthcare as all these other nations, it's just that the policies therein are even worse. There's an example in education: IIRC a few of the Scandinavian countries use vouchers for schooling. Vouchers are a sort of mix between welfare and capital distribution since it keeps costs lower by not incentivizing overconsumption and it keeps quality higher due to increasing competition. Compared to the US, vouchers are "less socialist". The US used to have high competition between schools (like 50 years ago), but since then, districts have consolidated on a massive scale, policy has become centralized, and in return costs have gone up without showing results. By some measures, the US government can be considered a failure on the monopoly of education

There are several other "socialist" countries, Denmark and Sweden to be more specific, that could be said to be far less socialist than the US. From what I've seen, those countries have much lower government intrusion into the economy and peoples' lives. Those two, along with Singapore and Germany, are considered the best models by the capitalist libertarian economists I read. I don't know too much about Singapore, but Germany gets good grades because in the mid-nineties it was an unemployment disaster, yet it instituted several labor reforms and after just a decade it now has the strongest labor market in the world.


Also, I don't believe that Europe by and large has higher social mobility than the US. Scandinavia and Germany may, but just about every other place is saddled with super high unemployment. The cause of that unemployment is partly the EUR not allowing them to debase a national currency and the rest is a welfare system that disincentivizes work and reform. In a lot of the Eurozone, it's really hard to lose your paycheck. Even if your productivity blows, even if you don't have any work, the state pays for a lot.