Posted on 05/04/2002 3:41:42 PM PDT by l33t
STOCKHOLM - Swedes, usually perceived in Europe as a comfortable, middle class lot, are poorer than African Americans, the most economically-deprived group in the United States, a Swedish study showed yesterday.
The study by a retail trade lobby, published in the liberal Dagens Nyheter newspaper 19 weeks before the next general election, echoed the center-right opposition's criticism of the weak state of Sweden's economy, following decades of almost uninterrupted Social Democratic rule.
The Swedish Research Institute of Trade (HUI) said it had compared official U.S. and Swedish statistics on household income, as well as gross domestic product, private consumption and retail spending per capita between 1980 and 1999.
Using fixed prices and purchasing power parity adjusted data, the median household income in Sweden at the end of the 1990s was the equivalent of $26,800, compared with a median of $39,400 for U.S. households, HUI's study showed.
"Weak growth means that Sweden has lost greatly in prosperity compared with the United States," HUI's president, Fredrik Bergstrom, and chief economist, Robert Gidehag, said.
International Monetary Fund data from 2001 show that U.S. GDP per capita in dollar terms was 56 percent higher than in Sweden, while in 1980, Swedish GDP per capita was 20 percent higher.
"Black people, who have the lowest income in the United States, now have a higher standard of living than an ordinary Swedish household," the HUI economists said.
If Sweden were a U.S. state, it would be the poorest, measured by household gross income before taxes, Bergstrom and Gidehag said.
They said they had chosen that measure for their comparison to get around the differences in taxation and welfare structures. Capital gains such as income from securities were not included.
The median income of African American households was about 70 percent of the median for all U.S. households, while Swedish households earned 68 percent of the overall U.S. median level.
This means that Swedes stood "below groups, which, in the Swedish debate, are usually regarded as poor and losers in the American economy," Bergstrom and Gidehag said.
Between 1980 and 1999, the gross income of Sweden's poorest households increased by just over 6 percent, while the poorest in the United States enjoyed a three times higher increase, HUI said.
If the trend persists, "things that are commonplace in the United States will be regarded as the utmost luxury in Sweden," the authors said. "We are not quite there yet, but the trend is clear."
According to HUI figures, during the period 1998-1999, U.S. GDP per capita was 40 percent higher than in Sweden, while U.S. private consumption and retail sales per capita exceeded Swedish levels by more than 80 percent.
The HUI economists attributed the much bigger difference in consumption and sales mainly to the fact that U.S. households pay themselves for education and health care, services that are tax-financed and come for free or at low user charges in Sweden.
According to recent opinion polls Sweden's Social Democrats are comfortably ahead of the center-right opposition in the run-up to the September 15 elections.
I thought the study should have compared Swedish-Americans to Swedish-Europeans. Then instead of a few percentage points the difference would have been like 50-70%.
It is true that the US has little pockets of abject poverty, but the nice thing about the US is that there really is a very high degree of class mobility; nobody has to stay poor and it is pretty easy to bootstrap yourself out of it if you aren't a moron. One of the things I noticed in Europe is the systematic structuring of wage with age, essentially forcing young people to start at the bottom of the ladder and stay there, slowly working their way up. It doesn't give a young ambitious European much to look forward to (and hence why so many of them are interested in working in the US). I was one of the "unlucky" folk in the US born into deep poverty; I've lived most of my life well below the poverty line. Nonetheless, I busted my ass for many years and managed to bootstrap myself to real wealth before the age of 30, something that would have been nigh impossible in Europe but not uncommon here. In the US you can climb the ladder as fast as you want. And never mind how horrendously short the ladders are that you are climbing in Europe; it blew me away when I found out that the senior executives from some of the largest companies in the world were getting paid about what a store manager would get paid here. (It was embarrassing to have them all begging a job and a visa from me in private, though I helped the ones that I could. That is a sad state of affairs for executives at companies that have revenue in the tens of billions.)
No, Europe has sucked the life out of its people. This much is obvious. WWII marked the last spasms of greatness in Europe and rigor mortis has long since set in.
Right on target. I have a young Swedish relative who is attending college in the US. This summer, instead of returning to Sweden to work, she is staying in the US where she is not subject to a MAXIMUM wage, and can make more money to buy more American College time. (Working in an upscale US resteraunt as a waitress (+ tips) pays more than ANY job she can obtain back in Sweden.)
Don't have to get run off by them either. Are you frustrated that you can't control this media with your nonesense? Can't your ideas stand examination in the fresh air and sunlight of an open forum? Maybe the closed media of a Socialist State would be more to your liking?
Especially when you can steal money from someone else instead of working for it yourself.
Violation of the Tenth Commandment "You shall not covet your neighbor's goods" is a fundamental Socialist Sacrament. Daily life for a Socialist consists of seeing how much he can steal from his neighbor so he may "give" it to others. In this stealing he gets to play God, and feels holier than his neighbors.
"I don't think that word means what you think it means."
Some day you can actually explain how that view is bigoted of Europe and Europeans. I was stating fact and making critical observations, and there is nothing wrong with either. You never actually support your position or even dispute the facts. Instead, you just disparage people that rain on your parade and spoil your fantasy. Ironically, this reflects my original point perfectly and gives the Freepers a real live specimen to point to.
This is just laughable, and shows remarkably limited vision. I don't give a flying f**k about my bank account. What money gives me is the freedom to do what I want in life instead of toiling at a miserable job (but only 35 hours a week!) for the rest of my life. What a sad existence. I fail to see what is so glorious and happy about your pathetic outlook on life. Unless, of course, your dream in life is to work a sorry 35-hour a week job for the rest of forever. I accumulated wealth so that I could move on to better activities with more meaning and value to me. I still work very hard, but I get to do what *I* want to do, which is the whole point of not being a wage slave to begin with. I'll bet there are damn few people in Europe who wouldn't happily trade their jobs for the ability to do what they want in life and actually accomplish something meaningful.
Suing large and prosperous WI employers is a helluva way to make friends and influence people. Won't take much for two of the three named above to simply move HQ out of WI, after the dust settles and the current officers retire.
Long story short: NV knows how to play the game.
First of all, Swedish conservatives and leftie-scum alike have been laughing their butts off over this study. Torie mentioned that, in some ways, it was an apples and oranges study. And so it is, unfortunately. We conservatives - a truely rare breed in Sweden - would however love to use figures like these for arguments. If they had done a study of price-adjusted disposable income (after tax, insurance, etc), the figures could at least have been interesting.
Someone mentioned productivity. It is true that Americans have a higher productivity per capita, and it's also true that Swedes have a higher productivity per capita per working hour. That's not because we want to get poorer (as this study would suggest ;), but because of a chosen trade-off made possible by a good standard of living. I have to admit that in this issue I'm, too, very Swedish. As long as I can afford my cars, computers and other need-to-have-junk, I'm happily trading off extra income for free time.
Crime rates have been discussed on this thread, and some very strange figures have been floating around. Tapping official statistics (from the FBI, and BRÅ [Swedish authority responsible for collecting crime stats]) I've found these numbers for the USA and Sweden (2000):
If someone wants to know about Sweden, I might just be the one to ask. Judgning by some posts on this thread, there seems to be a lot of blanks anyway.
/ a FR donating, royalist, atheist, conservative Swede.
That seems to be the extent of your "contribution" to this thread. Get a life.
Been there, done that. The reactions are not predictable. Some welcome you, some act like you are looking for money from some lost Will. Europeans in general are FAR more reserved than we are, and not inclined to talk to strangers. Best to write ahead if you can and gauge the temperature of the water. Once you have met some of your local relatives, and they tell others, meeting the others may be easier.
What is it about some Scandinavians that they must "share" their atheisim with strangers? It's like queers who must "share" their affliction with the world. Who cares? Do you want special handicapped status?
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