DISQUS

Grant Gould · 1 year ago

Iceland's economy is fairly unusual to begin with, though. For one thing, prices are astonishingly, brain-crushingly high -- just window-shopping in Reykjavik is enough to convince you that you're hallucinating. Probably largely a result of the whole isolated island thing.

Presumably when cost of living is very high a welfare state looks much more appealing because the baseline of economic subsistence is such a large fraction of income. It may be that in terms of the ratio of per capita welfare spending to cost of living, Iceland isn't nearly as welfarist as it seems. Worth checking the numbers, anyway.

KipEsquire · 1 year ago

Iceland has (well, had) its own ongoing Marshall Plan throughout the NATO years. The Icelandic economy's dependence on (mostly U.S.) military personnel spending their money in Reykjavik was all-encompassing and supplemented only by tourism (which, unsurprisingly, Iceland is now pushing heavily as its strategic role wanes).

(A secondary effect of the NATO factor, incidentally, was that English became the de facto second language on the island -- EVERYONE in Iceland speaks absolutely fluent English. This too has ripple effects on economic growth, etc.)

Just as it is invalid to compare continental European (or Japanese) economic performance in the mid- to late 20th Century to that of the U.S. without adjusting for who was paying for whose defense for 50 years, so too is it invalid to analyze Iceland without adjusting for its symbiotic relationship with the NATO generally and the U.S. specifically, even if it is now winding down in post-Cold-War world.

Will Wilkinson · 1 year ago

Of course, there is always the fact that Iceland has about the population of Des Moines.

Eric Blair · 1 year ago

Of course, there is always the fact that Iceland has about the population of Des Moines.

And we have a winner! Its more a matter of scale, I think.

Not to mention Iceland is pretty much a homogenous culture too, which I'm sure has an effect on people's attitudes.

TGGP · 1 year ago

I thought regulations were supposed to have a greater effect than taxation. Do they have things like SarbOx and OSHA?

Eric H · 1 year ago

But Will ... what about all of those market failures?! How can they possibly survive? Oh, the inefficiency ...

John · 1 year ago

I think key moral draw from this story is not just that free market policies can help welfare states, but that well organized welfare states can be the best enviornments in which to engage in buisness. One of the sources of Denmark's success has been its truly massive investment in education and worker training, which keeps their economy much more agile than the rest of the world's. Ditto goes for their tech investments. So the free market knife cuts both ways, methinks.

One other thought: The fact the its so incredibly difficult to get rich in Denmark would seem to throw quite the monkeywrench into libertarian thinking on personal gain. If people shouldn't work incredibly hard with negligible profit motives, then how can a system premised on high income taxes be remotely as successful as the Nordic tigers? I think some responsibility could be put on cultural cohession, the nordic work ethic, and that people living in these countries think about collective gains in a much more concrete way than say, Americans, might, but all of those would seem to throw water on free marketeer's assumptions about what really drives people to pursue gain.

TGGP · 1 year ago

I bet Danish immigrants to the U.S and their children are similarly well educated.

anonymous · 1 year ago

It would be interesting to see which is cheaper: having a minimum wage and less government expenditure or having extensive spending and no minimum wage.

Dann · 11 months ago

I'm quite ignorant in these subjects, I admit. But regarding the problem of scale, what's really the deal with it? If it works for a tiny country, theoretically you could get ten, twenty, a hundred of tiny countries with that working, right? Up to the populational number of a large country where it supposedly wouldn't work due to being much larger. Then the intuitive conclusion is that the welfare structure is somehow sliced in tiny pseudo-countries within a country, it would work as if it were many tiny countries. What am I missing? Bureaucracy could put a hold in this goal anyway, I'm not questioning that. But other than that, is there some sort of "structural" problem that would be analogue to trying to raise a skyscraper with the structure of many normal houses one above the other or something like that? I can't really see it. To me seems that it would be more like building many houses side by side than something that would collapse. But again, I don't really know much.