Tino Sanandaji in an interview with the American Enterprise Institute: What you completely get wrong — progressives, and maybe libertarians as well — is this idea that outcomes in a country in a society are entirely determined by short-term impact government policies.
Scandinavia’s egalitarianism is a known fact and it goes back thousands of years … In the 1930s, Sweden had a lower poverty rate than the U.S. did, and has a lower poverty rate than the U.S. does now. Sweden had a higher life expectancy than most other countries in the 1800s, and I’ve written, and my brother Nima Sanandaji has written a book Scandinavian Unexceptionalism exactly on this topic, which is conflating outcomes due to very unique social capital, homogenous population, culture, hundreds of years of development and just saying, “They have a higher tax rate and lower poverty, therefore if we raise our tax rate, we will become Sweden.” This is such an important argument.
