[glenra]

The Scandinavian countries that are doing the best economically today had their best economic growth when they were relatively free market/capitalist. So maybe if you grow enough prior to turning more socialist it can take a long time for socialist impulses to cause society to eat all the seed corn and starve?

[mikeash]

Or maybe if you start out at a sufficiently high level, you can do just fine under democratic socialism? Or social democracy, I forget which is which.

[alkonaut]

The growth boom in the Scandinavian countries was the industrialization between WW2 and 1980's. Living standards soared as the countries transformed from farming societies to industrial nations. As that happens, it's rather easy for any government to remain unchallenged, and in the case of Scandinavia the governments that took credit and remained in power were social democratic. Whether the boom was caused or merely correlated with the rise of social democracy is harder to say. History could have been different, we could have had a more liberal form of capitalism and we likely could have had even faster growth in these decades. Who knows. But to say that e.g. Sweden was more free market in the 60s/70s/80s than now I'd argue is not correct.

Liberalization of the market economies in Scandinavia has been taking place in a pace rarely seen anywhere else. Go to Sweden and find voucher schools for all ages, free taxi markets etc, - things you can barely find the US!

[repolfx]

Yep, this. The term "social democratic" hardly seems to have a definition. Sweden, Norway, Denmark etc are all capitalist democracies with relatively higher levels of welfare spending than the USA, but that's the main difference. They are certainly not socialist or even close to it.

I think this confusion may arise so frequently because socially speaking the current governments are very liberal-leaning (super pro immigration, super pro diversity/gender quotas etc). However that's causing kickback. Sweden's next election is predicted to be dominated by the Sweden Democrats who don't approve of such things.