| >>You're wildly extrapolating using the already established bad measurement of GDP. GDP is not a bad measure.. I think you're getting overly emotional, and not assessing my points rationally. For example, these counter-examples are not on-point: >>Do you believe that social democracies primary concern is increasing GDP per capita? I already argued why they should be: increases in per capita productivity are the primary source of improvements in quality of life. For example, the reason the Scandinavian region had the highest quality of life in the world by the 1960s, when it had yet to create expansive social programs, is that in the preceding century, it had been the fastest growing economy in the world, with the most free market policies: http://iea.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/files/San... • Scandinavia is often cited as having high life expectancy and good health outcomes in areas such as infant mortality. Again, this predates the expansion of the welfare state. In 1960, Norway had the highest life expectancy in the OECD, followed by Sweden, Iceland and Denmark in third, fourth and fifth positions. By 2005, the gap in life expectancy between Scandinavian countries and both the UK and the US had shrunk considerably. Iceland, with a moderately sized welfare sector, has over time outpaced the four major Scandinavian countries in terms of life expectancy and infant mortality. • Scandinavia’s more equal societies also developed well before the welfare states expanded. Income inequality reduced dramatically during the last three decades of the 19th century and during the first half of the 20th century. Indeed, most of the shift towards greater equality happened before the introduction of a large public sector and high taxes. Hong Kong and Singapore, the two most free market jurisdictions in the world over the last several decades, have caught up to and surpassed Scandinavia in key measures of quality of life, like life expectancy, despite being far behind them in 1960. Economic development is the primary source of quality of life gains. >>Have the living standards been significantly worse in Scandinavia? No, the opposite. Absolute strawman, that really shows no grasp of what my argument is. >>It's indisputable that the average Scandinavian citizen has enjoyed very high living standard for the last 80 years or so. Even with very large public sector and high taxes. This blatantly disproves the notion that this is not possible as you suggested above. I never said it is not possible, so that is a strawman. I said that the rate at which the economy, and with it, quality of life, improves, slows down with marginal increases in the suppression of market rights via top-down regulatory impositions and taxes. And once again, this is demonstrated by the fact that the more free-market based Hong Kong and Singapore closed a massive economic and quality of life gap with Scandinavian countries since the 1960s, and even surpassed them in some metrics, like life expectancy. |