> Why haven’t we seen this explosion coming out of them
You might argue that there's more tech came out of the UK (which still has some sort of healthcare, and had free education until recently) than there should considering its population and economy size. E.g. ARM, HTML, cloned sheep...
Also quite a bit of popular music came from the UK.
And Harry Potter was written by a person on state benefits.
The Scandinavian social safety net is excellent and I think the positive effects of that are apparent. People can take larger risks than they can in the US, but still nowhere near as large as they could with UBI
Also very high taxes to pay for it. Very productive granted, but also taxed at a commensurate rate. Plus Norway now has a bottomless pit of oil money keeping it afloat for the foreseeable future.
Go there and look at how they live; that takes inspiration. The benefits of their social welfare are apparent in their lifestyle compared to US daily life.
And the flip: Shouldn't Scandinavia be overrun with drug-addled do-nothings if social welfare is so bad?
I completely agree and am generally supportive of universal healthcare and the welfare state and suspect the Scandinavian model would be an improvement on the current US state of affairs.
I’m just skeptical of the parent poster claim that a Cambrian innovation explosion awaits us all if we would just welfare harder.
They spend a lot of money on education, and almost everyone is multilingual – Finns generally speak both Finnish and Swedish natively given they’re the state languages, and many I’ve met have very fluent English and German alongside. So I imagine they do pretty well. Look at Linus Torvalds, for example…
Oh btw, “Scandinavians” only includes countries in the Swedish axis of influence, so to include Finns alongside one has to say “Nordics”. Finland is Nordic without being Scandinavian (technically)
Capital is concentrated in US, so you have to go there, make some good money and if that doesn’t work — fall back into safety net of your home country.
You might argue that there's more tech came out of the UK (which still has some sort of healthcare, and had free education until recently) than there should considering its population and economy size. E.g. ARM, HTML, cloned sheep... Also quite a bit of popular music came from the UK. And Harry Potter was written by a person on state benefits.