4 – The Key: Personal Freedom

When in a small country suddenly everybody is well educated, women attend paid work and skilled workers earn not very much less than any business man, factory owner or CEO, the competition and thus economy prosper, obviously.

Thanks to natural resources, entrepreneurship and good governance, Scandinavian countries have boomed for the past 100 years and alongside the German Wirtschaftswunder after World War II they created the Nordic Model or Scandinavian Model without labelling it a dogma.

Still today, this term is not a policy maxim or ideology. “Modelling by doing” is probably the closest you get. Among social democrats you may hear somebody refer to this Model in a speech, but hardly ever in any political discussion.

Due to the openness of the Nordic economies, the private and public ownership in the context of a welfare state, these countries continued to prosper like no other country in Europe: not Germany, not the Netherlands and not the United Kingdom.

The results are social developments, personal freedoms, socities in balance, solid public finances and therefore a perfect framework for private entrepreneurship, which is also confirmed year by year in the Global Competitiveness Index of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland (link).

By Personal or Individual Freedom I mean Social Progress from Children’s Wellbeing, Child Care and Education, not depending on the wealth and social status of the parents; a minimizing of the Wage & Gender Gap including social mobility, political participation, labor rights and strong unions; a public and tax financed Health Care System with limit Privatizations; Home Ownership and a Minimum Pension System and a public, demand-based Nursing Care for Elderly, independent of expensive private insurances and family members.

In any reliable study and research, the Scandinavian countries rank among the best, always ahead of the United Kingdom, or Germany for that matter: Unicef Child Wellbeing in Rich Countries (link), the UN Gender Development Index (link), the Social Progress Index (link) or the OECD papers on Social Mobility (link).

The Guardian (link): “Britain has some of the lowest social mobility in the developed world“.

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