From "The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, on Sweden":
Labor force participation for women with kids 0-2 went from 43% in 1970 to 82.4% in 1985. But, on any given day, 47.5% of those women were absent from work, but still being paid.
Lots of paid leave policy was implemented on that period. In 1980, EXCLUDING vacation and holidays, workers on average spent 11.2% of their hours absent but paid.

This represents a move towards decommodification of labor time:
"The welfare state has taken upon itself to permit employees to pursue non-work related activities within the work contract".
Misplaced the goddamn end quote

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More from @LittleKeegs0

3 Apr
Did not think "The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism" would build up to such a incisive and devastating critique of capitalism. This book slaps
The critique is basically that capitalism can't handle the wage demands of full employment while maintaining decent growth and low, steady inflation.
High wage demands lead to lowered profitability, therefore less investment and less growth. It also leads to wage-push inflation.
Lowered competitiveness too! You can attempt to divert these wage demands into welfare state expansion ("only raise wages by 5% and gov. will increase pensions by 5%"). This requires tight solidarity between workers and non-workers. But even then, consumption remains high.
Read 11 tweets
2 Apr
A farmer-labor alliance backing socdem parties was key to the success of post-war Scandinavian countries. What's interesting is how they differed: in Denmark, farmers held more power and numbers, leading to more of a focus on price stability and agricultural subsidies for a time.
In Norway, the Labor party alone held a majority of seats in parliament from 1945-1961. They used this dominance to command a large amount of investment.

In Sweden, labor was particularly strong, thus leading to the labor-focused Rehn-Meidner model.
A wage policy, vs. Norway's credit policy. This model requires high investment & employer confidence, which started to fall in the mid 1970's. Of course, if governments controlled more investment and employed more people in the first place, this would be much less of an issue!
Read 7 tweets
30 Mar
It made sense for early liberals to oppose ​the state, as it was usually an oppressive, aristocratic institution vs. the potential freedom of the market.

It made sense for early socialists to oppose the state, as it was controlled by capitalists, with voting highly limited.
But these views are now both outdated. The market is the main aristocratic and oppressive force. States are complex, and voting rights are often under attack, but the same restrictions no longer exist. The state now can be, and is, regularly used as a tool for good by the people.
I think a lot of people get brainworms because they read some older texts that haven't grappled with the fact the state is fundamentally different nowadays. And they couldn't have grappled with it, the changes hadn't happened yet!
Read 6 tweets
9 Jan
Might as well respond to this article that's been going around:
currentaffairs.org/2021/01/the-on…
Hey, I'm right here!
Anyways, I've seen this confusion around many things. A simple rephrasing of econ 101 in terms of class conflict should clear things up: we want the capitalist class to have internal conflict through competition, as this will leave normal folks better off. Image
At the extreme end, it's easy to see why anti-capitalists would prefer a perfectly competitive market to a perfect monopoly.
Now of course, certain things are natural monopolies that we want the public to take over. But housing is certainly not one of those.
Read 14 tweets
21 Dec 20
Might be a hot take, but I think classical socdem & a more libertarian socialism are both valid ideologies, the key trade-off is one of effort vs. efficiency. It would take tons of effort to be involved with a bunch of decision-making bodies, even if the decisions were better.
There is also somewhat of an equality issue, centralization can lead to higher equality between places with different productive capacities, but that can be helped with a decent tax and welfare system while leaving decisions about production under more decentralized control.
And also if you look to Sweden's experience, there are certainly limits to what a centralized body can do to increase equality!
Read 4 tweets
19 Dec 20
It's truly incredible how right libertarian justifications for property are broken all the way down.

Property necessarily started with aggression.
Even if it didn't necessarily, it usually did in practice.
Mixing your labor with land does not make it an extension of you.
Even if it did, this would cause ridiculous results, like the classic example of pouring tomato soup into the ocean.
Even if we ignore those ridiculous results, it's still not clear what part of the land you get to own by laboring on it. Just the dirt you touched?
Even if that was clear, it wouldn't be clear how to distribute property justly among many people who worked on the same thing.
Even if it was, in the modern day, most GDP can be attributed in some way to knowledge from dead people.
Read 4 tweets

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