Senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders stated many times that America should emulate the Nordic model in terms of economic policy. Is this so unrealistic, as many critics point out? And what if we took a totally unorthodox approach to examining why Norway appears to be a success story? That is what biologists David Sloan Wilson and Norwegian Dag Hessen do in their essay titled “Blueprint for a Global Village”, which appeared with commentaries in the Evolution Institute’s Social Evolution Forum and is reprinted here. We think that both Bernie and his critics can learn a lot about good governance by approaching it from a multi-level evolutionary perspective.Evonomics
Bernie Sanders and His Critics Should Know Why Norway Is a Success—An unorthodox approach to understanding economic systems
David Wilson, SUNY Distinguished Professor of Biology and Anthropology at Binghamton University, and Dag Hessen, Professor of Biology at the University of Oslo
See also
See also
David Sloan Wilson, "Economics and Evolution as Different Paradigms" Series
This series is a must-read if you haven't yet.
4 comments:
Norway has oil. Both Norway and Denmark have a humongous housing bubble.
Finland has no oil and it's in a recession, with no light at the end of the tunnel due to the Euro.
Anyway, I partly agree and partly disagree with the author's claim that village culture can be scaled up to work for an industrialized nation.
To begin with, village culture is not necessarily a good culture. How's the village culture in the Ukrainian countryside?
The Nordic states teach children a sense of responsibility to the community, whereas America teaches children to compete, to look out for number one. That is the real difference as I see it. Our Ayn Rand-ism is a choice, perhaps we could make different choices, but it's difficult to change the culture of an entire nation.
I partly agree and partly disagree with the author's claim that village culture can be scaled up to work for an industrialized nation.
This is a real challenge that has beset Western political theory from the time of the transition from tribes to city-states (Greece) to empires (Roman Empire, followed by Christendom). That eventually came apart, especially after the Protestant Reformation in Europe and the defection of Henry VIII from Rome. The modern nation state grew out of the Peace of Westphalia. The Third Reich and now the American empire abrogated that. Europe has been trying to recover but the EZ is blowing that up.
"Nations" created rather arbitrarily by Western powers drawing lines on maps (Sykes-Picot) after the fall of the Ottoman Empire have resulted in a political quagmire today.
The disintegration of the Russian empire after the dissolution of the USSR is producing similar results in Central Asia.
China is struggling with its own empire in its own way.
So far attempts as international organization and the formation of a world order have been sabotaged by narrower interests and power relationships.
It's a bit premature to be speaking of a global village. Evolution has a way to go before there is a super-order.
Wow, our government schools, which teach almost nothing other than the religion of FDR and the “Good War”, teach “Ayn Rand-ism”. Interesting.
BTW, a private Nordic ethnic community in the USA would be denounced as racist by both the left and the Neocons and would probably get everyone involved arrested.
As we all know, when the left calls anyone who disagrees “racist racist racist”, that is also the fault of Ayn Rand.
Bob this may be the closest we'll ever be in agreement. Norway and Finland are homogeneous societies with strict immigration controls and strong social structures. There is too much multiculturalism and diversity in the US to expect the same level of social unity.
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