Sweden passed the 9-million registered inhabitant mark last week. This fact is only of interest to those who are simultaneously enthralled by the decimal counting system and by numbers that have a large and nearly equal proportion of fives and twos as their prime factors — also known as base 10 numbers with lots of trailing zeroesThe nearest number to 9 million that is remotely of any interest is the 602,489th prime, 8,999,993..

But there is news buried in this “news”. That horde of babies currently rampaging through Stockholm’s streets? They are not (merely) the figment of your hormonally-laden imagination as you careen inexorably towards the end of your child-bearing years — there are real statistics to back up your suspicion that there is an inordinate number of children being made of late.

Statistics Sweden, the closest there is to a God keeping score, has all the raw historical population data, and also provides us with a running monthly population update. I used both to construct this souped-up spreadsheet, from which I made the pretty charts you see below.

I used monthly data from 2003 and the first half of 2004 to make a seasonally adjusted, annualized projection for Sweden’s total 2004 births, deaths, immigration and emigration figures. With this projection, the data suggests the following interesting (to me) conclusions:

1. There is a clear baby boom underway. There will be 16% (!) more live children born in Sweden this year than just 5 years ago (a projected 102,225 live births in 2004, compared to 88,173 children born in 1999, which was the trough year of the most recent Swedish baby “bust”). When placed in conjunction with the below-trend death rate of these past two years, Swedes will manage to raise their numbers by 0.14% this year purely through their procreative prowess.

2. Net immigration has long been the main driving force behind Sweden’s population growth. It was the only source of growth from 1997 to 2001, when Sweden experienced more deaths than live births. For 2004, net immigration is projected to outpace net procreation (live births minus deaths) by a factor of almost two to one (23,630 to 12,721, or 0.26% year-on-year to 0.14%).

3. This most recent baby boom has nothing to do with echoes from previous baby booms. Just look at the spacings of the peaks and troughs: Sixteen years between the 1944 peak and the 1960 troughSweden did not participate in WWII, so Swedes did not have to wait for the men to return home before getting busy; also, note the lack of a spike in the death rate — not necessarily something to be proud of.; 19 years between the 1964 peak and the 1983 trough, as women started having children later; but only 9 years between the 1990 peak and the 1999 trough.

This latest upswing is due to entirely different factors — one theory I’ve heard is that this downswing came artificially early as couples refrained from having children amid the recession of the early 90s. Then, apparently, these couples were suddenly too busy having careers in the IT-stoked boom years of the late 90s, and postponed children again. Whatever the reason, there is now a backlog of “barnnödig” qv the truly excellent word kissnödig. couples, and they’ve all simultaneously decided to have their children now, before it’s too late.

One other possibility: The parents of these couples, born during the WWII baby boom, are all at retirement age, which means there are far more grandparent-hours available for child minding that the couples can tap into as they try to keep their careers on track. This might be a crucial incentive.

This is why we love blogging, and bloggers, so: I can unplug completely from Swedish media for the duration of the summer vacation, secure in the knowledge that should important investigative reporting surface, my favorite blogs will have it, prechewed into bite-sized morsels even.

And so it is with Gudmundson, who points us in the direction of a truly revelatory piece in Dagens Nyheter by Bernt Hermele about where the proceeds of Swedish lottery winnings go.

Sweden’s lotteries, like in the UK, are a government-controlled monopoly. In the UK, a neutral commission ensures that one selected operator, Camelot, complies with its license, and that all but the smallest profit margin funds “good causes.” Precisely which good causes are funded is a matter of careful public scrutiny. Some Brits I know even justify their buying of lottery tickets by saying they do it for a good cause.

That justification is, of course, mere self-deception. If it’s a good cause you’d like to fund, much better to give the entire amount, without middlemen to feed, and you’d get a tax deduction to boot. There is no way of getting around the fact that lotteries are a stupidity tax: You only play if you are completely incapable of grasping just how improbable winning is. The defence — that the ticket buyer is not calculating probabilities but paying to participate in a fantasy — turns lotteries into a state church of the here and now, requiring faith in rewards in this life. If anything, lotteries trump religion: they produce verifiable miracles like clockwork; somebody always winsCall me cynical, but what is religious belief other than placing high odds on there being a moral God and an afterlife?.

In the UK, precisely because the proceeds do go to transparently good causes, the lottery business is probably benign, with most likely a net positive utility for society (it’s hard to calculate, given opportunity costs and the rent-seeking activities of the lottery organizers)In comparison, it’s less certain that going to church is benign: Felix and Michelle and I had this argument in a church in Glasgow converted into an excellent restaurant. My argument went like this: While religious people are more likely than unbelievers to do charity work, thus increasing the utility of those in their immediate surroundings, there is still the problem that attending church is a vote for the dogma of the particular denomination one attends. Attend a Catholic church and you are voting with your presence for infallibly moronic positions on contraception, for example, and medieval attitudes to women, both of which lower society’s utility far more than can be counteracted by helping out in a Catholic soup kitchen.
 
It turns out that my reasoning is wrong, however: the current isssue of the Economist, in an article on philantropy, shows the atheist Dutch and Swedes actually contributing a far larger portion of their GDP — almost double — to doing good than do the markedly more religious Americans. That flies in the face of received wisdom, my own assumptions, and those who argue that high taxes are immoral because they stifle the incentive to behave charitably. The Economist got their data, below, from the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project.
 
. In Sweden, however, it’s easier to reach a verdict: Only the state, horseracing organizations and “popular national movements” (folkrörelser) are allowed to run lotteries, according to DN. The two stated reasons: This monopoly limits “lottery abuse” (the same line of argument as the one justifying the existence of the state alcohol monopoly, Systembolaget); and it guarantees that lottery profits go to the “common good” or “public ends” (allmänna ändamål). “Common good” here is defined as, wait for it, the financing of a political party, specifically the ruling Social Democratic Party, SAP, and its youth wing, the SSU. In fact, 40% of their combined 2002 annnual revenues, 80 million kronor of 200 million, was from lottery proceeds. Neither the SAP nor the SSU is particularly keen to publicize this, obviously.

Other political parties have the right to run lotteries too if they want to (and the Center Party brings in a few million kroner this way, says DN). This doesn’t make it right, though. It is beyond me why political parties should have such a cushy funding option, especially when most Swedes buying lottery tickets seem to have no idea that many of these directly fund the ruling party machinery.

The solution: Abolish the monopoly; privatize lotteries, much like Sweden has already “privatized” the Church of Sweden. If you want to support the Social Democrats, by all means buy Social Democrat lottery tickets, as long as they are clearly labelled as such. Feel like supporting another party when you inevitably lose? Buy into their lottery offerings instead. Or buy Greenpeace lottery tickets. or Médecins Sans Frontières tickets. In any case, the internet is coming to the rescue, soon felling this particular Social Democratic money tree: There is nothing stopping Swedes from betting online with foreign companies.

In this post, I build a theory as to why it is incredibly rude to ask a Swede which party they voted for in the last elections. Something to do with the size of the public sector and the size of the dominant party — I’m not quite sure myself.
 
One annoying side effect, however, is that this reluctance to state a clear political position makes it hard to argue politics over here. Imagine having a political debate with a Brit who is trying to avoid giving away whether he is Labour or Tory.
 
Luckily, Swedish bloggers are a self-selecting group of opinionmongers, so among them this trait is less pronounced. And among Swedish SAIS friends, this trait was stomped out through years of ridicule.Jag har upptäckt en stor tabu i svenska samhället. Och jag har även en teori varför tabun finns. Jag har redan förklarat min teori till några svenska kompisar och de tycker att jag möjligen har rätt — och de säger aldrig sån saker, även om jag har rätt. Då får ni förklara varför jag har fel.

Tabu kan förekomma i alla sociala situationer, även mellan gamla vänner, men säkert på fester i Stockholm, när man pratar med människor som man känner inte så bra. När jag möter människor, tycker jag om att prata om politik. Och när jag pratar om politik, brukar jag fråga, “På vilket partiet röstade du förre valet?”

Det är jättesvårt att få ett svar på det. Många säger att det är en hemlighet. Och så började jag fundera. Man röster i hemlighet som garanti att man inte ska lida på grund av sitt val. Men det skulle väl aldrig hända i Sverige at man lider på grund av en offentlig röst, eller hur?

Hur. Här är min teori. Det börjar med anmärkningen att, som i alla länder, bästa anställningar i den Svenska offentliga sektorn är politisk anställd. Nu kommer två statistiker: Sveriges största parti — Sossar — fick 40% av röstar på valet, och 56% av svensk BNP kommer från den offentliga sektorn — båda siffror är högre än genomsnittet i andra länder. Det betyder att i Sverige, för flera människor än annanstans, framgång på jobbet menar att man måste stöda eller låtsas att stöda partiet som kan ger framgången — Socialdemokraterna. Kanske betyder det att man är partimedlem, även. Men: Även om på UD eller SOS man tror att du är Sossar, röstar du på Folkpartiet. I hemlighet, självklart.

Det är inget problem så länge det finns inga utlänningar som ställer oartiga frågor. Svenskar, som är artiga, skulle aldrig ställa varandra frågor om svaret möjligen behöver en lögn. Och därför är frågan tabu.

Finns lösning? Javisst. Ställa frågan på en annan sätt, så att man inte behöver ljuga: Till exempel, nu frågar jag: “Hypotetiskt, om Socialdemocrakterna inte funnits, vilket partiet skulle du stöda?” Det funkar lite bättre.

Last summer, on an island off the coast of Sweden’s bible belt, Pentecostal pastor Åke Green said some very nasty things about homosexuals in a sermon (in Swedish) entitled “Is homosexuality a inborn urge or a game evil powers play with Man?” You can guess what the answer was. He quoted liberally from the old testament to show homosexuality is a temptation of the devil, blamed the spread of AIDS on the legalization of homosexual sex, said homosexuality arises from wet dreams, excessive fantasizing, the porn industry, a positive image in the media, and that it is a gateway activity to pedophilia and bestiality, both of which are practiced predominantly by homosexuals. Basically, the kind of thing you get to hear on an average day in a Pentecostal church in backwater Louisiana or Mississippi.

He delivered his Sunday sermon to some 50 parishioners in fuming anticipation of a “gay day” on the island, invited the media to attend (none came), and then sent the transcript around to papers, one of which printed bits of it. For spreading his message thus, he was charged under a Swedish law originally intended to prohibit agitation against ethnic groups (hets mot folkgrupper), but which was expanded in 2003 to include homosexuals as a group. This was the first such use of the law, and Tuesday’s ruling by a local court was thus a test for its scopeThe motivation for extending the law’s scope was the fact that Nazi sympathisers have in the past incited violence against gays through speech at demonstrations, and there was found to be no explicit legal proscription against such speech. The original law was intended to protect Jews from skinhead malfeasance. Regardless of the quality of the law, I have no qualms with treating ethnic groups on a par with gays in this respect..

In the ruling, the court decided Green was guilty, sentenced him to a month in prison and fined him around $3,600. I’ve now read the ruling [Swedish, PDF; page 13 is missing in the PDF, but that part is covered here], and join David Weman over at Fistful of Euros in thinking that this decision is deeply flawed. At its core, it states that strident public speech making claims about ethnic groups or gays that can be construed as insulting is illegal, even if the speaker believes those claims to be true, and even if the grounds for such beliefs are religiousGudmundson has the press links..

This criteria for prohibited speech is far broader than one which prohibits speech which intends to incite violence. Here is the ruling’s nut sentence:

Den rättighet homosexuella som grupp har att inte utsättas för kränkningar måste, enligt tingsättens mening, vara mer skyddsvärd än Åke Greens rätt att få göra dessa kränkande uttalanden i religionens namn.The right of homosexuals as a group not to be exposed to insults must, in the opinion of this court, be more worthy of protection than Åke Green’s right to make these insulting statements in the name of religion.

Gasp. I have no problem with prohibiting speech that intends to incite violence. I do have a problem with a law, or an interpretation of a law — I’m still not sure which it is — that prohibits insulting speech. Such speech is certainly reprehensible, and it should be condemned as uncivil and boorish, but it should not be illegal. Despite the findings of this ruling, there is plenty of room for such speech in a vibrant, confident democratic society. I’d even say that the unfettered presence of such speech is essential, because it forces a society to continually assess what constitutes civil behaviour; it is only through such debates that a modern society can inoculate itself against the emergence of more virulent strains of bigotry. Legislation against such speech does away with this process.

Before we examine how this ruling came to regard insulting speech as “agitation” against defined groups, let’s immediately get one thing out of the way: Åke Green’s parishioners, God-fearing Pentecostalists that they are, did not attack gays after his sermon, and his sermon contained nothing that can be construed as condoning physical harm against homosexuals. There was no incitement to violence.

What then defines “agitation” against an ethnic group or gays (def: hets mot folkgrupper)? My own preferred criteria would set the bar at incidents wherein an agitator attempts to get others to commit violence against a group through speech. Clearly, this court saw different.

In the ruling, the law’s purpose for criminalizing agitation is cited as not intending to threaten scientific inquiry, free debate, religious freedom and minority opinions. However, the citation continues“Den innebär däremot ett fullt godtagbart krav på att även andra människors rättigheter och den grundläggande demokratiska principen om alla människors lika värde skall respekteras vid utövandet av dessa fri- och rättigheter.”, “it does involve a wholly reasonable demand that other people’s rights and the fundamental democratic principle that all people are created equal be respected when exercising these freedoms and rights.”

From this passage, the court infers that a courteous (“saklig“) discussion in which homosexuality is criticized would have been perfectly acceptable under the lawDoes this mean then that it wasn’t the content of pastor Green’s sermon but the strident manner in which he delivered it that violated the rights of gays? That’s not clear either. I can hardly imagine that making the same points as the pastor but with flowery language, a mellifluous voice and an apologetic smile is going to make a difference to anyone why cares to listen.. The court then says that “the law is clear in stating that speech which can be construed as insulting for homosexuals is forbidden according to Swedish legislation.”

That was easy! All that is left to do now is to weigh the fundamental rights to freedom of religion and speech against this fundamental right not to be insulted. The solution, according to the court, is to use the principle of proportionality. One should try to avoid, as much as possible, insulting others when expressing your opinions — freely, of course. How did Åke Green do in this regard?

To find out, the ruling spends some time dissecting various parts of Green’s sermon. Another court previously decided, in January 2003, that merely citing and interpreting passages from the Bible or other religious texts cannot ever be considered criminal, even if the isolated passages in question can be construed as agitation against gays. Fortunately for the court, it finds plenty of bits in the pastor’s sermon that were not directly gleaned from scripture — it lists, for example, his assertion that bestiality and pedophilia is predominantly a gay thing, and that homosexuality is a cancer tumor in society.

It’s on account of these statements that the pastor is found guilty.

I’ve already explained why pastor Green should be allowed to call homosexuality a tumor if he wants to: It brings such opinions out into the open, so that he can be reprimanded in no uncertain terms by the court of public opinion, and so that society itself is moved to restate its values from first principles periodically, through debate. But there are other reasons why this law is atrocious. For example, which of the following scenarios are now also illegal?

• A non-Muslim speaker at a feminist gathering rails angrily at Muslim men, accusing them of being predominantly misogynistic, as evinced by her personal experience from working at battered women’s homes.
• At Friday prayers at Stockholm’s mosque, a preacher asserts the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are real.
• A drunken Brit tells a lot of Irish jokes at an Irish pub in Stockholm. A lot. And they’re not funny. But quite mean.
• A group of rather patriotic Turkish immigrants publishes a pamphlet in Sweden denying the Armenian genocide.
• Some annoyed Stockholmers insult a group of Dutch tourists after a football match that Sweden loses, hurling all manner of vile stereotypes their way. A random Belgian eggs them on.

Yes, this is a Pandora’s box that’s been opened.

PS: I also think there should have been more concern for context in the ruling. For example, for a speaker at a Nazi-sympathizers’ rally to call homosexuals a tumor is, to my mind, worse than for a Pentecostal preacher to say the exact same thing. Why? Because Nazis have a history of trying to exterminate gays, while Pentecostalists do not. Walk into a Nazi rally wearing a yarmulke or rainbow colors and you should fear for your lifeBack in 2002, Matthew and I had a related discussion about KKK cross-burnings as an incitement to violence, and how they compared to Nazi rallies.. But walk into a Pentecostal church and you will get a verbal dressing down, at worst. Clearly, context determines what constitutes an incitement to violence. This was not, as far as I can tell, considered by the court.

I think there is an interesting realignment underway in the Swedish party political system. Parties, and even factions within parties, are no longer just positioning themselves along the traditional left-right axis, but also in terms of how global their perspectives are — along a nationalist-internationalist axis, if you will. The result is some interesting similarities in outlooks between parties not traditionally neighbors on the left-right axisJohan Norberg, when trying to choose how to vote on June 13, is in effect weighing which party is the most internationalist among the center-right offerings. (He has no permalinkage: scroll to June 7.), and, more worryingly, opportunities for nationalist parties to conquer terrain on the opinion landscape that is being vacated by larger political parties, whose elites are (albeit slowly) migrating towards global perspectives for policymaking.

This migration may explain the surge in violence on June 6 [Swedish] in Gamla Stan between what looked like the extreme left and the militant right. In fact, the altercation is better understood as a battle between extreme internationalists and disenfranchised nationalists.

While the left-right axis, roughly, aligns parties according to class loyalties or income redistribution preferences, the nationalist-internationalist axis aligns parties according to the scope of these allegiances. Is it just Swedish farmers whose interests a party should represent, or those of farmers in the rest of Europe or even the third world? Should the workers of Sweden unite, or the workers of Sweden, Poland, the Baltics, and the rest of the world? Where you fall on such questions makes huge differences in policy recommendations, even among people of the same left-right persuasionBoth Gudmundson [Swedish] and Norberg (June 8) link to this just released Timbro report on voting records of MEPs, and while individual voting records vary, among Swedish parties the Social Democrats have the best free trade record. (!).

It used to be very simple, and in many countries it still is: Parties should represent the interests of their voters, and these voters may be left, center or conservative, but they are all, say, French. The resultant political system is one where, ideally, utility is maximized for the greatest number of Frenchmen, without regard for such niggling externalities like policy induced poverty abroad Yes, I’m talking about CAP again, my apologies. or the needs of political refugees from from abroad.

For parties migrating to an internationalist perspective, this is no longer an ethically defensible position. If the value of non-citizens’ lives is the same as that of citizens, then an ethical party policy position should try to maximize utility for all “ideological brethren,” regardless of where they may live. Defending the rights of unionized labor at home by denying opportunities for fellow working-class members across the Baltic Sea (through restricted immigration, say) becomes problematic.

It appears to me that among Sweden’s left-of-center parties, youth wings are the ones keener to adopt this internationalist approach, whereas the party apparats, older and with more union baggage, are resistingCould the pro-free trade voting record of Social Democrat MEPs be explained by their relative youth? Unfortunately, the Timbro report does not have MEP’s ages. It would make for an interesting correlation study.. The old guard may also be more pragmatic, electorally: Patronage gets you elected, whether you like it or not, but with it come expectations that have nothing to do with ideological consistency. They may also understand that the electorate is not nearly as inclined to adopt a global perspective on utility maximization: This SvD article [Swedish] from a few days ago reports that a rising trend of Swedes, now over half, want Sweden to take in political refugees at a lower rate than is currently the case.

The irony of this entire situation is that in many cases parties are faced with a false dilemma. With respect to trade, for example, free traders know that their prescription for trade policy leads to the greatest possible utility for both the importing country and the exporting country. Unfortunately, the theory of comparative advantage is one university course removed from being self-evident, and it is in this gap that nationalist protectionists set up camp.

These “napros” do have potential natural allies: While the total utility of a country improves when it embraces solidly pro-globalization policies, individual groups within the country may lose out — auto workers in the US, for example, or farmers in Sweden. These groups, some of them traditionally heavily unionized, are the easiest targets for napros, and nationalist parties will try to coopt their interests. Gudmundson has already nailed one such example: the nationalist SverigeDemokraterna and their Swedish-meat-only-in-schools policy. My guess is that this wins votes with farmers because they empathise far more with fellow Swedes than with fellow subsistence farmers in Senegal.

An example of nationalist protectionism on the left is the reprehensible poster campaign by the Byggnads contruction workers’ union a few months back. Their members are also waiting to be captured by a nationalist party.

What are the policy implications of a migration by traditional parties towards global perspectives for policy making? There are lessons to be learned from Flemish politics: In an effort to contain the nationalist Vlaams Blok, all other parties threw up a cordon sanitaire, in effect voluntarily vacating the entire nationalist half of the opinion landscape, and leaving it all to the Vlaams Blok. The result: one third of the vote in Antwerp now goes to Vlaams Blok.

I don’t think, however, that the solution is to remain nationalist in perspective, but that preëmptive policies should be introduced which prevent the nationalist option from becoming appealing. In Sweden, concretely, this means redirecting union umbrella group LO‘s funding, massively, towards retraining those groups at risk of losing their livelihood because of globalization. Whatever happens, a nationalist party should not capture groups like Byggnads union members. Also, let’s not forget the average age of the black-T-shirts I saw milling around on the edge of Slussen on June 6: They looked barely out of high school. These people need to get a job in a job-producing economy so they have no time to blame their failures on somebody else.