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Today is Friday, March 29, 2024 at 03:01 AM.


Francisco Toro:
The first thing I wanted to talk to you about was Sweden's welfare system. In your second lecture you outlined some of the health care, educational, and maternity leave benefits. They seemed very impressive from an American point of view.

Ingvar Carlsson:
Let us start from the beginning: when you have a baby, you have the legal right to a leave of absence from work for 15 months. That gives you the ability to be home with the child the first period, and then you have day-care centers for your child when you return to work. Eighty-one percent of Swedish women work part time or full time. If you become sick, you get 70 percent of your income while away from work. And you pay a small fee the first time you visit the doctor, but if you come to the hospital, that's principally free. If you are unemployed, you get 80 percent of your salary.

Toro:
You're describing this as a new scaled-down Swedish welfare state. As an American student this is astounding to me: we just don't have any of these things. So many of my friends are having such a hard time paying for college education here. It seems that the society you've helped to build in Sweden is very close to what many Americans think of as a good or just society.

Carlsson:
It's always very difficult to make comparisons between different cultures. But as I listened to the American presidential debate, I recognized arguments and values that are ideological conflicts very similar to European presidential campaigns. I listened to Mr. Clinton talk about how we must do certain things together to support our government; that's very close to how the social democratic parties in Europe talk. Mr. Dole, on the other hand, is saying there's too much government, which isn't in fact the concern in Europe. So even though there are enormous differences, there are similarities between American policy and European policy.

Toro:
Do you think Sweden is understood properly by people who use it as an example?

Carlsson:
I think that there is a rather serious misunderstanding when it comes to welfare. In the U.S. welfare is for the poor, but the welfare state, at least the Scandinavian Nordic welfare state, is for all. If you are a white-collar worker or have a high income, you pay a lot of taxes. At the same time, if you have a son and a daughter at university, it is free; you get something back for the taxes. So the welfare state is not just a burden.

Toro:
In America, welfare or what we call welfare is just for the poor, and some of the attacks we've seen on our welfare system seem to be closely related to racism. In our country the white majority sometimes looks for scapegoats among ethnic minorities and immigrants. I understand Sweden has very liberal immigration and asylum policies. Earlier this decade, there was a retrenchment of the welfare state in Sweden due to economic policy. Do you think that affected the relationship between native-born Swedes and immigrants?

Carlsson:
Yes, but Sweden today is a different country from what it was 25 or 30 years ago. We have a lot of immigrants coming, and that affects us in a cultural way. It affects our schools: we have schools where we have 40 different languages spoken. In the last few years, when we've had droves of immigrants coming from former Yugoslavia, we have not succeeded in integrating these people in the way we would like to. We have had higher unemployment. Those people are not able to get jobs. We have a lot of work to do on this issue, and we cannot say that we are so different from America.

Toro:
Has there been a problem with increasing violence as unemployment has increased?

Carlsson:
Unfortunately, all industrial countries have more violence than what we have had in the past. That is the very dark, black side of the industrialist country--that we have more violence, more racial conflicts, more attacks. It is very easy to blame all this on immigrants, and we all know that it's not true. Certainly the risks are greater for young boys, particularly immigrants, than those in the well-off suburbs.

Toro:
How does the incorporation of Sweden into the European Union help it meet some of the challenges you've just described?