Did you bring enough for everyone to share?

In our last episode, we eluded to our disgust with many Swedes' definition of "democracy".

Today's vocabulary word is "rich". And while we're at it, "poor". And "divide". And... well, either way, as often is the case, this post includes math (or perhaps lack thereof?).

Background info for non-Swedies: Sweden has been more or less run by socialist governments for most of the last century. Since the 2006 election, however, we have had a "conservative" government. If you're an American, IMMEDIATELY shift your idea of "conservative" to somewhere around the vicinity of Al Gore and Barack Obama for the remainder of this discussion.

Here you have an article that outs itself right from the start with its headline -- which is unfortunately very hard to translate properly: "More rich child-families". That is, of all the families in Sweden that have kids, they're saying more of them are rich now. (Well, fine, go ahead, YOU try to translate "Fler rika barnfamiiljer" and have the meaning come out right. Not so cocky now, are you?)

The immediate problem is how you define "rich". Is it going to be like the "rikemansskatt," the "rich man's tax" that means people with an income over a certain point pay not just municipial but also state taxes here -- and which is paid by something like half of the working population?

Yes, I do, in fact, believe there's a similar definition of "rich" being bandied around here. If you dig deep into the article (that is, read it), you'll find that the number of children living in what the article is calling "rich" families has increased from 18% to 30% since 2006.

Awesome, 30% of all families in Sweden are rich! Oh wait, it's not awesome, because rich people are evil. Boooo, 30% of all families in Sweden are evil!

But I digress... I think.

How have they defined rich? They have an index where a score of 1.0 means just being able to afford everything you need. "Rich" is what you are, then, if your family has a score of 2.0. I'm going to guess that, by that definition, my little family is "rich".

What I'm trying to say here is: I reject any definition of rich under which the label is slapped on me for being able to make a mortgage payment and feed my cats; I reject any definition of rich that encompasses 30% of the population. That is, of course, unless the other 70% are eating garbage from the dumpster. If we were talking about the world population, then I know that I am (rich, that is) and that they are (33% surviving on less than $2 a day, that is). But we're not. We're talking about Sweden, and so you have to wonder what definition of "poor" is going to be thrown up to match the wide-berthed definition of "rich".

The "poor" families in the article have a quotient of less than 1.0; they are, in other words, unable to afford the package that has been defined as the "basic standard". The article, sadly, fails to give a statistic matching the "30% are rich". However, they do say two things that at least help us to extrapolate: number 1, the percent of kids living in poor families hasn't changed since 2006. Number two, the Swedish region of Skåne has the highest percentage of kids living in poor families, and there it is 9.3%; the lowest is apparently in Jönköping, where the percentage is 3.5%.

This is the point at which all of my fellow aware Americans raise an eyebrow at how awesome it must be to have a country where well over 3 times as many kids are rich than are poor, and only then using a very mild definition of poor by global standards.

Well then, here comes my pissed-offedness: how is this information viewed, in talking-point form? "Divide widens," says one headline, and this blog links the article as evidence that the conservatives are "consciously creating a 'hungry' lower class of uneducated, sick and unemployed (who just need to 'lift themselves by their bootstraps') which can then be exploited and help to drive down wages."*

I cannot agree that these statistics are evidence of any gap having widened. When I asked a left-wing friend of mine "which is better, some people having grade A health care and some people having grade B, or everyone having grade C?" he actually answered me that it would be better if everyone had grade C -- and I don't think his view is uncommon, consciously or unconsciously, among Swedish socialists. But even I can agree that there is a "divide" in the former, A vs. B, situation (I just don't think that that divide is automatically a bad thing). But seriously, I do not see how an upwards shift in the poorkids-averagekids-richkids scale is by any definition a "widened divide". If it used to be the case that 50% of the population earned $10,000 a year and the other 50% earned $20,000, but this year the ratio is 40-60, does that constitute a "bigger divide"? I'm sorry, I'm just not grasping the math.

But for me, the best part is this: as I said in the opening of my rant, the conservatives have been in charge since the 2006 election. Those of you with your SAT glasses on will have noticed that that's also the year being examed in the article -- the increase in "rich" kids and the non-change in number of "poor" kids is since 2006. So if these however-many-but-less-than-9.3% of Swedish kids who are poor were created as a class by any set of public policies... well, whose were they, then? I'll even speculate that it's quite a feather in the current government's hat that the lower group hasn't increased in size given the current economic climate.

I really am at a loss for words about how a person's political viewpoint can allow them to believe that we live in a WORSE world if the average child's family resources has gone up without the lowest income group increasing in size. I will never understand the world view that sees it as an automatically and indepedently bad thing that life has improved for someone. The Robin Hood rhetoric is perfectly acceptable for me when we're talking American-top-1%-rich and American-Mommy-sells-crack poor, but as for this stuff I'll just continue to be amazed at our ability to whine about being possibly the most privileged 9 million people on the planet.


*Original: Man skapar medvetet en ”hungrig” underklass av lågutbildade, sjuka och arbetslösa (som bara behöver ”ta sig i kragen”) för att sedan kunna utnyttjas och hjälpa till att driva ned lönerna.