The Swedish are not very good capitalists....
Aside from making you smarter (its true, I saw it on
Facebook), international travel gives you the opportunity to do some
cross-cultural comparison. Since I’m
coming from the land of free market capitalism, I feel as if I am qualified to
make an argument for why the Swedish are bad capitalists.
First, imagine my surprise when I showed up at the office on
May 1st only to find out I was the only one there.
Actually, I had been warned this might happen, but it makes
a better story if I was surprised by it.
It was May Day, which outside the United States is a holiday
that celebrates workers, sort of like the American labor day but more global
and socialist in tone. Since the building was vacant I didn’t really stay there
very long on May Day. I went for a walk and
found that many of the city residents were listening to a brass band close to
downtown. It was very celebratory.
I think the Swedish like brass bands.
For reasons I assume have to do with normal
everyday Swedish culture, there was a brass band on the train platform in
Stockholm when I was leaving last week.
Also, I passed a different brass band playing Sunday at an outdoor café.
Along with spiral staircases and brass bands, I
think another difference between the US and Sweden is that lots of
people put ladders on their roofs here.
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| Roof Ladders |
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| Not sure what the roof is made of -- looks slippery. |
If I had to guess, I’d say it was because the roofs are made of tile
and/or slate and are thus fragile to walk on.
Still lots of ladders on roofs -- you must have to get on the roof a lot here.
The Swedish also have a very neighborly way of trying to reunite people with their lost mittens and gloves. You just hang them on a tree.
Of course, I walked past the mitten tree again today and someone had taken them all away. So you have to check quickly I guess.
Anyway, May 1st was a Thursday but it would
appear that May 2nd was also a holiday since nobody really showed up
at the institute that day either.
So it was a short week.
But I am not saying the Swedish don’t get capitalism because
of May Day and their clear affinity with the worker. Nor am I saying it because the stores are not
open 24 hours a day in order to ensure that my every consumer whim is met. Nor am I saying it because you don’t have to
tip the wait staff here or because being a Ph.D. candidate means you are
actually employed by the state and get a year’s maternity (or paternity) leave
if you happen to have a kid. These are
all part of the evils of socialism.
I’m saying they don’t get capitalism because it took me
almost a week to figure out how to pay for a climbing gym membership. It seems a simple rule of capitalism is that
it should be really easy to take people’s money.
Not the case here.
(I will say that the pure number of high end
cars in this city suggests that some people here are actually very good at
capitalism --– I didn’t even know Maserati made a convertible roadster until
one drove past me!)
Perhaps it is just that the Swedish like convoluted forms of
capitalism, since I was ultimately able to pay for a climbing gym membership. However, the membership is at a price that
clearly includes no profit for anybody.
All told, purchasing a membership and the separate climbing card
required three different trips to the climbing gym, discussions with three
different 20-something climber-dude “employees” and ultimately getting to climb
for free twice.
The second time was free only because the 20-something
climber dude at the desk turned out to be a volunteer and so wasn’t charging
anyone that night.
I should of course mention that there are no liability forms
to sign here either.
Which makes you wonder how they get away with the playground equipment that achieves a level of
strangeness and dangerousness that can only be a US trial attorney’s
fantasy. Clearly another reason the
Swedish are bad capitalists. In American
one of the sure ways to riches is to either be a trial attorney and/or
represent others by suing in the case of an injury on say, playground equipment. (Yes, I am bitter about the ongoing access to
climbing and fear of lawsuits issue in Hawaii). Imagine what could be done with
playground equipment like this!
When was
the last time you saw a little kid slack line?
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| Slack line for kids is in the front |
Or a weird spider-webby pyramid that looks designed to kill a
child?
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| Swedish playground equipment |
The evils of socialism are
beginning to show – they are clearly anti-children here.
Anyway, much like I will continue to document spiral
staircases (the climbing gym has one made out of wood) and ladders on roofs, I
will seek out all the ways Sweden is bad at capitalism and report back.
Like, the fact the pirate party is here -- (though they are not specifically anti-capitalist unless you are the American recording or movie industry).
Discerning the variations in capitalist structures has not been my only occupation, however.
I decided on Saturday that I would take advantage of the
Institute bikes and bike to the nearby national forest.
The bike turned out to be a three speed with the rear brake
in the pedals. I have not ridden a bike
with pedal breaks since I was 10 – and that one had a banana shaped seat. This one comes with a basket and a bell.
I had mapped out the route to the national forest, which was
about 11 km away in the next town – Dalby (another evil of socialism is that
everything is in the metric system here).
What is most impressive is that you can ride a bike from Lund to Dalby
on bike paths the entire way! Which I
did.
My bike was not built for speed and it turned out I had a
tail wind going there, so the way back wasn’t as easy, but even so, it was a form
of non-motorized utopia.
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| More like a bike freeway... |
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| I am not sure it could be more picturesque |
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| Yes -- I see why people complain about how ugly windmills are... I would much prefer an oil rig and dead plants everywhere. |
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| Actually not sure what they are growing... |
The national forest, I must say, was a bit more like an
urban metro park. It had very nice trees
and walking paths, but was pretty small and surrounded by fields.
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| The trees were kinda small... |
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| Not climbable |
That being said, it appears from the maps
that there are semi-contiguous patches I have not yet seen so I may have to go
back and explore further on future weekends.
So much for an exciting weekend.
Monday marked the celebration of the 5th
anniversary of the Pufendorf Institute.
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| It tasted good too... |
There is a two-day celebration planned and as a guest scholar, I was on
the agenda.
I am not sure how I missed it, but there is a portrait of
Pufendorf in the entryway of the building – which kind of says all you need to
say at this point about the man.
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| Pufendorf |
Also, he was German.
I went to the introductory event, which everyone neglected
to say would be in Swedish until after we were all sitting down. Then since it would be rude and awkward to
leave, I just sat there for an hour listening to people speak Swedish and
sometimes pretending I got the jokes.
The afternoon panel was the visiting scholars so that was in
English.
I must say that another way you can tell the Swedish are not
really all that driven by capitalism is the way the Pufendorf Institute
described is raison d’etre at the anniversary event, which had to do with
creating the space in which to think and take wrong turns and develop
collaborative and multidisciplinary networks.
A kind of academic utopia.
The mix here is quite eclectic. One of the other themes pursuing a different
research agenda is focused on animals.
The other visiting scholar is this really nice woman from New Zealand
who studies chicken cognition. Yes, I
have long asserted the intelligence of chickens in the face of much
mockery. Well, it turns out there is
someone who has actually published the evidence to provide this!
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| These chickens were actually living in the park -- they are not as miserable as they look here. |
We were also treated to a lunch time opera improvisation. This turned out to be a classically trained
opera singer and her piano accompaniment doing something like theatre improve,
but with opera. It is hard to explain.
I got to eat lunch with an astrobiologist/astronomer and
talk about extraterrestrial life.
Also, someone said that I had once reviewed a paper of
theirs’ for a journal. So much for blind
peer review.
All in all it was a very interesting event, even if half of
it was in Swedish and I didn’t understand what was going on.
Since the subject has turned marginally to Swedish language,
I must say my efforts at learning Swedish are still infantile. Some signs are easy to figure out. Others not so much, like this one:
It turns out this is the not-so elegant to the English ear
way of saying “exit.”
Someone at the climbing gym tried to teach me the word for
callus today but I told him that my vocabulary had not advanced to that level
yet.
He wasn’t a capitalist either – it turns out you can major
in rock climbing in high school!
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