Yeah sorry, to emphasise further, I’m referring to the position where we should place strong restrictions on wealth accumulation when it leads to market failures. The difference between this and the mainstream (in this conception) is that mainstream views take more of a siloed approach to these outcomes, and prefer income taxes or laws to remedy them.
An anticapitalist view contrasts with this by identifying wealth accumulation / concentrated ownership of the means of production as a root cause of these issues and works to restrain it in a more preventative capacity. As you identified, such a view typically advocates for policies like wealth taxes, worker co-determination on boards, and high tax surveillance.
Also loosely on your claim that anticapitalism is incompatible with EA because anticapitalists foreground equality over utility—I disagree. First, EA is scoped to ‘altruism’, not to ‘all policy worldwide’, so a view that aims to maximise altruism also maximises equality under regular conditions. Second, it’s not necessarily the case that there is a tradeoff between equality and global utility, and highly socialist societies such as the Scandis enjoy both higher equality and higher utility than more capitalist countries such as the United States or the UK.
(I’ve read Piketty and don’t remember him ever suggesting he would trade one for the other; can’t speak to the other authors you cite)
and highly socialist societies such as the Scandis enjoy both higher quality and higher utility than more capitalist countries such as the United States or the UK.
While Scandinavian countries generally are less capitalist than the US or UK, the difference is small. Here are their rankings on the Economic Freedom index:
Rank
Country
Score
5
United States
8.09
6
Denmark
8.02
12
United Kingdom
7.88
13
Finland
7.87
14
Iceland
7.84
25
Sweden
7.61
28
Norway
7.58
All of them are comfortably in the top quartile, and Denmark is actually above the UK in the rankings.
At least 8 years ago though, Finland and Norway had relatively high levels of state ownership of enterprises, much higher than the US. If that’s not a much higher level of real socialism, it’s hard to say what is. That suggests to me that whatever the Economic Freedom Index measures it’s not how little socialism there is in a country. Nonetheless, it could be the freedom not the socialism that’s responsible for Finland and Norway doing well, of course.
Norway is a petro state so arguably it doesn’t really count, but Finland isn’t.
I am trying my hardest to disambiguate ‘market/economic freedom’ from ‘unrestrained accumulation of wealth’. Europe produces a huge amount of tax revenue (see below; I don’t have an anticapitalism index at hand so this is as close as I could get in a 5 minute search) while maintaining similar levels of economic freedom to the US, and manages much higher life satisfaction and equality despite lower GDP per capita. That’s insane!
Anticapitalism in a strict economic sense is merely the opposition to unrestrained accumulation of wealth and/or concentration of ownership of the means of production in private hands. It doesn’t have to take a position on anything to do with markets. (Obviously, the popular Western conception of anticapitalism is also often anti-market, but actually-existing-anticapitalism in Europe is pro-market!)
I am trying my hardest to disambiguate ‘market/economic freedom’ from ‘unrestrained accumulation of wealth’.
You mentioned scandinavian countries specifically, but Swedish Wealth Inequality is as high as the US and higher than the UK. In general european countries raise large amounts of tax/GDP by having higher taxes on middle income people than the US, not by having higher taxes at the high end.
This opens a bit of a can of worms. FWIW, the World Inequality Database (founded by Thomas Piketty, and OWID’s main source on wealth data) reports Sweden as having a top-10% wealth share of 58.9%, on the lower end and much less than the US’ 70.7%:
I looked at the source for the infographic you linked, which is UBS’ Global Wealth Report (presumably from 2023, but undated). [Here’s the full data](https://rev01ution.red/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/global-wealth-databook-2023-ubs.pdf). Table 4–5 reports Sweden’s top-10% share at 74.4%, which would make it a highly unequal country, much more on par with the U.S, and much higher than their neighbours.
My suspicion from this read is that the UBS report is extrapolating from 2007 data (since this is the latest Sweden-specific dataset they cite). 2007 was the last year that Sweden had a wealth tax (which, FWIW, [they had from 1911–2007](http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/DuRietzHenrekson2015.pdf)) and so would produce good official estimates of the wealth distribution, but they might be skewed, especially because the wealth tax only applied above a threshold. Whereas the WID appear to be taking into account income tax data from capital gains ([this paper finds a top 10% share of 65.9% in 2012 using this methodology](https://www.ifn.se/media/wbldgg0m/wp1131.pdf)) and a bunch of other normalisations.
But I really wanna emphasise that I’m less sure, I would generally lean toward trusting the WID on this over UBS, but that’s probably not enough to make a point on the internet about Scandi anticapitalism.
Yeah sorry, to emphasise further, I’m referring to the position where we should place strong restrictions on wealth accumulation when it leads to market failures. The difference between this and the mainstream (in this conception) is that mainstream views take more of a siloed approach to these outcomes, and prefer income taxes or laws to remedy them.
An anticapitalist view contrasts with this by identifying wealth accumulation / concentrated ownership of the means of production as a root cause of these issues and works to restrain it in a more preventative capacity. As you identified, such a view typically advocates for policies like wealth taxes, worker co-determination on boards, and high tax surveillance.
Also loosely on your claim that anticapitalism is incompatible with EA because anticapitalists foreground equality over utility—I disagree. First, EA is scoped to ‘altruism’, not to ‘all policy worldwide’, so a view that aims to maximise altruism also maximises equality under regular conditions. Second, it’s not necessarily the case that there is a tradeoff between equality and global utility, and highly socialist societies such as the Scandis enjoy both higher equality and higher utility than more capitalist countries such as the United States or the UK.
(I’ve read Piketty and don’t remember him ever suggesting he would trade one for the other; can’t speak to the other authors you cite)
While Scandinavian countries generally are less capitalist than the US or UK, the difference is small. Here are their rankings on the Economic Freedom index:
All of them are comfortably in the top quartile, and Denmark is actually above the UK in the rankings.
https://mattbruenig.com/2017/07/28/nordic-socialism-is-realer-than-you-think/
At least 8 years ago though, Finland and Norway had relatively high levels of state ownership of enterprises, much higher than the US. If that’s not a much higher level of real socialism, it’s hard to say what is. That suggests to me that whatever the Economic Freedom Index measures it’s not how little socialism there is in a country. Nonetheless, it could be the freedom not the socialism that’s responsible for Finland and Norway doing well, of course.
Norway is a petro state so arguably it doesn’t really count, but Finland isn’t.
I am trying my hardest to disambiguate ‘market/economic freedom’ from ‘unrestrained accumulation of wealth’. Europe produces a huge amount of tax revenue (see below; I don’t have an anticapitalism index at hand so this is as close as I could get in a 5 minute search) while maintaining similar levels of economic freedom to the US, and manages much higher life satisfaction and equality despite lower GDP per capita. That’s insane!
Anticapitalism in a strict economic sense is merely the opposition to unrestrained accumulation of wealth and/or concentration of ownership of the means of production in private hands. It doesn’t have to take a position on anything to do with markets. (Obviously, the popular Western conception of anticapitalism is also often anti-market, but actually-existing-anticapitalism in Europe is pro-market!)
You mentioned scandinavian countries specifically, but Swedish Wealth Inequality is as high as the US and higher than the UK. In general european countries raise large amounts of tax/GDP by having higher taxes on middle income people than the US, not by having higher taxes at the high end.
This opens a bit of a can of worms. FWIW, the World Inequality Database (founded by Thomas Piketty, and OWID’s main source on wealth data) reports Sweden as having a top-10% wealth share of 58.9%, on the lower end and much less than the US’ 70.7%:
I looked at the source for the infographic you linked, which is UBS’ Global Wealth Report (presumably from 2023, but undated). [Here’s the full data](https://rev01ution.red/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/global-wealth-databook-2023-ubs.pdf). Table 4–5 reports Sweden’s top-10% share at 74.4%, which would make it a highly unequal country, much more on par with the U.S, and much higher than their neighbours.
Although I’m interested, I don’t really have the time to deep dive around the different methodologies, but some light reading through section 1.1 of the UBS report and the [WID’s methodological report](https://wid.world/document/distributional-national-accounts-guidelines-2020-concepts-and-methods-used-in-the-world-inequality-database/) makes me think the WID have the more comprehensive methodology.
My suspicion from this read is that the UBS report is extrapolating from 2007 data (since this is the latest Sweden-specific dataset they cite). 2007 was the last year that Sweden had a wealth tax (which, FWIW, [they had from 1911–2007](http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/DuRietzHenrekson2015.pdf)) and so would produce good official estimates of the wealth distribution, but they might be skewed, especially because the wealth tax only applied above a threshold. Whereas the WID appear to be taking into account income tax data from capital gains ([this paper finds a top 10% share of 65.9% in 2012 using this methodology](https://www.ifn.se/media/wbldgg0m/wp1131.pdf)) and a bunch of other normalisations.
But I really wanna emphasise that I’m less sure, I would generally lean toward trusting the WID on this over UBS, but that’s probably not enough to make a point on the internet about Scandi anticapitalism.
That is insane that you can embed a OWID chart into a forum reply 😂
Just wait until you see the PRs I wanna submit to the forum software 😛