The Swedish model? By 1980 Sweden had the lowest income and gender inequality in the world. As a result of the neoliberal capitalist reforms from mid-1980s, "The current Swedish income distribution bears some resemblance to the English one of 1688. The average member of the richest 0.1 per cent has a disposable income, after tax and transfers, 38 times greater than that of the median-income earner. At the time of the ‘Glorious Revolution’, England’s temporal lords had an income 30 times that of urban middleclass merchants and traders." Angust Maddison, Contours of World Economy, 1-2030 AD, Oxford 2007, pp. 278-9 Wealth distribution has worsened even more, resulting in the most uneven pattern to be found in Western Europe, on a par with those of Brazil, South Africa or the USA. In 2002, Sweden’s top 1 per cent owned 18 per cent of all household wealth; by 2017, it had risen to 42 per cent. The National Education Authority (Skolverket) has found that a qu...
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51