government programs with names like Youth Training Scheme and Working Life Development, the figure is closer to 13 percent. Nor is the situation likely to change soon, since net investment in the Swedish economy has gone from about 16 percent of the GDP in 1970 to less than nothing recently. People have been going around to businesses, taking their investments back: “Give me that drill press.” In Sweden you can get a better return on your money from government bonds than you can from corporate stocks, and you don’t have to read the financial pages every day to see if the government’s still there. Believe me, it is. So the Swedish system works, and the Swedish system is broken. This left me with a lot of questions about Sweden. And I wasn’t the only one. “What is Sweden like?” I was asked. A reasonable query, except it was posed by a Swede, and I’d only been in the country for a week. The foreign visitor’s thoughts are always of interest, I suppose. “How do you like Australia?” ask Australians. “Are you having fun in Italy?” ask Italians. “When are you leaving?” ask the French. But never in my travels have I had a native say to me, “Who are we, and what are we doing?” I didn’t think it would be diplomatic to mention Disneyland. “It’s like Minnesota,” I said. “You know, wholesome, hygienic, polite, cold climate, everything works, and it’s full of, um, Swedes.” (Also, the radio programs are as dull as Garrison Keillor’s, at least if you don’t speak Swedish.) Actually, Sweden isn’t like Minnesota or Disneyland, but then again, it isn’t much like Sweden, either. The people aren’t all that tall and blond, they don’t talk orgy-borgy talk, the women are no more beautiful than women generally are, and as for the vaunted Scandinavian lubricity, there was exactly one naughty-type Swedish magazine available at newsstands. It had the promising title Slitz, but the only nude photos were of an underfed young lady in appalling eye makeup, and the accompanying copy began with a sentence about “ legendariske visionaren och chefredaktoren Hugh M. Hefner. ” You don’t need to be a linguist to know where the hot stuff comes from in Sweden. There is, in fact, formal censorship. I was at a dinner party having one of the precisely two drinks that Swedes have before the meal, when a guest arrived late. This is something no guest ever does in Sweden, not even if he died en route, though sometimes it can be hard to tell. The guest apologized sincerely. “I
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