The Success of Social Democracy

Making the case for why social democracy should be the system to implement and not freewheeling capitalism.

8 min readJan 5, 2021

A classic poster for the Norwegian Labour Party. A Social Democratic Party which has governed Norway for most of the modern era.

I am both a political idealist and pragmatist. I want us all to try brave new ideas while at the same time be humble enough to accept that those ideas may in fact never work out.

At the same time I am a pragmatist. I believe in learning from what has worked and what has not worked. When I have strong faith in social democracy as a political and economic system, it is because I have grown up in such a system (Norway) and seen with my own eyes that it works. Personal experience is of course one thing. But I have also spent a lot of time pouring over statistics, looking at history and comparing with other countries I have visited and studied.

Reality Bias Towards Social Democracy

I believe the evidence is soundly in favor of social democracy. If you are not convinced just look at a host of UN surveys and statistics over human development, happiness, health, education or almost any other index used to measure how well a society is doing, and this statistics will always have social democracies at the top or near the top.

The success story has not only been replicated across all Nordic countries. But it has to a high degree in multiple other countries. Germany, Austria and the Netherlands are some obvious examples of successful countries with significant influence from social democratic values.