Nordic Success: Balancing Capitalism with Social Equality

Touring the beautiful city of Chicago one summer a while back, I met a Russian lady pursuing a PhD in Economics at the prestigious University of Chicago. Shortly while touring the city, we began sharing our mutual experiences in the USA and compared Russia, India, China, and European countries along with Scandinavian countries on political, social, and economic grounds. We both agreed the USA is an innovative, vibrant country leading the world in technology and business, but socially complex and diverse, just as India is—in fact, India more so (on language, ethnicity, caste, class, and religion)—along with massive poverty, a huge social challenge to reckon with. We debated which countries were the fairest societies of all. We ruled out the USA, China, Russia, and India—due to lack of social justice, restricted liberty in Russia and China, poverty in India, and social inequality, crime, and gun violence in the USA. She rightly suggested that in terms of social fairness, democracy, economy, or crime control, we must look at Finland, Norway, and Sweden as good societies with the most favorable indices on social and economic equality.