It is a country whose very name has become a synonym for a materialist paradise. Its citizens enjoy one of the world's highest living standards, and a great many possess symbols of individual affluence: a private home or a modern apartment, a family car, a stuga (summer cottage) and often a sailboat. No slums disfigure their cities, their air and water are largely pollution-free, and they have ever more leisure to indulge a collective passion for being ut i naturen (out in nature) in their half-forested country. Neither ill-health, unemployment nor old age pose the terror of financial hardship. In short, Sweden's 8.2 million citizens have ample reasons for being satisfied. In fact, most are.
Yet growing numbers are plagued by a persistent, gnawing question: Is their Utopia going sour? Despite Sweden's prosperity, a sharp increase in burglaries and robberies has produced a sudden sales boom in police locks and other antitheft devices. Police in a country that for years took pride in having no drug problem have recently uncovered several large caches of heroin. There are no signs, moreover, that Sweden has made any progress in dealing with its nagging alcoholism problem or its high suicide rate.*
Above all, perhaps, there is increasing concern that the samhället—the unique collective society created by Sweden's own brand of socialism—has fostered both a bureaucracy and a mentality that put security ahead of initiative, welfare ahead of opportunity and to envelop life in a cocoon of red tape. It was the labyrinth of tax regulations administered by a stern bureaucracy that prompted the self-exile of one of Sweden's most creative citizens: Writer-Director Ingmar Bergman, 58, who settled in Hollywood in April after suffering a nervous breakdown brought on by his arrest on tax-evasion charges. (The courts have yet to decide whether Bergman does indeed owe back taxes.)
The samhället's cradle-to-grave benefits are unmatched in any other free society outside Scandinavia. Swedes enjoy free public education through college, four weeks' annual vacation and comprehensive retraining programs if they want to switch careers. On the average, Swedish workers take 22 days per year of sick leave (for which they get 90% of their regular salary) and pay $3.40 at most for each visit to an out-patient clinic. On retirement at age 65, an industrial laborer earning $11,250 annually is entitled to a pension of $8,726. In pursuit of new ways to ease the Angst of life, a local politician actually proposed that the government provide free sex partners for the lonely.
The samhället is the creation of Sweden's Social Democratic Party, now headed by Prime Minister Olof Palme, which has ruled the country (sometimes with coalition partners) for the past 44 years. Scarcely Marxist, the party long ago discarded belief in class warfare and state ownership of the means of production. Sweden's socialism has encouraged continued capitalist ownership of enterprises (90% of industry is in private hands) and private investment in new areas of production.