One deeper issue did trouble me about Sweden’s long-term prospects: in rejecting their Lutheran principles to embrace consumerism and the various temptations of the modern world, had the Swedes perhaps thrown the puritanical baby out with the globalisation bath water? Put differently, consider all those old agrarian principles of self-sufficiency, caution, modesty, equality and parsimony, the instinctive urge to compromise, to cooperate and share – the very characteristics that laid the foundations for the Social Democratic experiment. Are these characteristics not inevitably, fatally eroded
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