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It's from Scandinavia!" This, we learned, was the name of a region, a cold and forsaken place where people stayed indoors and plotted the death of knobs.
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David Sedaris (When You Are Engulfed in Flames)
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To summarise, the design of Nordic tax systems has over time created a ‘fiscal illusion’, whereby the public is not aware of the taxes they are paying. One can reflect on whether it is really in line with democratic principles to raise taxes in a way such that citizens are unaware of them. Interestingly, few proponents of introducing a Nordic model of high taxes in other countries stress that such a move would require hiding the true cost of taxation from the public.
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Nima Sanandaji (Scandinavian Unexceptionalism: Culture, Markets and the Failure of Third-Way Socialism (Readings in Political Economy))
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If a forty-year-old ex-drone pilot takes three years to reinvent herself as a designer of virtual worlds, she may well need a lot of government help to sustain herself and her family during that time. (This kind of scheme is currently being pioneered in Scandinavia, where governments follow the motto ‘protect workers, not jobs’.)
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Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
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most of the states in America practice at-will employment, which means your boss can fire you for any reason, at any time. (All my readers in Scandinavia just passed out.) Some professions have either unions or professional organizations to help mitigate this and to bargain collectively.
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Mike Monteiro (Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It)