The Real Crisis: Not Work Incentives but Runaway Credit

This chapter shows that, while economists were fretting over incentives, the real action was taking place unremarked under their noses. When the major crash that Lindbeck predicted finally occurred, it had nothing to do with work incentives or the welfare state. Like the global financial crisis of 2007–2008, of which it might be considered a precursor, the Swedish (and indeed, the wider Nordic) crash originated in finance. Sweden (with the rest of Scandinavia) resisted the lure of financial liberalization until the mid-1980s, and when it succumbed, punishment came quickly. A severe financial crisis in the early 1990s was almost entirely the result of this liberalization, which also became the opportunity for a modest application of the ‘incentives’ agenda, leaving, however, much of the Social Democratic welfare state intact.