Jacob Christensen

If you have lived in Sweden for some years then you will know that the Swedes have two passions: Betting on the Stock Exchange and betting on, well, everything else.

In both cases, insider activity can be a problem. It is, after all, not too difficult to rig share values or matches in different kind of sports. The word of advice is: If you’re a common Joe, be very careful.

The latest betting story concerns the appointment of a successor to the luckless Laila Freivalds as Swedish Foreign Minister. The media have been speculating and seem to have arrived at a consensus where the Minister for Development Aid Carin Jämtin is the most likely candidate.

The Bookmaker Unibet has another perspective on the story. On Friday the company stopped betting on the appointment after a number of people started placing large bets on the present Minister for Trade and Commerce Thomas Östros.

The question now is: Who are the players? Are they government ministers trying to break the bank? Is it a gang of political advisors trying to supplement their incomes? Or is it a deliberate attempt by the Prime Minister to lead the media in the wrong direction?

My guess is that we will be a little wiser on Monday but I have no idea about the identity of the future Foreign Minister. And in case you want to know: I’ve bet my money on Japanese stocks, not on Swedish government ministers.

Washington Post’s regular blog “Think Tank Town” had an intriguing entry this Friday.

The entry reviewed a recent book by Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute who advocates the introduction of a general cash grant as replacement of existing transfer programmes, or to quote the presentation of the book on the AEI’s homepage:

This is the Plan, a radical new approach to social policy that defies any partisan label. Murray suggests eliminating all welfare transfer programs at the federal, state, and local levels and substituting an annual $10,000 cash grant to everyone age twenty-one or older.

Does this ring a bell? As a matter of fact, Murray comes close to advancing the idea of a citizens’ wage which was presented in a Danish context back in the late 1970′s by K. Helveg Petersen, Niels I. Meyer and Villy Sørensen in the book “Oprør fra midten” which was a sort of centrist anti-capitalist manifesto.

The idea that general benefits are more efficient and seen as more legitimate is also a stock argument in the defense of the Social Democratic kind of welfare state.

That still doesn’t make Murray a Social Democrat – he is a card-carrying conservative. Left and right will be happy to engage in a heated discussion over the size of the cash grant and the question of the provision of social and health services.