Market in Gamla Stan, Stockholm.Boston Globe
I love Sweden. so I read with delight Jonathan Power's article "Sweden's quiet success" (op ed, Aug. 16). It is important to recognize, however, that Sweden's experiment has been undertaken in a nation with a homogenous population of just 9 million.Sure, America should look closely at the Swedish model of enlightened capitalism. Yet we should recognize that the Swedish approach would not survive in our extraordinarily diverse population of 290 million.I lived and studied in Sweden, at first in a bleak Stockholm suburb that my friends called the immigrants' ghetto. Power says that "immigrants have been welcomed generously." One has only to ride the Stockholm subway on a Saturday night to witness slurs hurled at Turks, Serbs, and Africans from drunken, restless teenagers to understand that Sweden might get it more than most nations, but it is far from a paragon of virtue.