Category Archive

A few posts back I mentioned that Kostia was supposed to be going to Sweden for November and December to teach some courses at our university there. Well, it turns out that the Swedish consulate/migration board can’t turn around a work visa application in 4 days (more like 4 weeks) so he’s here, and now he’s teaching even more internet distance courses for Högskolan Dalarna. But they still want him to come teach in person, so supposedly another work invitation is on its way for next semester. If that happens as planned, we’ll both head back to Falun in January for at least a semester. This would be much nicer for us than him going there for six weeks and leaving me in St. Petersburg all alone. We’ll see how things actually turn out. I’m not holding my breath yet.

Next week I go back to Sweden to “defend” my master’s thesis and criticize the theses of other people in my program. Then I’ll be finished for real and I’ll be a Master of European Political Sociology. 

I got my first master’s degree in 1997, then had 10 years of happily not being a student. Kostia and I went to Sweden to study more as an excuse to go to Sweden than to study, but we did take our programmes seriously. At times I thought that maybe I should do a PhD after all, since I like that reading and writing and thinking thing. But now, after finishing another master’s thesis, I’m really relieved not to have that student feeling of having an assignment hanging over my head. I don’t think I could live with a dissertation hanging over my head for years. And then, of course, what does the world need another PhD in the social sciences for? It doesn’t. And what would I do if I actually finished the thing? I have several friends in academia and I am not at all interested in participating in that particular rat race (or any rat race, for that matter). No, I think I ought to just do another master’s degree in another 10 years.

My eyes are going to pop out from computer usage, so I will just report that the thesis has been turned in. I’m not happy with it, but that goes without saying. The important thing is that it’s done for now.

When my sister and I were teenagers we were really big Queen fans. Of course, this was already after Freddie Mercury had died, but still, we had every album on CD, watched concert videos and VH1 specials, and when we went to England on a family vacation in 1992 we bought all manner of Queen crap and memorabilia.

Brian May was always our favorite band member. He was like, the sensitive, intelligent, soulful one. So I was very pleased to find out that last month he turned in his dissertation in astrophysics after a 36-year break.

Imagine being a rock star and a PhD in astrophysics. There’s a person who’s done something with his life.

1. Well, of course the first thing I’m going to do is have a nap, and then get drunk. Then we’ve got a fun weekend planned: hosting a housewarming/thesis-turning-in party on Saturday, and the Vyborg film festival on Sunday. 

2. Have a proper summer. Early August is pretty much the end of summer in St. Petersburg. But I’ll be in the U.S. in early September, so I can extend summer a few more weeks.

3. Blog more regularly and more interestingly, both here and on my Russian blog.

4. Start a project based on my thesis: a website for expats in St. Petersburg who are disturbed about the ecological situation, with links to local environmental organizations, information about recyling points in the city, etc.

5. Make time for jogging and yoga again.

6. Translate another of Kostia’s stories into English, which will give him enough material so he can publish the bilingual edition of his book that we first thought of doing two years ago.

And probably some more things too. But first, I’d better go finish the damn thing.

Unrelated: I saw this postcard on PostSecret and it struck a chord…

Oi, I still need to write about last Saturday’s adventure. But not today. Today I need to work on my thesis for a bit. It’s due in two weeks and I’m way behind on the writing. Things I have been doing this week instead of writing:

1. Conducting interviews. This is for the thesis, which is good, but these interviews are in Russian and they are wordy and Kostia has to transcribe them for me and that’s going to take forever, and from all that work only a little bit will actually make it into the thesis.

2. Teaching English. I’ve got plenty of work, and every day it seems someone else calls or asks if I can teach them. I don’t want to turn anyone away, as earning money is also a priority right now, but I’ve got to finish this thesis!

3. Harry Potter. I finished the last book, and we went to see the movie yesterday. The book was good, the movie was great - even dubbed into Russian. By the way, about that spoiler I “almost” heard last week, well, I guess I heard enough of it for it to be a real spoiler. But it’s OK, it didn’t interfere with my enjoyment of the book.

OK, at least I can post the picture of the Cheburashka necklace now…

It looks like this, but mine is silver instead of gold, on a silver chain.

I’m happy to say that yesterday I got 15 pages of thesis into a state decent enough for me to be willing to show them to my advisor. I need to get as much done as possible before we go back to Russia, though, since I won’t have access to books and free internets there. They don’t really have public libraries as we know them in St. Petersburg. Simply to enter the big National Library on Moskovsky Prospect in St. Petersburg you have to have a library card, and to obtain a library card requires showing your diploma from an instituion of higher education. Can you believe you can’t go to the library unless you have a college degree?!? I suppose it’s one way of keeping the homeless from sleeping there. In any case, I’m going to try to get myself a library card this summer, but undoubtedly there are some extra administrative hurdles for foreigners, so I have modest hopes. So I’d better go home and get back to the reading and writing.

 Edit: Kostia says that there are, in fact, local libraries in neighborhoods in St. Petersburg which you have to have a library card to enter, but do not require a university degree to get a library card.

Turned in my paper on The Swedish Education System yesterday. Now I only have to study Swedish and write a thesis. A friend who’s in the same boat said, “But that’s still a lot!” After the last few weeks it doesn’t seem like a lot, though. I’ve been trying to work on my thesis for awhile already, but there was always more pressing stuff to do.

Here are some random links; amusing and disturbing in differing proportions:

Pearls Before Breakfast (via Rooted Cosmopolitans)

On Becoming a Woman (via Thistles)

Even though it’s only halfway through the spring term, it feels more like finals time right now, because here you’re supposed to take one five-week course at a time, so a set of courses is ending now. Because of the weirdness of the university schedule and my desire to get as much out of my Swedish experience as possible, I’m finishing up three courses at the moment. One is for my actual M.A. program, and two are “extra”: Swedish for Foreigners III and The Swedish Education System. They’re 10-week, half-time courses, so it’s only a double course load, not a triple one. For the second half of the semester I’ll have only Swedish for Foreigners IV. Well, and I’m supposed to be writing a master’s thesis too.

So if I don’t write anything terribly interesting for the next couple of weeks, it’s because I’m busy writing papers and things.

I’ve been meaning to write about what a high-quality afternoon we had last Saturday. After visiting the library, we went downtown, finding 6 kronor worth of returnable bottles (that’s like, almost a dollar!) along the way. We visited a antique shop that we’d passed by many times and got a bit of a Swedish art history and art investment lesson from the proprietor. In the central square, under a tent which proclaimed “cooperation for a more pleasant town”, they were giving away free waffles and lemonade, for no apparent reason other than to make a more pleasant town. The sun was shining and it was warm and people were out and about, which is not always the case in sleepy Falun. There were street musicians - not only the not-terribly-talented drummer who’s often around, but a young woman playing guitar. We didn’t see the not-terribly-talented accordionist who’s often around (Kostia: He should learn a new chord. Me: What’s wrong with that one?). It was a lovely Saturday afternoon in this small Swedish town.

Today was my first of 10 (non-consecutive) days of classroom observation for this class I’m taking on the Swedish education system, and it was quite something. After the brief, horrible experience I had last year of teaching English to 8-year-olds in a ill-conceived private school in St. Petersburg, I thought I could stand to see a proper teacher of this age group in action, in case I (god forbid) ever got thrown in front of a classroom of 8-year-olds again. It was good thinking on my part. I can see how culture and classroom atmosphere have an effect on children’s behavior. It was really refreshing. I’ll write more about it later — I’ll have to write something up for class anyway.

As promised, a brief, unoriginal paper on the Swedish education system for the uninitiated. I wound up not writing the paper in blog entry style, so sorry if it’s boring.

Edit: the formatting of the paper screwed up the blog format. I just took it off; it wasn’t so interesting anyway. If you’re curious, I can e-mail it to you.

Wow, a week since my last post, and I’m not even taking an intentional break. I did try to post earlier in the week but Blogger was having problems. Or as we say in the Case-Andreev household, “Praaaaablems”.

I wanted to show you what Swedes eat on Fat Tuesday:

And a little background info: http://www.sweden.se/templates/cs/Article____14133.aspx

We are exceedingly frugal, trying to live in Sweden for a year mostly unemployed, so we generally avoid overpriced cafe temptations, but I managed to persuade Kostia that we should try semla as part of our Swedish cultural education. It was certainly tasty, but nothing to go crazy over. It’s got almond paste inside. The bun isn’t pastry so much as a bread roll with cardamom. The cream is, of course, delicious.

I spent most of the past week agonizing over the final paper for a course on EU enlargement. Kostia can testify to the fact that I spent several days whining about how horrible the process of writing this paper was and how horrible it was going to turn out to be. I just came from the final seminar, and well, it was pretty painless. I really get overly worked up about some things. But I just hate turning in papers that I don’t think are good. It’s embarassing.

Having finished that paper, now I have to do a bunch of reading for a completely unnecessary elective course I’m taking about the Swedish education system. I have a paper due tomorrow that I’ve decided to write as a blog entry — the assignment is just to write a just a two-page “reflection on the literature”. So you can look forward to reading something about the Swedish education system today or tomorrow.

When Kostia and I were applying to universities in Sweden this time last year, we didn’t pay any attention to WHICH universities we were applying to. Rather, we were just looking for programs we were qualified for. For us, studying was just a pretext for living in Sweden. We didn’t know anything about the reputations of Swedish universities, nor did we really care. I already have an M.A. from a decent U.S. university, so this was really all about having a positive Swedish experience, not about getting an impressive piece of paper to wave around.

I think that, entirely accidentally, we wound up in a really good place for us. We both like our programs a lot, Falun is a nice little town, and I think we would not have been able to make our savings stretch the whole academic year in a bigger city. I’ve heard that finding student housing in some other places is really difficult, and some universities don’t even offer Swedish classes for their international students!

The funny thing is, people are always talking about another university: Uppsala. Before we came, a few of our St. Petersburg friends who have more of a clue than we do asked us if we were going to be attending Uppsala. Kostia was on an e-mail list for prospective students in his program and one of them sent an e-mail to the list saying “I’ve been accepted to Dalarna University, but I don’t know… it doesn’t have a good reputation like Uppsala”.

People say “Uppsala” here with the same kind of reverence that Americans use for Harvard. And, like Harvard, people like to try to “casually” work it into conversation if they or someone they’re related to went there: “My son finished his studies in New Zealand - the university there had an exchange program with… UPPSALA.” Even one of my professors, a seemingly typically humble Swede once said, “When I was doing my PhD… at UPPSALA…” I suppose I should be flattered that some people here have said things to me and Kostia like, “How come you guys didn’t go to UPPSALA?”

Well, part of the reason we didn’t go to UPPSALA is that we didn’t get in. We applied to some programs there that were only remotely related to our academic backgrounds, and we didn’t really sweat over our applications, figuring that the whole Sweden thing was just a pipe dream anyway. Maybe if we had known that Uppsala was UPPSALA, we would have made more effort, or maybe we wouldn’t have bothered applying at all.

Ultimately this UPPSALA thing just makes me laugh because university reputations really don’t matter to me at all. I know idiots who went to Ivy League schools and brilliant people who attended completely unknown colleges. In my experience, education is mostly about what the student brings to it, and given the academic job market, most people who are going to teach you anywhere went to places like UPPSALA anyway. I’m learning more in the program I’m in now than in my last M.A. program, mostly because I’m older and more focused, and I’m enjoying it a lot more in part because the people around me aren’t pompous assholes. I’ll admit that the name on the diploma of my previous M.A. has probably opened some doors for me, but I also know how absurd that is, because I’ve never used a damn thing I learned there, other than the fact that I don’t want a career in academia (which was, admittedly, a useful thing to learn).

I had told Hugh about all of this when he was visiting last week. Then, when we were talking to the crazy earth mother in the vegetarian café, right on cue, she said, “There’s a university in Falun?” [pause] “There’s a really good university called UPPSALA…” Hugh started to laugh his trademark laugh. “I TOLD you,” I said.

Here’s a left-wing screed I wrote this morning for my Comparative Social Policy class. It’s an “assignment”, not a “paper”, so I felt like I could have some fun with it. The footnote references didn’t copy from Word; if you really care I can e-mail it to you. The first half is a somewhat boring summary of the reading, the second half is where I start complaining about America, so skip down if you want.

A response to Rothstein’s “The political and moral logic of the universal welfare state”

In Chapter 6 of Just Institutions Matter: the moral and political logic of the universal welfare state, Bo Rothstein investigates the relationship between the institutionalization of welfare policy and public opinion. Why is public support for the welfare state strong in some countries (i.e. Sweden) and weak in others (i.e. the United States)? Part of his answer is that universal welfare policies seem to enjoy more public support than selective ones.

Some researchers have questioned the purpose of a universal welfare state since it seems that tax revenues just go around in a big circle. Rothstein, however, demonstrates that even with a non-progressive taxation scheme redistribution is significant, and in fact, “the more universal the welfare system, the greater the redistributive effect”.

A key factor in the popularity of the universal welfare state is, well, its universality. Rothstein quotes Walter Korpi and Joakim Palme in saying, “If we take from the rich to give to the poor, the rich simply will not part with especially large sums.” If, on the other hand, everyone feels they are getting some sort of benefit from the system, they shouldn’t mind paying their share.

Rothstein describes the political logic of the universal welfare system: while social democratic parties begin as an outgrowth of working-class movements, they can only achieve political success by appealing to the middle classes as well. Therefore, the programs they promote must benefit the middle class and provide a middle-class level of services. Although in Rothstein’s simplified redistribution model the middle class gets exactly as much out of the system as they put in, and are therefore likely to waffle on the issue of universal welfare, ultimately it is the “safety net” idea which wins them over. Knowing that they will be secure even if the unexpected happens is persuasive enough to keep their support.

However, the safety net may not be enough to garner the support of the upper economic classes, so this is where the moral logic of the universal welfare state comes into play. First, a selective welfare state which employs means-testing can be said to violate the notion that “the state should treat all citizens with ‘equal concern and respect’”, because it requires that the government intrude into the privacy of welfare recipients, and those recipients become stigmatized. Further, the process of means-testing encourages applicants to cheat and officials to be sceptical, resulting in a vicious circle of mistrust which undermines the legitimacy of the system. Rothstein also makes the argument – which seems to be of a practical nature rather than a moral one – that the process of means-testing and verifying claims is administratively costly, much more so than a universal system.

Ultimately, Rothstein asserts that the support for any welfare system hinges on the public’s belief that the government can be trusted to manage people’s money, and that everyone is paying their fair share. People are willing to participate if they feel that the system is just. Rothstein cites interviews which indicate that even Americans would agree to an expansion of social services and an increase in taxes if they felt the government would administer the programs wisely – the problem is that they don’t trust the government.

I agree very strongly with the moral logic of the universal welfare system, but as an American who has been subjected to neo-liberal ideology all her life, I noticed several critical points which Rothstein does not address. One is the logic of redistribution. While he says that one of the major criticisms of the universal welfare state is that it is not sufficiently redistributive, it is precisely the notion of redistribution that many people object to. Their logic is, “Why should my money be taken from me and given to someone else?” Even if rich people also reap the benefits of the system, the value of those benefits is still smaller than what they pay in taxes. However, maybe this question is irrelevant, because the rich represent a tiny portion of the voting population, and are therefore not crucial for policymaking purposes (although economic elites have a disproportionate influence even in a democracy). The middle class are a much more significant proportion of the voting population, and Rothstein makes a good case for the logic behind their support of a universal system.

Another part of the debate which Rothstein doesn’t account for is what happens in a global economy when the rich are tired of paying high taxes without visible benefit, and feel their interests are not represented politically. Elites have the ability to simply move themselves and their businesses to a different country where the tax conditions are more favourable, undermining the tax base – which is more consequential to the state than the elites’ voting power. This process is certainly taking place in the corporate world, but I’m not certain to what extent individuals have chosen to uproot themselves. In any case, one must appeal to the moral logic of the universal welfare system here. There must be a common understanding among all citizens: this system educates you, gives you the opportunity to succeed, to simply abandon it because you have made a lot of money is immoral.

One argument, not mentioned by Rothstein, in favour of elite support for a universal welfare model even fits into a rational choice paradigm. This is the notion that “everyone does better when everyone does better”. In a society where income inequality is reduced by redistribution, there is less incentive for crime such as theft, because lower economic groups experience less relative deprivation. Ostensibly everyone benefits from living in a society where everyone has access to high-quality education. Health care for all means fewer epidemics and fewer public health crises. One can, of course, defuse this argument by saying that the rich can protect themselves from the consequences of weak social policy by separating themselves from the rest of society (hiring security guards, using private health clinics, and generally keeping away from the unwashed masses) but these measures cost money too, and are not desirable to everyone.

Unfortunately, I’m not convinced that the main reason for Americans’ scepticism about the welfare state comes solely from mistrust of government. I think that most people’s objections are more philosophical than practical. Americans at all economic levels resent paying taxes, even if they get more out of the system than they put in, in the form of roads, schools, etc. Right-wing populist politicians (elites who have a great economic interest in reducing taxes) have done a good job of persuading even the working class that their tax dollars are going to lazy welfare recipients who don’t want to work. Even if you explain to people that the majority of their tax dollars go to the bloated military budget, not to mention public services that they actually use, they still resent that tiny portion that goes to the needy. While a universal welfare system would undermine this belief, there is no politically viable way to establish a universal welfare system in the U.S. A large number of Americans believe very strongly that government benefits breed laziness and welfare equals communism. In fact, many Americans would be happy to do away with even the minimal means-tested welfare system that we have.

The moral arguments about “universal concern and respect” for all citizens are also not terribly salient in an American context. Many Americans feel that if a person is asking for money from the government, the government has the right to invade that person’s privacy by asking intrusive questions. (In fact, I would say that right-wing Americans don’t believe in any universal human rights other than right to guns and property, the right to pollute the environment with oversized cars, and the rights of fertilized eggs which disappear the moment the egg becomes a breathing person… but I digress.)

Overall, the mainstream opinion on the welfare state in the US is contradictory, hypocritical, and lacking in compassion. If people are poor it is seen to be their own fault, yet the market economy that Americans believe in so religiously (as well as their opposition to labour unions) ensures that wages at the low end of the pay scale are kept as low as possible, guaranteeing that there will always be people in poverty. Higher taxes and universal welfare coverage could guarantee everyone a basic standard of living while still upholding the sacred market, but people are simply unwilling to pay higher taxes, viewing this as a form of “forced charity” rather than simply the cost of living in a well-functioning and morally just society.

Awhile ago they sent an e-mail out to all the international students at the university here asking if anyone was willing to go to a gymnasium (high school) and talk about their home country. They were especially looking for people from English-speaking countries. So, I offered to go.

I edited the Power Point presentation that I had made for my classmates here and took the bus to the neighboring city of Borlänge to talk to Swedish 16-year-olds. The school was interesting. It’s a privately run (but publicly-funded) school with only 50 students in two classes. It’s brand-new this year and they’re focussed on computer science. Because of that, almost all the students are male.

They all speak English fluently and some really sophisticatedly, but when we broke into smaller groups after my presentation to talk (they were supposed to be practicing their English) there was a lot of awkward adolescent silence. I was racking my brains trying to think of conversation topics — I didn’t know I’d be leading discussions, exactly.

The atmosphere at the school was really mellow. After giving my presentation, the teacher who had organized it all suggested that she and I have a coffee break before giving the presentation to the next class, and the students had a break too. They have a schedule of sorts, but it’s all completely flexible. They all have their own laptops with wireless internet, so they can basically sit there all day and screw around on the internet and listen to music and stuff. So completely different from my high school experience — 1000 students move from class to class every 40 minutes, supervised all the time… it must be really nice for these guys. I hope they get some education out of it too.