Flagged as inappropriate proselytizing: the “survey” conveniently neglected to poll the happiness levels of the hundreds of millions killed by Stalin and Mao and Castro...
Addressed in the article, which is specifically about "democratic socialism" rather than all of socialism:
> This reasoning is why so many socialists are prefixing it with “democratic.” Democracy is a key element of the socialist project, and differentiates it from the institutional character of states like Venezuela, China, and the former Soviet Union. These countries undeniably feature strong roles of the government in the economy, but because they lack democratic legitimacy, they do not serve the will of society.
> To counter the obvious success of the Nordics, some will define them as actually capitalist. The capitalism-or-socialism binary gets further complicated as debaters introduce terms like “welfare state capitalism,” “social democracy,” “democratic socialism,” “state capitalism,” “state socialism,” and more. This debate doesn’t get any clearer among self-identified socialists, as many have their own pet definitions. With such barriers in the discourse, how can we possibly measure how people experience socialism?
If Sweden isn't socialist, then give me more of what they've got.
If it is socialist, then how do you distinguish them from Cuba? Or the US?
