Last year Paul Krugman, the Nobel laureate in economics, had a good laugh at the expense of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, which had felt the strange urge to publish a report on “the opportunity costs of socialism”. Sweden, among other presumptive dangers, was singled out as having a lower gross domestic product per capita and a higher tax-to-GDP ratio than the US. Proof, no doubt, that “socialism” didn’t work.

Socialism, in this case, is in the eye of the beholder and a semantic argument can of course be made that, in the case of Sweden and its Scandinavian neighbours, “social-democratic” is a far more appropriate description of a society intent on proving that an open-market economy is not incompatible with an extended and efficient welfare state.