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New York has SoHo, NoHo, Nolita, TriBeCa and Dumbo, so why can't Stockholm? Last year, somebody had that very thought, opened a cafÈ in trendy Sˆdermalm (well, I live there) South of Folkungagatan, called it SoFo, rallied local shops to the cause, and now SoFo is a meme on the verge of prime timeStockholm fashion blogger Anna has covered SoFo from the start.
The cafÈ owner, BTW, does not take kindly to suggesting SoFo works best as an ironic neologism..
But not the only meme. Every SoFo implies a NoFo, which, selfevidently, is the area North of Folkungagatan. But Folkungagatan is long, so we call the area further along MoFo, More of Folkungagatan.
To the South of SoFo (SoSo? Nah), we get to the area North of Lower Gotlandsgatan, NoLoGo. Still further south there is a part of the city whose main landmarks are the Bridges off Ringv‰gen, or BoRing. I live between BoRing and NoLoGo.
To the West of SoFo, we find LoBoToMe, or Lower Bondegatan To Medborgarplatsen. Even further west lies the area South of Fatbursgatan, SoFat, and then as we head North, we approach Hornsgatan from the South, an area affectionately known by the locals as SoHorny.
Click on image to magnify.
Other parts of Stockholm, not on this map, have also acquired sought-after acronyms. North Vasastan is now called NoVa, while South Vasastan is SoVa. (Thanks to Anna and Magnus for pointing some of these out to me. If you come across others, do let me know.)
Apparently, I have just done something terribly Swedish: I have reneged on a movie date with a friend on account of it conflicting with my laundry room reservation. That's not as specious an excuse as it sounds: These three-hour slots for washing, drying and ironing are a precious commodity. They require days of advance planning, and are enforced with — in my apartment building's case — an EZpass-like wireless contraption that won't unlock the access door if it's not your turn. Doing laundry requires as much thinking ahead as buying alcohol from Systembolaget, and as much patience as standing in line for a Stockholm nightclub; it's an investment in time one should not squander unnecessarily.
When I told my friend my excuse, she immediately said, "Oh, so it only took you a year and a half to become Swedish. That's amazing." Add a generous dollop of sarcasm to that statement. I do hate being predictable like that, but not as much as going without underwear, so laundry room it remains.
By way of explanation for the slackening of the pace around here, I've spent all my free time this past week immersed in a project using DVD Studio Pro 2, Apple's brilliant DVD authoring software. This also means you will presently be subjected to my half-baked musings on DVD authoring, and — as the preceding clause aptly illustrates — I am additionally initiating a policy of preÎmptively criticizing my own posts, effective immediately, as a means of smothering whatever small pleasures are left to the Eurofs and Charleses of this world when they are compelled to snark on my site. As far as I'm concerned, if they are having this much fun, I want a piece of itClearly, this is a stupid idea, as if I am going to exchaust all the possible ways in which what I write can be ojected to..
Then, you're going to have to sit through another garrotting of the Swedish language, performed by me. I got back a corrected version of my last effort, and it shows my Swedish skills in a clear retrograde motion. My teacher helpfully asked if I had weaned myself from typing it in MS Word, whose spell- and grammar checkers are like a life vest and a kiddy pool, respectively. I lied. With those things turned on, I know Swahili.
What's also lame is linking to my own article on another blog, even if it is interesting.
DVD Authoring: DVDs may bring all manner of high-bandwidth goodness, but DVD players themselves are dumb beasts. Those DVD menus have nowhere near the sophistication of Macromedia's Flash or Shockwave because DVD players don't have the processing prowessdon't ask me what the difference is, I don't think they know either.. They'll just about manage playing video and audio tracks linked to buttons, with a bit of scripting thrown in reminiscent of peeking and poking at a Commodore 64. Because of this constraint, even the fancy Lord of the Rings menus are just videoloops with clickable hotspots. For example, until now I never noticed it is impossible to have one audio track playing uninterrupted while navigating menus. I tried to make it so, to no avail. Each click of a button requires the DVD player to initiate a new audio track (or none).
This, I believe, is the reason for the ubiquity of my pet DVD menu peeve: Interminably long transitions between menus. My guess is it lets the author play some theme music. My other peeve: overproduced menus: Why do they almost always have to look like CNN breaking news intros? I don't make my web pages look like that, not because I can't but because it's uglyOK, so I can't, but that's not the reason why they don't look like that..
Och nu p svenska: Det ‰r kanske lite svÂrt att antar vad utvandrare tycker om Sverige. Och det kan vara konstigt att fˆrsˆka ber‰tta om sig sj‰lv som land, men det gˆr www.sweden.se. Vad ska man ber‰tta om Sverige? En artikel igÂr p Sydsvenskan pÂstÂr att bilden p webbsidan ‰r helt fel, att det verkar svenskare ‰r "duktiga, flitiga, skˆtsamma, galna, sensuella, sentimentala och stolta. Sj‰lvmedvetna men aldrig sj‰lvfˆrh‰rligande."
Som artikel skriver, andra l‰nder fˆrsˆker inte att bygga upp ett stor nationellt varum‰rke som Sverige (utom Belgien!). Dock betyder det inte att Sverige inte bˆr gˆra det. Internationell bild av Sverige ‰r j‰tte positiv, och det ‰r inte eftersom svenskare ‰r duktiga lˆgnhalsar.
Till exempel, s bygger man upp ett gott rykteGo ahead, click on the FT link, it leads to a cute English-language story.: FT skriver hur Ikea ˆppnade en ny aff‰r i Sevilla, och anv‰nde typiska svenska anst‰llningsmetoder. Men dem var revolution‰r fˆr Spanien, och nu bˆrjar Spanskare att diskutera deras arbetspolitik.
Kanske bˆr Sweden.se skriver om det...
An advertising campaign by the Swedish contruction worker's union has the temerity to suggest that preventing immigrants from competing on price helps them avoid exploitation. Basically, by not working, you're not being exploited, goes the reasoning. Of course, unions, like any other interest group, should look after their members, so if Swedish construction workers want to lobby the government for mercantilist laws to protect them from having to compete with eager hardworking Poles and Latvians, let them; but they must not be allowed to get away with baldfaced lies: They are not on the side of the poor; immigrants are not being exploited when they undercut Sweden's union rates. Instead, it is Swedish consumers who are being exploited by high prices when they cannot access competitive labor markets.
The whole point of free trade and the free movement of labor — indeed, the raison d'Ítre of the EU — is that countries specialize in producing those goods and services they have a comparative advantage in. For Poles, their advantage is price. For Swedes, it is technology. Both countries will have far more winners than losers when they trade goods and labor, but it is important to realize that you cannot have those winners without the losers. The solution is not kneejerk protectionism, it is training those who lose out so they can find new jobs. A generous welfare state makes this solution all the easier.
No luck getting this message across in Europe. Except for Ireland and the UK, all current EU member states will prevent acceding member states' citizens (except the minuscule ones) from looking for work on their turf when they join, for up to seven years. Read this Guardian Special report. It reads like an ode to callousness.
And it is the perfect recipe for disillusionment. Take one EU, problems and all, then throw out the redeeming bits. Now stuff it down the newcomers' throats. The upshot: Belgian EU citizens can work in Sweden because they are already rich. Polish EU citizens cannot, because they are too poor.
At least the British government "says it expects economic benefits from migrant workers," according to the Guardian. Why can't anyone else see this? Jean Monnet is turning in his grave.Under helgen best‰mde jag mig redan att jag skulle skriva h‰r p svenska om Byggnadsarbetarefˆrbundets annonskampanj som jag m‰rkte up i tunnelbana fˆrra veckan. Idag, lyckligtvis fˆr er som pratar b‰ttre svenska ‰n jag, skrev Peter Wolodarski p DN allt som jag ville s‰ga, men i mycket b‰ttre svenska och i mer detalj. Kampanj ‰r skamlig.
Jag vill bara stryker under nÂgra saker. Jag kan fˆrst att Byggnads vill tillvarata deras medlemmars intressen, och att det betyder att de inte vill ha invandrare som jobbar fˆr mindre pengar h‰r i Sverige, d‰rfˆr att Byggnads inte ‰r konkurrenskraftig med invandrare. Men Byggnads ljuger helt enkelt n‰r de pÂstÂr att de vill hj‰lpa invandrare undvika utnyttjande. Invandrare som kommer till Sverige som byggnadsarbetare tj‰nar mer pengar h‰r ‰n hemma. Det ‰r inte dumpning. Dumpning betyder s‰lja under kostpris fˆr att ˆdel‰gga konkurrensen.
EUs utvidgning bevisa att det inte ‰r invandrare som utnyttjas, det ‰r vi svenska konsumenter som ‰r utnyttjat av Byggnadsarbetarefˆrbundet. De ‰r fˆr dyra i den nya EU.
What a stunning coincidence. In many nation-states around Europe, simultaneously, laws are being debated that ostensibly have no connection to one another — defending secularism in France, defending women's rights in Belgium and Sweden, defending states' rights in Germany, defending the autonomy of state-funded Christian schools in Spain and Italy — and yet, miraculously, despite these disparate if lofty ideals, they all converge on the exact same effect: Muslim women will not be allowed to wear headscarves in public schools.
If there is anything redeeming about this sudden flurry of legal innovation, it is that collectively these laws betray a certain embarrassment about their aims. In each case, the proscription against Muslim women is officially construed as a secondary effectThe silliest example of such a secondary effect is not France's law against "conspicuous religious symbols" being used to ban the headscarf, but the defence in Spain of a state school run by nuns that forbade a Muslim girl from obeying the same biblical precept that obliges nuns to wear habits! Sorry, but that merits a rare exclamation mark.. To me, this signals that the proponents of these laws know they are treading on shaky legal ground. They know they can't just come right out and say, "we're going to make a law forbidding Muslim women from wearing headscarves at school," because its intent would be laughed out of any human rights tribunal.
Hence the proscription as side effect. It's the same desired effect, minus the intent. Countries are doing an admirable job of coming up with their own home-grown solutions, though with varying levels of precision: Sikhs are still in limbo in France, it turns outUpdate 2003/02/15: Scott Martens on A Fistful of Euros surveys the state of the headscarf debate online..
France is the furthest along this road to madness; if ever the lunatics end up running this asylum, blame the one with the Napoleon complex.
For bonus points, this has got to be the stupidest editorial I've read in years. But I'd love to be trumped.
When it comes down to it, if somebody were to put a gun to my head and credibly demand to know my one favorite bar above all others or else, I'd have to go right ahead and betray Bouche Bar in favor of International Bar, on 1st between 7th and St. Marks.
Yes, the place looks like a biker dive, with cheap-beer neon in the window to scare away tourists; yes, it has blinking Christmas lights strewn year-long along the length of the railway carriage shaped space; and yes, it has a yellowed map of the world in the back on which Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union are forever forces to be reckoned with; but boyo what generous cheap martinis! And the jukebox is the best in NYC — it's where I first heard Stereolab — and they let you bring pizza slices into the bar to have with your drinks on rainy winter sunday afternoons... And the bartenders all just walked off the set of a Suicide Girls shoot.
One of them used to bartend at Downtown Beirut a few blocks up the roadThe perfectly adequate but tame bar Standard has taken its place., that legendary but now defunct punk rock bar from a time when the East Village still scared people. She took her attitude seriously: When American moviestar Buddhists successfully ignited the Free Tibet campaign in the late-middle nineties
, she put up a sign behind the till that read, "Free Tibet (with every drink)". To me, that line will forever nail our jaded end-of-the-millenium take on the world, from a time when people still smoked and 911 was a Porsche model.
Fast forward to today's Swedish papers, which ganged up on their king for comments he made while visiting a fellow monarch, the Sultan of Brunei: King Carl Gustaf thought Brunei a lovely place, "a country which is much more open than one may imagine," with an absolutely delightful host of a Sultan who "holds an open audience where anyone who wants to can come and present his wishes, and presumably his complaints also."
The problem? The Swedish government considers Brunei to be a dictatorship, and King Gustaf, politically neutered by law, is not supposed to make normative statements about anything weightier than the weather, unless it's about global warming, in which case he better shut up and not sweat either.
Except that Brunei, an absolute monarchy, is filthy rich, and the Sultan has more than enough money to rule his 350,000 subjects through patronage. The human rights situation in Brunei, compared to all the other countries of the region, is really quite good — certainly better than any other Muslim country that I can think of — and improving. The 2002 Amnesty International country report documents the release of evangelical Christians who were held as prisoners of conscience. The 2003 Amnesty annual report does not bother with Brunei at all; few countries manage that featSweden isn't one of them. Both the 2002 and the 2003 Sweden country reports document police brutality, deaths in custody and a suspicious police killing. Going by Amnesty's numbers, then, you might want to go live in Brunei — and imagine, they have no income tax..
So perhaps it was bit opportunistic to criticize the king for being publicly grateful to his host, especially if in a narrow sense, his comments are not factually incorrect. It is certainly the case that we are not in a situation where the oppressed Bruneian masses are yearning to breathe free, like they do in Tibet; and this in turn frees me to revisit, just for the evening, my jaded views of yore: To all those members of parliament who paraded in front of the cameras, condemning in the strongest possible terms the evils of the Sultan's regime in a country they had to look up on the map this morning, go ahead, buy yourself a Free Brunei T-shirt, or mug. I'm selling at cost, since the Brunei Relief Fund is not short of cash. It should go nicely with that previous icon of jaded chic — the Free Winona T-shirt:
I suspect this whole affair has absolutely nothing to do with Brunei, and everything with the monarchy. Let's face it: Monarchs, be they Belgian, British, Swedish or Bruneian, have more in common with each other than they do with their subjects — they are born cossetted rich parasites through no fault of their own, but choose to remain so in their adult life, and that is inexcusable. Monarchies symbolize the superiority by birth-right of one man over another. If the monarch also wields power, as in Brunei, this at least makes sense according to some internal logic. But in a constitutional monarchy, this symbolism is a jarring anachronism, because ostensibly, democracies are meritocracies.
Maybe I'll go make some Free Belgium T-shirts...
Delayed access to such manna as The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker and Scientific American means that by the time I get to hold their pages in my hands, the most obviously interesting topics have already been flagged, debated and annotated to death on the web. There is a silver lining, though: Sometimes I find subtler matters of interest to blog, and these can turn out to be quite rewarding.
I think this is one such post. But you'll have to bear with me.
Remember Rule 30? I blogged it once (OK, twice), and made a little Flash application to illustrate what it can do: Create complexity by applying a simple fixed rule (algorithm) over and over again to the individual components of an ordered system. It's a shocking result, because it's so unexpected and powerful: There are no shortcuts to finding out what the system will look like after n applications of the rule — there is no formula or equation we can use to describe the state of the system using just n as the input. We really do have to run the program from scratch if we want to know what it will looks like at time n.
In other words, equations are useless for predicting the state of a system if a process like Rule 30 holds sway over it. This is the big idea in Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science, and it is why Rule 30 is the poster child for that bookI blogged NKS here when it first came out.
This past week, Wolfram put the entire brick of a book online, in a free, searchable edition. Now you have absolutely no excuse anymore not to check it out.. Wolfram argues that the complexity we see in nature is best explained not by equations, but by looking for very simple processes that operate locally, using local inputs and simple transformational rules. This is the "new kind of science" he proposes.
Bear with me.
Remember Fotini Markopoulou-Kalamara? I blogged her here, when Scientific American did this profile on her a year agoMarkopoulou has a audio lecture of hers online that is actually on the verge of understandable, with hand-drawn slides. In it she gives us a taste of how a very simple algebra of spacetime can translate into notions of cause and effect, using set theory. It takes about an hour of your time, not including pauses to figure out WTF she just said.. She had been working on an emerging theory called Quantum Loop Gravity (QLG), which competes with string theory to recast the general theory of relativity (which does a great job describing gravity) in terms of quantum theory (which until now had nothing to say about gravity). This is the holy grail of physics.
What I found remarkable at the time is that in building this framework, she and her colleagues had been working from the perspective of the smallest possible units of space, looking for very simple processes that operate locally. In other words, they had been practicing what Wolfram was now calling a "new kind of science", and the results looked encouraging.
Where am I going with this?
Quantum Loop Gravity went mainstream with the January 2004 issue of Scientific American, where it got the cover
Unfortunately, the accompanying article is only abstracted free online, but here in Stockholm, at least, the issue is still at the newstand. Alternatively, you could read this article on QLG by Smolin, or else be blown away by the accompanying video mini-interview.. The article is well worth the read — it is written by Lee Smolin, who together with Carlo Rovelli and others pretty much fathered QLG. The conceptual leap they made was to stop assuming, as the general theory of relativity does, that spacetime is smooth and continuous. Instead, they proposed that it is composed simply of nodes connected by lines, and they calculated that these nodes occupy a smallest possible unit of volume, a cubed Planck length, about 10^-99 cm^3, and that changes to this network of nodes happens in increments of a fixed smallest possible unit of time, Planck time, about 10^-43 seconds. Particles, by the way, are nothing more than patterns of these nodes "travelling" in tandem, bumping into each other, much like a gigantic game of Life. And, importantly, this network of nodes is not in anything; it is the universe.
So the universe is a giant distributed computer, running at 10^34 Gigahertz, if you will. It took a while to figure out the implications of this, but now QLGers have a bona fide soon-to-be-testable prediction: the speed of light should vary ever so slightly depending on its energy, and this satellite, scheduled for a 2006 launch, should be able to tease out the slight difference in arrival time for photons that have travelled for billions of years.
So three years from now, we may have some instant Nobel winners on our hands. Meanwhile, string theory is looking tired and unelegant, requiring the existence of many extra dimensions and particles nobody manages to find.
But the fact that time may be discrete at a fundamental level — massive though this conceptual shift would be — is only half my point. The other half point is contained in the Jan 15, 2004 edition of The New York Review of BooksThis issue also contains a wonderful short by J.M. Coetzee., in an article written by Oliver Sacks.
Sacks exhibits his usual freak show of patients with bizarre neurological disorders (Where does he get them?). This time, his patients had a problem with their visual perception, in that it sometimes slowed down enormously, so that they no longer perceived their surroundings continuously, but instead as a series of disjointed images, much like a flickering film or even a slideshow.
Their experiences were the starting point for research that is now converging on the conclusion that for all of us, visual perception is not continuous, but occurs in discrete successive states, or "snapshots". Usually, these are updated fast enough, and fade slowly enough, for the effect to be an illusion of continuous motion, unless the brain is damaged in specific ways. For good measure, it now also appears that consciousness occurs in discrete successive states, called "perceptual moments," that last a tenth of a second. And, here too, the mechanism by which all this happens is via a network, this time of neurons, all acting by applying rules to local stimuli, such as surrounding neurons. It's a "new kind of science" yet again.
That's my other half point, then: I quite simply find it remarkable that the mind "samples" its sensory inputs, and derives conscious states based on them, at discrete time intervals.
Taken together, it would appear that both fundamental physics and neuroscience are going to nearly simultaneously jettison the notion of a continuous flow of time in favor of discrete increments. Soon, it may be the new received wisdom that not only does the universe update itself at discrete intervals, we update our perception of the universe at discrete intervals.
Let's pretend for a moment, for the sake of a nifty segue and the argument that follows it, that Eskimos do indeed have many precise words for snow because they are steeped in it — literally.
By the same token, then, it must mean something that the Swedish language has many more precise words for defining family relationships than does English. I've only just now realized this, because I myself have always been tone deaf when it comes to such words. This is something that I blame on my Dutch, by the way: That language is even less precise than English on this matter, since both nephews/nieces and cousins are called neven/nichten [Dutch].
In Swedish, the exact term for nephew/niece depends not just on the sex of the person in question, but also on the sex of the parent related to you. So the son of your brother is brorson, that of your sister systerson — and then there is brorsdotter and systerdotter for any nieces you might have.
This same logic applies to grandparents. With far meaning father and mor meaning mother, the four possible combinations are farfar, mormor, farmor and morfar. Unfortunately, this is farmor complicated than I can handle because I can never remember if the first bit begets the second or vice versaIt turns out the second bit begets the first.. But it gets farfar worse: Great grandparents also have precise definitions: quickly now, there's farfars far, farfars mor, farmors far, farmors mor, morfars far, morfars mor, mormors far, and finally, mormors mor, who recently was eulogized in this Kylie Minogue song (iTunes URL). Do you even know the names of any of your great grandparents?
Some Swedish words are too good to be kept by Swedes all to themselves and should be adopted by anglophiles immediately. In English, for example, "stepmother" is far too monolithic a notion: Swedes understand there can be bad, neutral and good step parents, and have dignified each with a proper term. There is styvmor, the kind that Cinderella had; plastmamma — literally, plastic mother — which is neutral; and finally, the wonderful bonusmamma, which means exactly what you think it does.
Now, why do the Swedes have so many words for relatives? Because they are dysfunctional socialists intent on banishing the family? Or because family is so important that each relationship is lovingly given due recognition? Or maybe because it facilitates keeping track of the score in Strindbergian family feuds? My guess is that the truth lies somewhere between options two and three.
Discovered via the "Oddly Enough" section of Yahoo! news: A wallet lost by an 18-year old girl in southern Sweden 40 years ago has just been returned anonymously via the post, with everything in it intact.
Here is the original story [Swedish] from a local paper, with picture. Here is the BBC's take, in English.
The story has intrigued a lot of news editors: The Reuters version has been picked up globally by at least 60 papers and news sites monitored by Google.
Why? Tritely, because it is an unusual occurence. A better reason might be that such stories resonate in us. We like to be assured that such occurences happen, if only occasionally. We like the idea that individuals make efforts on behalf of strangers, because it is a token of humanity's ability to empathize. More broadly, we need to believe that we can sometimes trump the random small cruelties of daily life. And we like to fantasize that out there, the things we've lost continue to have a life of their own, perhaps one day to be reunited with us.
Finally, the story resonates because we are curious; because the return of the wallet must have a larger plotMy own theory: Like Aristides Silk, the kleptomanic pickpocket in Tintin's The Secret of the Unicorn, somebody has been collecting wallets in Southern Sweden. That person has just died, and his widow is now disbanding the collection.. Is it a story of shame, or of benevolence? Did the anonymous mailer know the wallet's owner? Good fiction tends to start this way — the wallet was returned to the town of Trelleborg, which is not far from where Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander works; he'd discover a huge conspiracy involving stolen identities, human trafficking, and sex slavery.
Trelleborg is also not so far from H‰ssleholm, where the letter was written. That story, too, has not yet reached its end.
Stockholm is being overrun with small children. Everyone's getting them. This is a wonderful thing, but where do they come from? How do Stockholmers proceed from single to parent? There are plenty of either kind around, but what is missing from view is a clear dynamic for progressing from the former state to the latter. There is no visible culture of wooing here; the actual process of couple formation must occur well out of the public eye.
What is propelling this baby boom? What is this black box into which you drop singles and out of which march families? After extensive research, I've constructed a working, falsifiable theory: The black box is binge drinking.
Binge drinking is on the rise in SwedenInfo on alcohol consumption is culled from the European Comparative Alcohol Study, published in 2001, produced as part of the Swedish presidency of the EU.. Swedes still do not drink as much as the average European, but they do drink it all at once, on weekends. This is a clever bit of adaptation: It allows for bacchic pursuits that do not compromise weekday contributions to GDP. It's an entirely rational and considerate solution to to the problem of being rational and considerate and also horny.
Here is how I believe Swedes procreate, based on my research:
Let's start on a typical Friday, at 5.45pm, 15 minutes before the Systembolaget at Skanstull in Stockholm is set to closeSystembolaget is the state alcohol dispensing monopoly run by the prime minister's wife.: How to know when binge drinking is imminent? There is a queue for the machine that dispenses numbered tickets for the queue. Hundreds of people crowd in and await their turn. At 6pm sharp, policemen guard the doors against insistent latecomers. All purchased booze is hauled home, where it is consumed before heading out for the evening. The idea is to get drunk before going out because drinking anything remotely alcoholic at a bar is even more expensive.
Once at the bar, the buzz is maintained by buying "cheap" beer in copious quantities. Loose groups of mixed-sex friends sit around, eyeing each other up while clearly signaling they are drunk and hence to be absolved of any negative consequences subsequent actions might haveThere is little doubt that for Swedes, inebriation correlates strongly with sex. They even have a word for children born 9 months after midsummer's carousing: midsommarbarn [Swedish, but with interesting birth statistics]..
Actual expressions of interest are managed by a process of attrition. As groups head home, those people with a mutual interest in one another contrive to be the last to remain as the pack splits up. Typically, then, moves are attempted in the pit of night at deserted busstops, subway platforms, and entranceways.
If it doesn't work out, then both sides claim drunkeness. But if it does, the couple formation process accelerates rapidly. The pair, relieved at their gambit having worked, quickly opt out of what, frankly, amounted to a low-probability weekly crap shoot. Before long, larger economic forces come into play: Sharing an apartment is cheaper, but then you might as well get some perks from the state for doing so, and so you sambo.
This is how I think it happens. The remaining bit about how the children arrive should be self evident. One way to test this theory is to see if there is a correlation between binge drinking levels and birth rates, with birth rates hopefully lagging binge drinking levels by a year or two.
One question future researchers may want to look into is whether binge drinking is also an economic adaptation to the high price of alcohol. If it is expensive to get drunk enough to lose your inhibitions, you will tend to save up your resources for less frequent but more effective bouts. If this is indeed the case, we should see a less pronounced culture of binge drinking in Malmˆ, a city where the Systembolaget monopoly holds less sway on account of that city's proximity to Denmark and its lakes of cheap booze. Eventual effects on the birth rate may be more difficult to tease out, however: Restricting one's alcohol-fueled romantic pursuits to weekends may be a clever way of managing scarcity, but it should be a tactic jetissoned in times of plenty, in favor of a more sustained effort. Increasing the frequency of low-probability crap shoots is definitely an effective way of raising one's chances as the price of alcohol drops. In Malmˆ, then, the disappearance of binge drinking may be a leading indicator of increasing birth rates.
Policy implications are clear: If the Swedish government chooses to keep alcohol prices high, binge drinking should be encouraged as a means of maximising birth rates; but a better policy may be to let prices fall, so as to generate increased opportunities for mating. There may be far more Swedes on the way.
