Sweden's Health Care Pays Off

More casual Swedish empiricism:

The people of this industrial town look much better cared for than their US or UK counterparts. I haven't seen a single obese person in 24 hours of walking and running through this small town. Some of the young people wear tattoos, but none have slashed and studded themselves with the piercings and disfigurements you see on British working class youth. Nobody seems to have the idea of using clothing to assert membership in some subculture, or to stand out from the crowd, or even to seem alluring or sexy by local norms. The girls' clothing is as formless and drably colored as the boys'. The teenage girls wear the same easy-care hairstyles as the grown women.

Lots of kids, lots of strollers, not infrequently pushed by men, but almost always pushed by people who look older and grayer than the stroller-pushers in an American industrial town would be.

On the verandah outside the senior citizens center, the old people do not push oxygen tanks or support their bulk on motor scooters.

Consumer money visibly appears to be lavished upon cars, which are newer and larger and more numerous than you'd see in an industrial town in southern Europe.