Into the Woods

Scotland 2070: Healthy, Wealthy, Wise. Ian Godden, Hillary Sillitto, Dorothy Godden. College Publications (London), 2020. 218 pages.

What would it take for Scotland to attain the same level of wealth and wellbeing as the Nordic countries? This book lays out a fifty-year plan for accomplishing that. What’s remarkable about this book, though, is that its ideas easily translate to any country looking to the future.

I first became aware of this book from an article April 17 in the Guardian, “An independent Scotland could turn to Denmark for inspiration.” I ordered the book from Amazon.

Though one of the book’s subtitles is “An ambitious vision for Scotland’s future without the politics,” it’s not entirely true that there is no politics in the book. It’s pretty clear that the authors’ view is that Scotland can optimize its future only by breaking with the United Kingdom and becoming independent. The authors, though they are highly educated, are not scholars. They’re businesspeople. In the U.S., it’s generally safe to assume that businesspeople believe in conservative notions of small government, low taxes, keeping working people on the brink of starvation with no safety net so that they’ll work for cheap until they drop dead, crummy education, health care as a profit center rather than a means of keeping people healthy, and a manipulative and deceptive politics that ensures that people are preoccupied with cultural grievances and thus never figure out who is really eating their lunch. These Scottish businesspeople are the opposite of that. The central principle — a principle at last being advocated by America’s Democratic Party — is that government exists to serve the people. This is in opposition to the neoliberal principle that has reigned for decades, that government exists to serve private profit.

Twenty-five years ago I fell in love with Ireland on my first trip there. But Ireland has changed in the past 25 years, and not for the better. Ireland chose a low-tax, low-productivity, low-knowledge, low-education, low-equality neoliberal strategy. Global money thus poured into Ireland. The authors of this book use kinder language about Ireland’s mistakes. I’m more blunt. The way I’d put it is that Ireland greatly damaged itself and its people by becoming a global tax whore. But I’ve also been in Denmark a couple of times, where I admired the contrast between Denmark and Ireland and how Denmark has developed a prosperity that serves its people rather than the global rich. Scotland, on the other hand, has been pretty much in stasis, largely because Scotland is a tail wagged from Westminster. The United Kingdom — or should I say England — seems too inclined to waste time and opportunity by nursing its cultural hurts, which is holding Scotland back. If Scotland does become independent in the future, the power of global money would do everything possible to turn Scotland into another Ireland. The authors of this book understand that. It would be up to the people of Scotland to choose a better path by looking north rather than south, and that’s the point of this book.

Though it’s tempting to list the key points of this book’s vision, I think I won’t, because it’s a book worth reading no matter where one lives. I will say this, though. That vision of the role of government and the demands of the future have a great deal in common with the vision that President Biden has brought to Washington. California, America’s most progressive state, just announced a $75 billion budget surplus. Voodoo economics has had its day. It’s time to get serious about a sustainable green economy, with major new investments in education, health, and infrastructure broadly defined.

Go for it, Scotland.