The least helpful contribution one can conceivably make in any economic debate is to recommend that one country adopt the social model of another. That is guaranteed to get you absolutely nowhere.

These days, it is difficult to find a European think-tank that does not advocate adoption of the Scandinavian social model. But the notion that the social model in small, consensual, wealthy and ethnically homogenous northern European countries such as Sweden and Denmark should serve as a model for large economies with huge wealth and income differences and mass immigration such as Germany or Italy is surely bordering on insanity.