It was a Nordic scholar, which country it belonged to, and Zhu Jinglun couldn't remember it, and maybe even more than one country, more than one person told him that in those years, the Nordics liked to export their worldview all over the world, and there were a large number of such scholars.

Zhu Jinglun remembers that some people said that the negative effects of the so-called high welfare are actually the lowest in East Asian countries. Because their research found that Singapore has improved social welfare, Singaporeans have not become lazy, Japanese have improved social welfare, Japanese people have not become lazy, Koreans have done so, and Taiwanese have done the same.

Western scholars have found after studying some African countries, tropical countries in Southeast Asia. Some foreign-funded companies, in order to increase the working hours of the locals, increased the hourly wage income, but the results are incredible, because the locals do not increase the working hours to earn more money, but reduce the working hours, after they have earned enough living expenses, they are no longer working, and the hourly wage increases, so that they can earn more work in less time.

The same is true in European countries, where workers in Catholic countries such as Spain and France tend to work fewer hours than earn more.

Western scholars argue this phenomenon from the perspective of religious culture, and they believe that Western Catholicism and Protestantism are two different cultures, pursuing different values, Catholicism pursues the maximization of leisure, and Protestantism pursues the maximization of returns.

After comparing them with the Eastern countries, they found that the East Asian countries performed best in this regard. Whether it is South Korea, Japan, or Singapore, there is a phenomenon. Those who can obviously enjoy a generous pension after retirement, if their health allows, many people do not go to leisure time, but continue to stay in their jobs through reemployment and other situations, while receiving reemployment wages and pensions, what they pursue is the ultimate profit maximization. As for rest, many people say that there is a time to rest when they die.

The special culture of East Asia is not based on pleasure, so the savings in this region are also among the highest in the world. Before real estate became an industry, few families would be in debt, save all their spare money, and do not pursue excessive enjoyment. Even if you save enough for your life's expenses, you still save it, save it for your children and grandchildren, and save it for future generations.

This kind of workaholic culture, of course, is different from the West, the Protestant countries that have the right to speak, are not used to those Catholic countries that spend money when they have money, and they are not used to looking at the Chinese who save money when they have money. So while criticizing Catholics for not having a sense of frugality, they also scolded the Chinese as working machines.

These worldview disputes aside, East Asian cultures are the most well-suited for welfare.

Some Japanese scholars have put forward a point of view as to why this is happening, and they believe that at the time of the industrial revolution in the West, a kind of social adjustment called the "diligent revolution" was being carried out in East Asia. Given the extreme asymmetry of population and resources, East Asian countries do not expand outward like the West, but tap deep into their internal potential and devote a huge amount of labor to the development of limited domestic resources. That is, to put more and more labor into the land, so that the output per unit of land can be increased, so as to feed the population base that the West cannot feed.

Under the pressure of this reality, various cultures emphasizing diligence began to emerge in East Asian cultures, raising "diligence" to a moral level.

So you can live even if you don't work, but morality condemns this kind of behavior, you are a young person who doesn't go to work, and stays at home all day, even if your parents can afford to raise you, but you will be gossiped about, and when everyone is saying that you are lazy, young people will not dare to stay at home.

This culture gave Zhu Jinglun firm confidence that he decided to promote the redistribution of social wealth, and as for the negative effects of high welfare, he decided to refer to the Nordic solution.

After the 1970s, the high welfare policies of countries such as Sweden, which had eaten up the benefits of the World War II war, began to be unsustainable, because too many people began to be reluctant to work, and the Workers' Party government did not dare to reduce benefits, resulting in a surge in government debt, and even when you could get a lot of income even if you didn't work, and even when you took sick leave more than you would get from working, the Protestant culture was not good.

Similarly, even if the Chinese pursue hard work, once they can live well without working, no one will work, they like to save because they are full of uncertainty about the future, once the country can guarantee their future, the culture of diligence will be gone.

When the welfare state benefits are too generous, unemployment benefits are close to normal wages, taxes are too high, and all the money earned so hard is taxed, who will work? No one works, no one makes money to pay taxes, and how can welfare be maintained.

The Nordic approach is through education, not to educate the people about the ethics of hard work, but through a variety of special vocational education, so that people can find happiness in their work, people need to work, this is an objective law, most people if they really don't work, but will feel uncomfortable. The reason why people don't like work is largely because work is not fun, especially in the industrial age, which requires people to work like machines, which is even more destructive to human nature.

Through a variety of reasonable vocational training, everyone in the Nordics has the skills to work in the profession they like, and if they don't like it, they can continue to train in other occupations until they find a job they like. In this way, in a generation, the Nordics have reversed this situation, and the proportion of women working in them has reached 80 per cent, which is higher than in most countries.

This situation also encountered a challenge later, that is, after a large influx of immigrants, when immigrants found that they did not have to work hard to integrate into the Nordic society, as long as they could live on the social benefits of the Nordics, this became a Nordic tax to support foreign immigrants, and these immigrants who did not work, had a lot of hours, and did not understand the culture chose to have more children, and the more children they had, the higher the subsidy, which caused a lot of social problems.

That's a different story.

Zhu Jinglun considered that the problems encountered by the Nordics were caused by their own radicalism, such as the Nordic countries ruled by the Workers' Party, which overemphasized the interests of the workers, and finally caused inefficiency. This kind of problem does not exist in China today, and the problem in China now is that there is no welfare at all, and once the workers are unemployed, they cannot even meet the basic guarantees, and even if they work, they are not rich, and this is not a question of enjoyment, but a matter of survival.

Therefore, Zhu Jinglun's determination to establish a welfare system will never waver.

But when he told the officials of the three provinces and six ministries about his attitude, there was a wave of opposition.

Shang Shuling Hurd is a relatively weak prime minister, not because of his weak personality, but because of his identity, he is an Englishman, but because he is an Englishman, he believes in the British set of liberal economic theories.

This is already the 1901s, various economic theories have appeared, and Lao Ma's Capital has been issued for decades.

Hurd and some technocrats who have accepted the economic power of the West collectively oppose it, believing that Zhu Jinglun's view that the establishment of a welfare system is to imitate Germany's example, and that it is difficult to implement it in China, and their reasoning is very simple: if people can get income without working, they will only raise a large group of lazy people, and they naturally believe that it is a natural law that does not work and cannot eat, and it is applicable everywhere.

Zhu Jinglun had a heated discussion with him and told everyone that the purpose of his establishment of the welfare system was not the purpose of Germany, nor was it what Bismarck said, "those who expect pensions to rule better," and that the real purpose was to enrich the people and make everyone rich.

But it was still difficult to convince officials. They said privately that this was a dream of the emperor, but he wanted to use it to govern the country.

Zhu Jinglun lamented that the government he created had changed a long time ago, and he suddenly missed the government composed of a group of pedantic scholars and doctors, they were pedantic, but they had the spirit of people-orientedness, even if they didn't do it, they would sigh that the people were poor and the people were weak. Now it is good that these officials have no mercy for the poor, believing that they are poor because they are lazy, because they are born stupid, and they deserve to be poor.

Their thinking is not the traditional "people for the state" mentality, but the social Darwinism of the jungle.

They can't be blamed, politicians all over the world mostly do this, it's a popular idea in the world. It is precisely the social currents of thought that are born out of the workers' culture that oppose this notion. In some countries, both ideas go to extremes and finally revolution breaks out, while in other countries, the two concepts are compromised and finally enter the welfare state.

Revolution is always the most costly way to change, and if it can be avoided, Zhu Jinglun definitely does not want to see it.

Now the signs of this are already happening, in the 1880s in Japan began to appear in the workers' movements and in China in the 90s, large and small organizations have emerged, some of them hold all kinds of social ideas popular in the West, and some even hold revolutionary ideas.

These organizations are not just set up spontaneously by poor workers, on the contrary, most of them are actually established with the participation of the more affluent elite. The first batch of trade unions were established by some technical experts from the West in the factory, as well as technical backbones who returned from studying in the West.

Most of the organizations established by these elites do not intend to revolution, they just want to negotiate better workers' treatments, higher jobs, and better working conditions.

As soon as the purpose of these rational organizations is not satisfied, those extreme organizations will stand up, and even rational organizations that do not see hope will begin to go to extremes.

Zhu Jinglun was amazed to find that in terms of ideology, the elites with a rich conscience, whether they were new intellectual elites or traditional scholars, their thinking was actually the same.

Or is it really what Hu Shi said, at the level of all human good morals, the traditional virtues of all countries are interconnected, and the Confucian idea of benevolence and filial piety and etiquette culture are not unique to Chinese, but are common in the cultures of all ethnic groups around the world.

Zhu Jinglun found that it was difficult to get these current technocratic officials to stand on the same side as him by persuasion, and even if some policies were forcibly passed, without their active support, it would be difficult to achieve good results in the end.

After thinking twice, he decided to invite Chen Zhiting back.

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