Sweden tried to fix the wealth gap with a massive school reform, but it totally backfired and made the gap even bigger 30 years later.
March 27, 2026
Original Paper
Taking an Extra Moment to Consider the Distribution Effects of Education
SSRN · 6473482
The Takeaway
While the reform succeeded in making everyone's school grades more similar, it paradoxically caused the eventual economic rewards of that education to become more unequal. This suggests that equalizing classroom performance does not necessarily translate to a more equal society.
From the abstract
This paper analyses whether a major Swedish school reform with the explicit aim of reducing inequalities did, in fact, reduce inequalities. To this end we introduce a simple empirical framework --- Parameter Estimation by Raw Moments (PERM) --- that allows applied researchers to estimate treatment effects on distributional parameters such as variance and skewness, as well as multiple outcome parameters such as the covariance using common research designs. PERM works by separately estimating tre