Plenty of good material in this new article for Economic Affairs, drawing extensively from Zitelmann's book In Defense of Capitalism: Debunking the Myths
(Full disclosure; I helped translate this book into Swedish for Svensk Tidskrift, the publisher that Ydstedt, one of the co-authors above, runs).
Some nice extracts:
Despite Sweden's transition away from its experiments with socialism since the 1990s, many younger people outside the country still regard it as a model of this political ideology. In the ranking of the world's most economically free countries, Sweden is nowadays one of the ten most market-oriented economies
Before ramping up the massively bloated welfare state and generous maternity leaves for which the country is now known, it had relatively lower taxes and a relatively freer economy than most other countries. As a result, it went from third-world level poverty and mass emigration during the 1800s to economic flourishing and abundance in the 20th C.
for the whole period 1870 to 1970 economic growth in Sweden was the second highest in the world, and the country became the fourth richest in the world 1970.
Relative to other countries, today Swedes have predominantly a more positive view on markets, international trade, and the rich. On taxes -- despite having one of the world's harshest and most exploitative tax systems in the world at the upper tranches -- Swedes (together with Vietnam and Poland) are outliers here, favoring high (but not too high) taxes and generally opposing using the rich and productive members of society as milking cows:
That's probably one of my favorite graphs in the research.