Seriously tho, care to elaborate?
Now the state has more employees and will continue growing to attain more power, and thereby more voters. Having worse public services than 10 years ago while the spending has increased drastically is a bad sign.
That being said, it'll have to get drastically worse before ordinary people realize where their money went, and then it might shift
It has however been heavily criticized. It seems like he had a point to prove and found numbers that fit with his view, and not a neutral description. He also seems to ignore that the trends he points to, also exists in other countries.
That said, he does raise some valid concerns. The number of employees in the public sector grows, even under conservative governments. Part of the reason is that Norway can afford it at the moment. Another reason is that the number of rules and regulations increases, and the government needs more people to enforce them.
The latter is mostly a political issue, and something that also happens in countries that are not wealthy. The author's solution is to reduce taxes and cut public spending.
-is based on network effects
-has utility to both payor and payee
-long modelled as "from each according to his ability to each according to his need"
-is already practically believable
-only synonymous with "gambling"
The point is that leveraging some subtle disparities in EV* would what'd be necessary for something like the above "ideologies" to "work" over time (although so far the politicians on the whole don't think like this)
*usually supported by better data and models, which is what governments that don't piss the people off with taxes are good at
https://www.nationalaffairs.com/public_interest/detail/welfa...
The other crap doesn't work because it tends to devolve into dictatorship of the few and/or paralyzed committees if the dictatorship of the few isn't casting its gaze on that aspect of the government. This happens because the model of good and evil in each of these ideologies isn't internal, it's the competent people who made it are bad and everyone else is good and would be better if they just had some of the bad guys money. They tend to build hierarchies instead of intermixed/interregulating groups and they are always surprised when they are usurped and turned into a dictatorship of the one/few by someone operating in their own interest because good and evil are not external, it's an internal battle within all of us (good and evil is convenient, could be framed as selflessness/selfishness or any number of other dichotomies.)
>The lesson which Swiss social insurance administrators have learned from the insurance business generally is that client behavior usually changes in response to administrative actions--and that benefit levels should be structured to account for these changes.
From the linked pdf, but of course being a direct democracy with sustainable cross-tribal communal traditions probably helps.
Partially towards your point: the swiss (municipal) governments have strong yet uniquely mutually beneficial ties* to the private sector--that often result in "corruption" in other democracies--
As mentioned, would need to think further with special regards as to how one should persuade "crap-artists" towards more rational "world-models". the idea of internality seems productive for that.
*personnel and knowledge and competency exchange without uh "mission exchange"
(Tangentially: the Swiss take of pan-Germanic "spiessig" ("karen") probably suggests that they are not conservative in the normal sense of that word)
This isn't what I am talking about as a problem with the socialism/communism/etc, it's a basic feature of repeated models with intelligent agents (of which life is a passable example of) If you keep a system the same people will maximize their own benefit over time within it. I think it's a big part of why systems with lots of checks and balances work so well over strong hierarchies. They are inherently unstable (and in the best case unstable in a way that destroys socially sub optimal behaviour like market power abuse). The dynamism prevents the worst of the power concentration that happens in hierarchies.
I personally don't think you can convince many of the crap-artists from believing their crap because it has a bunch of religious qualities to it so is very hard to deprogram. It would be nice if we stopped letting these people anywhere near children with this crap so as to avoid the worst of the brain cancer spreading but that's probably the extent of what we can do. The idea that there is some bad rich guy causing all your personal problems and all one has to do to fix your problems is steal more from that rich guy is alluring because the alternative of fixing yourself is hard and people seem to have a myriad of mechanisms to other problems to be able to endure them.
Is this controversial on the left?
If the answer is no, then it's very controversial.
1) Norway oil + mining, which finance a large service sector that "is the bulk of the economy" (except not really: it would be 90% smaller without the resources)
2) Sweden mining + chemicals, which finance a large service sector around that
3) Finland mining + forestry, a large chemicals sector, which finance a large service sector around them like in Norway
They all do large scale resource extraction, which then supports the economy on top of them.
They all have oil money. Frankly the closest country to them that doesn't have a large resource base is Belgium, and they only have a service sector because they used to have a large resource extraction base recently that is dying (still not quite dead). Now they're ... well, pretty much their business is becoming government (they have a lot of huge governments and large international organisations on their territory. EU, NATO, SWIFT, Benelux, at least 10 Belgian govenerments, ...)
This is what people don't seem to realize. This is how it works. The question, of course, is how to make it work without resources. Even the Ottoman arabs were doing fine in economy until the west conquered them and decided Jesus demands we force them to stop the resource they were exploiting on a large scale (black slaves, not that they didn't exploit European, Indian or even Chinese slaves, but in much smaller numbers)
It's not really about services, is my understanding..
Music, Merchandise and the third M I can't recall.(Not movies, they are too uh context-dependent-- not precisely centralized because Hollywood processes are far from that)
Since financial or even governancial services can be thought of as extractive, what a country needs are cross-class meaning-agnostic exports that foreclose getting cynical about "creating value"
Ah.. got it! Meals
Sorry programmers!
Sweden is considered a socdem >> benelux+rest of nordics thanks to ABBA & IKEA meatballs, even though the reality is flipped.. UK is going down the toilet because her last "comparative advantage" of music production has been .. braindrained
Denmark of TFA has created a new category M Medical research
Also the rural urban etc divides
At that point then everyone takes credit for how well that all works.
This is like pointing out that Bill Gates' household proves how communism works on a small scale.
Sweden doesn't have much oil revenues as far as I know
logscope•4mo ago
jghn•4mo ago
brabel•4mo ago
Also, salaries vary wildly between professions, lots of things, like rail lines, which are usually thought of as government concerns are privatized, neighbourhoods are more and more unequal (in Stockholm, you can go from a place where the humblest dettached house costs above 12 million SEK - around 1.3 million USD) to another where the starting price is more like 3 million SEK without travelling very far). It's definitely not "the same" everywhere (segregation based on ethnicity is crazy high, but that's another story).
So, I find it hard to consider Sweden to be anything like what you would associate with socialism (the only "socialist" thing in my opinion is the sales of alcohol - which is monopolized by the Government - but even that started opening up recently as they allow producers to started selling directly to the public from their production locations - like breweries).
[1] https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/topics/policy-issue...
PaulHoule•4mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_democracy
as opposed to the "workers control the means of production" idea of Marx, Lenin and such. You tax individuals and businesses and use those provide certain services. There's also the idea that you have legislation to protect workers (minimum wage, 40 hour week), consumers (air bags in cars) and the environment (no lead in gas.) Other than that you let capitalists do what they do best.
What I can't get is that so many people get so angry at the idea that poor people, or at least poor people younger than 65, could have access to health care in the US.
delichon•4mo ago
That's a pretty glib dismissal for real pain. Before Obamacare, in the nearest major city I could make an appointment with a gastroenterologist on a Thursday and see him on the following Tuesday. Now it is over six months for an appointment, and then for every subsequent appointment ... to see a nurse, not a doctor. There used to be five doctors in my rural county, now there are zero. While insurance premiums have skyrocketed. From my point of view healthcare has crumped. You then summarize my dismay as anger at the idea of poor people getting access to healthcare, like what else could it be other than class bigotry?
PaulHoule•4mo ago
gsf_emergency_2•4mo ago
I gather that the main (meta-)issue, as you are kind of insinuating here, is that, for healthcare, there is a conflation of inflationary and deflationary processes..
(Sorry to go on what might seem to be a reductive tangent here, as I often do when pressed. I have further takes on Klein vs Shapiro for later)
My roughshod framing of (one) solution is that there has to be sustained deflationary pockets in a mildly inflationary phase
Probably mirrored by such proposals for housing as
https://devonzuegel.com/for-the-greater-good-the-game-theory...
PaulHoule•4mo ago
It does seem that, against all odds, Obamacare really did "bend the cost curve" and slow down the growth in health care costs. After a rough patch decade or so when we didn't get new "blockbuster" drugs we are now getting drugs like Wegovy and Cobenfy which cost a lot but promise savings elsewhere.
[1] that said, a doctor really should know what to do when somebody with a rare condition that they'll only see once in their career and working a 996 schedule at a university medical center does give the experience for that.
gsf_emergency_2•4mo ago
Things seem to get muddled with global pipelines (your breakthru drugs come from Nordic R&D) but I'd argue that therein (Obamacare-type bipartisan stewardship) lies the real argument for a "inputs-first" post-fossil Abundance
gsf_emergency_2•4mo ago
On the downside, claiming to speak for all of Nordica is quite a Danish thing to do
gsf_emergency_2•4mo ago
*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freetown_Christiania#Culture
would be considered uh unglamorous in Sweden
kevinfiol•4mo ago
piva00•4mo ago
Just an addendum that most Nordic countries don't have that, those are set on collective agreements between employers and employees, typically through an union.
PaulHoule•4mo ago
Right now we have a lot of huge houses with massive master bedroom suites in Arizona and very little high speed rail but if there was union labor to build those houses and non-union to build the rail it would be the other way around. As it is we have a "labor aristocracy" that fought efforts to establish universal health care for 40 years because good health benefits are a reason to take a union job.
jghn•4mo ago
This is where I was going with my question. It seems unlikely that they live in a truly socialist environment
lawlessone•4mo ago