The degradation comes from waves of austerity politics by right wing governments. These services are expensive and require staff to keep things going. Austerity ideology dictates that there simply must be inefficiency in public services, and cuts are the cure to this disease since this will cause the public sector to "make do and mend" and end up running more efficiently, rather than having a knock on effect and decrease the quality of the services. This is the policy direction responsible for the fall in the quality of public services in the UK, and for some reason Finland decided this was an excellent idea and is following suit. The SDP patched things up a little bit, but not as fast as things can be torn down.
I know basically nothing about Finland, and was curious about your comment as I find government spending an interesting topic. So the first thing I did was look up the government budget trends in Finland. [1] As an outsider it just seems that the Finnish budget is growing at an exponential pace? From 2010 to 2019 the budget went from ~50bn to 55bn per year, nearly managing to even create a balanced budget in 2018. From 2019 to to 2024 it seems to have grown to 90bn/year and is continuing to rapidly grow. There's certainly some expectation of an increased budget during COVID times, but it doesn't seem to be coming down, at all?
Finland has been a very poor country after WW II until the 1970s (compared to Sweden who had no war or Germany who lost the war). An economy best compared to Portugal or Greece.
The was a first overheating boom in the end of the 1980s, until a heavy recession took over in the 1990s. The next boom was Nokia driven in the 2000s until the global banking crisis. Since Nokia has fallen (well, it still exists but with a different business and more modest success) there has been little to no growth and heavy deindustrialization.
So basically Finland is back to the previous state of being a poor country with weak industry (I am exaggerating a bit). But the spending has continued to grow like the Nokia boom years had never ended.
Edit: Finland has one of the least favorite population pyramids in Europe. People getting older and no children. Very little immigration until maybe the last decade. And now a far right government with a strong anti-immigration agenda.
This is basically it, with the addition that Finland is no lomger in control of its own money. From the war up until adopting the Euro, Finland would devalue its currency a little over once a decade to keep commodity exports going.
The EMU is a mechanism effectively set up to extract wealth from the european periphery, for the benefit of Germany (and maybe to a lesser extent Framce). Finland is very much on the losing side, along with Greece, Portugal etc.
Perhaps with the difference that the culture is very protestant, with high trust in government. So rather than letting the situatiom deteriorate to what it was in southern Europe durkng the Euro crisis, the populace will flock to the stern faces speaking of deficits in the media, and dutifully vote them in.
> From the war up until adopting the Euro, Finland would devalue its currency a little over once a decade to keep commodity exports going.
True. When Finland dropped 2 digits from its currency in the 60s the Finnish Mark and the German Mark where roughly 1:1. When the Euro was introduced 40 years later the exchange rate was 3:1. So 200% inflation over the years more than Germany which was far from stable either. So Finland was a high inflation country all the time.
I don't think high inflation countries are known for good economy. Finland for example had massive emigration. I don't think by having continued the high inflation route after 2000 the situation would be significantly brighter today.
I don't understand this putting the blame on the EMU. The demise of Nokia has nothing to do with it. Finland getting de-industrialized also has nothing do do with it, but with the openness of the European market which brought us incredibly cheap commodities at the expense of our own industry. Even Germany is struggling.
> The EMU is a mechanism effectively set up to extract wealth from the european periphery, for the benefit of Germany (and maybe to a lesser extent Framce). Finland is very much on the losing side, along with Greece, Portugal etc.
Nonsense. „Devaluating the national currency“ is a euphemism for extracting wealth from the citizens without them realizing getting poor. The stability criteria are there to protect you from a government destroying your money.
I don’t get why so many Europeans think the Euro is hurting them economically while in reality it was holding them back (especially in Greece and Italy, their national currency was practically worthless). However, it takes time for member state governments to get used to an independent central bank.
The central government took full responsibility of funding healthcare, social services, and some other government functions in 2023. Before that, large part of the funding came from municipal governments.
Then there is the war in Ukraine. Normally, Russia is one of the most important trading partners of Finland. But when it doesn't know how to behave, a large part of foreign trade is missing, and the economy suffers.
> Normally, Russia is one of the most important trading partners of Finland.
Partially explains why there is no light in the tunnel of the state budget.
But it does not explain why many authorities are struggling with services for residents which worked better a decade ago. It is not so that authorities would have experienced severe cuts in budgets or headcount during the last 2 years.
> Austerity ideology dictates that there simply must be inefficiency in public services, and cuts are the cure to this disease since this will cause the public sector to "make do and mend"
There is some weird notion in populace that if we cut the funding, the public services will "get handle of themselves" and become more cost efficient. That's what a reasonable individual would do in tougher times. What happens in reality is that the nepotist core in public services will entrench and be fine or even better off, while the society will be told to suck it up.
Whereas if funding is increased, that same nepotist core will suddenly discover their spirit of public service and ensure the money is spent on better delivery, instead of further enriching themselves?
Honestly, the whole funding debate for public services is often so facile and ideologically entrenched. Both sides are right: Public services _are_ invariably inefficient, and cutting funding _does_ invariably do little to increase efficiency. But neither side will accept the validity of the other's argument and so we end up with this cycle of alternating governments imposing austerity and generosity.
The NHS used to be very efficient, when it was managed largely by clinical staff. Now it has as many professional managers as clinical staff, and they all have to be paid...
Also an awful lot of the NHS fuctionality is now farmed-out to private healthcare companies, who need their rake-off.
As far as "professional managers" is concerned, these guys are mostly NHS managers, not the kind of managers that could easily transfer into a private company. Their expertise is in some obscure corner of the NHS.
If the German government did "austerity" they wouldn't need half my wage to spend on literal nonsense. Look at the budget over the last decades, as if there wasn't enough money...
I've never actually looked at the German budget (quasi B1 deutschkenntnisse and no training in economics, what would I get from reading them?), what I can say is that it's very easy to fall into the trap described by Chesterton's fence and call for the removal of things because you don't understand them, not because they're actually bad.
For example, someone I used to know in the UK said much the same about his taxes paying for schools, just because he personally didn't have kids.
>For example, someone I used to know in the UK said much the same about his taxes paying for schools, just because he personally didn't have kids.
This isn't what I said. If I pay half of my wages to the state I would expect them to manage to staff government offices. Maybe besides defense, basic administration has to be the most important function of the government, as nearly every other activity relies on it. There is zero doubt in my mind that there is something less important in the budget than performing the core functions of any government.
Indeed, it was an example of the category alone, and not even intended to imply you have that specific detailed opinion.
Thing is, the stuff I linked to are all vague large-scale groupings, and I can't dig into any of them and say "Max Mustermann from the… *rolls dice* cultural affairs department, is spending too much on… *rolls dice* trying to promote Sendung mit der Maus to… *rolls dice* the Swiss" — and even if I could dig in at that level, I wouldn't be able to comprehend the value, only the cost.
(Würde jemand sagen, "von allem den Preis, von nichts den Wert", oder ist das nur die Uberzetsung des Oscar Wild Zitat?)
Social security is also the budget to allocate the money. It’s ridiculous expensive in Germany. For example. 3 billion is spent on jobless people… half of that goes to burocracy.
1.5billion per month is the salary of 300.000 office worker. So Germany needs 1 person to manage 10 persons … so why the fuck does it take 3-6 month until they reply ?
It’s , here the end of contract and give me money till I have a new job or for max a year.
> 1.5billion per month is the salary of 300.000 office worker.
A common suggestion I've heard, is that the cost of hiring someone is around twice their actual pay (things like insurance, HR, rent or maintenance on the office building, equipment, site security etc.), which means half as many case workers, and each case worker probably has 20 unemployed people.
> so why the fuck does it take 3-6 month until they reply ? It’s , here the end of contract and give me money till I have a new job or for max a year.
You could try working for them to find out? Ich vermute, dass meine deutschkenntnisse ist nicht gut genug für das.
My guess, based on all the customer support workplaces I've heard about is: 85% of the people in the system are basically fine, 10% have difficulty understanding the system, 5% are a colossal PitA who need to be constantly chased or are even outright disruptive — and most of the cost is with that 5%.
There may also be system errors, but I mean actual people — 5%, for various reasons from mental disorders, to being unaware how bad they are at the language (like my first two years in the country), and likely other categories, will need a lot of hand-holding to get through any particular system.
I often see comments like this, but what's a good solution to the ever expanding cost of public services (to the point most of western europe now has gov spending at 40%+ of gdp)? You do need to cut back if you're starting to run a significant deficit or more and more of your budget will go on interest payments.
Any large org tends to get more inefficient with time as it accumulates inefficient components it can't get rid of, but unlike companies, government departments aren't going to go bust and close down.
I genuinely don't know a good answer here, but would be curious about other people's.
> (to the point most of western europe now has gov spending at 40%+ of gdp)
Perhaps that's fundamentally barking up the wrong tree. West-European governments in the post WW2 era have had higher relative spendings then that, without every financial expert and their dog declaiming that doomsday is near and services need to be cut.
We've been able to finance better healthcare before, we've able to finance better education before, we've been able to finance better infrastructure before, etc. So which costs have risen out of proportion to the point that none of that is possible today.
>So which costs have risen out of proportion to the point that none of that is possible today.
It's not the costs that have rise sharply, it's the revenue and taxes that have declined since WW2 due to increased competition from globalization and the offshoring of jobs abroad, plus tax heavens aiding big corporation avoid paying taxes locally in western european countries, meaning governments today are missing out on a lot of income they used to get in the past, income which is now in places like China and in tax heavens.
I don't know of that's the cause, but it could be an interesting theory to look into.
But taking job offshoring, as an example. It could be fairly straightforward to determine how much tax revenue a car produced in, say, Germany, contributes to the economy, vs the same car imported from abroad. But where it gets complicated is that, German unemployment being low, the worker that lost his or her job to offshoring didn't turn out jobless, and by his or her work is still contributing to tax incomes. So what is the loss?
A lot of money is lost to tax havens, but the hourly productivity has also increased drastically, meaning that governments might still get more income per worker, per working hour. Governments are loosing in absolute terms, but have they lost income in relative terms?
The general feeling I have, is that a lot more money is lost to greed. As an example, we could take healthcare. It is undeniable that the average quality of healthcare has increased (for instance, looking at cancer suitability), but the cost of basic healthcare items have also, in some cases, increased disproportionately. (For instance looking at the cost of insulin in the US, or a dose of COVID vaccine, etc). So the general impression is that we are paying a lot more than before for only a slight increase in health and well-being.
And how does that apply to other trades? Construction costs have exploded, but we are not getting much better houses for it.
And therefore the general question was more: which parts of society are profiteering from forms of greed and price-gouging, how can we quantify that, and what can be done about it so that we, as a society can continue to improve on the care and the services we offer to our citizens, as opposed to accepting regression as the inevitable way forward.
Less bargaining power, that's a fact. But I'm not certain about the lesser wages.
I've been looking at the inflation + CPI index in Europe [0] over the 1990-2020 period. The result is that for an equivalent €100 in 1990, you would need to earn about €200 in 2023. According to [1], the wages in Germany have not increased enough (due to the well known wage stagnation of the 2000-2008 era). But the wages in France [2] (with data over the 2000-2023 period) have. Over the 2008-2019 period, the wages in both countries were increasing at the same rate.
The inflation + CPI index is not perfect, but it gives an indication of the costs changes of a "representative" consumer basket. With our sample of 2, this means that those basic costs have not increased disproportionately w.r.t. wages over the 1990-2023 time period. The pill was a bit harder to swallow for the Germans, but they also started at a higher level.
But what the inflation + CPI index totally fail to take into account is the explosion of other costs that now put single-income families in great difficulties w.r.t. a few decades ago. And the mechanism behind those costs increase is the one that would be interesting to understand and analyze.
But maybe those experts should've been raising alarm over this? Western Europe is doing pretty poorly when it comes to economic growth. And prior to that Germany got a lot of help from the US, Spain did not do well, Italy was questionable, Portugal did not do well. Netherlands did well, but a lot of it is down to their location as a place for trade. That only leaves France and Belgium. Did they do well?
>We've been able to finance better healthcare before
Modern healthcare is better than anything before. Even in its dysfunctional state it is better. Sure, you might have to wait longer to see a specialist, but the number of cases where the reply you get is "nothing we can do" is lower.
The things you mention are more expensive to provide today. One of the reasons is that our requirements for those services are much higher leading to much higher inherent costs.
> That only leaves France and Belgium. Did they do well?
Looking at France and the quality of their industrial output in the 70s to 90s, ranging from high-speed trains, rockets, passenger airplanes, Concorde, helicopters, (racing) cars, submarines, nuclear power plants, medical labs, etc. I would say yes. Their infrastructure has also been of high quality, so has the education system of their elites, and their healthcare.
And from what I could see of Belgium and their infrastructure, it also looked like that period was good for them.
> Modern healthcare is better than anything before. Even in its dysfunctional state it is better.
This is a more relevant point. The question is if we aren't well past a point of diminishing returns. For instance, for France, the data shows that the life expectancy of women was increasing by 2 years every 10 years, until 2010. It has increased by 0.5 years since then. The life expectancy of men followed a similar trend.
In fact, we might not have seen the full effect dysfunctional health care just yet, and we could be riding on the momentum of previous gains. And the ever increasing delays to see a specialist can only have detrimental effects in the long term. In parallel, the disproportionate increase of healthcare costs per patients means that, at some point, life expectancy is going to go down.
> One of the reasons is that our requirements for those services are much higher leading to much higher inherent costs.
No, I don't think I agree. The house you are getting has not improved 3 fold in quality compared to 20 years ago. The roads you are driving on are not 2 times better. Train travel is not a lot safer, nor faster, nor with more frequent service. On the contrary. The food quality in your supermarket has not improved. The electricity you use still has the same voltage and the same frequency. The clothes you wear are not of higher quality.
France also has kind-of a colonial empire still going on. Could that have an effect?
>The house you are getting has not improved 3 fold in quality compared to 20 years ago
That's true, but there is likely the 80/20 principle at play. Every additional level of quality costs more and more to achieve. Not to mention that often the increase of quality isn't really noticeable. Eg lead paint vs not, better wiring (fewer house fires), better insulation (lower heating costs), better air circulation (less mold) etc.
You also have the problem of survivorship bias. The old homes that are still used today are the probably the better ones. The worse ones from back in the day just didn't last.
But all-in-all, I can only suggest reasons. I'm from a former Soviet state. Some of the transformations are that good. Eg sidewalk roads actually feel 2x better if not more. These days they are nice and smooth roads you could skateboard on. Back in the day I'm not sure I would even want to ride a bicycle on them because they looked like the surface of the moon. And clothes are much cheaper in relative terms and even in absolute terms. But I think this is an exception and not a general trend.
> France also has kind-of a colonial empire still going on. Could that have an effect?
They were officially post-colonial by that time, and what is left is perhaps more a financial drain than a net income gain, although geostrategically invaluable.
> Every additional level of quality costs more and more to achieve. Not to mention that often the increase of quality isn't really noticeable. Eg lead paint vs not, better wiring (fewer house fires), better insulation (lower heating costs), better air circulation (less mold) etc.
They might increase cost, or they might not, as they are logical continuation of progress (as in, does lead-less paint really cost more to produce than leaded paint?) but in the end, they are "marginal" costs on a house, maybe in the order of 15%? So by themselves, they are not going to increase the price by 300%.
> I'm from a former Soviet state.
That brings a very different perspective, yes. Having spent quite a lot of time in eastern Europe, it is clear that the life experienced in that period was very, very different, and that many improvements where brought in, in quality and quantity.
But taking the road example, if you go to Belgium, you will have the joy of experiencing the inverse phenomenon, with a decrepit infrastructure that has been much, much better in the past. Imagine the moon surface you described, and then on a motorway, with cars driving by at 130 kph.. I've seen motorway signs covered in moss, as if an apocalypse had hit.
For clothes, I have items that were bought at the turn of the century and are still "wearable", but no recent clothing item seem to survive more than a year or two, independently of the cost. Which is an annoyance: I wouldn't mind paying more for something that lasts, but, so far, haven't found a brand that does. Of course, the current state of affair is an upgrade on the quality and quantity of clothing that was available in ex Eastern-block states. (Although, as bad as the fabric and colors were, I can only assume that they were built to last?)
Which I think is partially due to institutions becoming less efficient with time as more organizational scar tissue accumulates (certainly seen a lot of this at the companies I've worked for). Plus gov departments tend to accumulate extra low-return responsibilities from politician gimmicks (the mismatch between what sounds good in a headline and whats cost effective).
Which in turn I think comes from scope insensitivity, we just aren't good at understanding scale and underestimate defuse costs.
High government spending doesn't mean the government is bigger necessarily. The big expenses are just getting moved right back out to the private sector for agricultural subsidies, energy subsidies, etc...
The better metric would be how many employees work (directly or indirectly) for the government and then compare those numbers.
> Any large org tends to get more inefficient with time as it accumulates inefficient components it can't get rid of
This is really the crux of it. Same incompetence and inefficiency, we see in tech industry. Are there any serious studies on the disease that comes with scale, and possibly its cure?
Renewing your passport is quick and relatively painless in the UK. Founding a company is also reasonably easy. This reads like you have some chip on your shoulder about "austerity" and are needlessly bringing it up here.
It is strange because as a Brit living in Finland there are a for sure a lot of things better in Finland when it comes to public services but renewing ID documents and setting up companies absolutely aren’t.
> Austerity ideology dictates that there simply must be inefficiency in public services, and cuts are the cure to this disease
Over time I developed a more cynical theory. As politicians have extremely short-term understandings and targets, they abuse the latent momentum of public services to surf on the inherent delayed response before service quality goes down and gets noticed. By then, they can blame the cause on something else, and move on to the next cost-cutting measure.
Even if there is an outcry, they can gaslight citizens into believing either that a) it was not better before or b) the changes are an imperious necessity that cannot be reversed.
Either way, the personnel and knowledge has been lost, so the service (and the quality-of-life that came with it) are lost forever.
Excellent description, and further additions for the cynicism.
(opinion) Human society large rewards narcissism. Diligence is usually rewarded with exploitation. There's actually academic supporting the 2nd. Therefore, most politicians are largely selfish and mostly interested in being on TV, being the center of attention, and holding sway over other citizens. (Not all, just the majority). The only metric is "what gets elected." However, like "green" anything, the optimization is usually "do nothing, and color the corporate logo green."
Causes further issues. The optimization becomes, "focus on highly incendiary minutia, while avoiding anything risky, and maximizing viewer attention and anxiety." Issues that will allow them to say they're valiant, while exposing nothing especially damaging for the next election.
The American fiscal funding fiasco this / last year is typical. 6 months, and America finally has a budget. All the while, it's mostly arguments about minutia like "Homeland Security impeachment", who the speaker is, where Military can get abortions, whether a base will get funding, migrants on buses, and weekly CR shutdown "thwarting". It literally became weekly federal budgets around Feb-Mar in America... Meanwhile, a lot of enlisted in those abortion / base (yes/no?) states are wondering whether they're going to get paychecks. People on boats complain about having no ammunition to shoot with...
London's sewers are another excellent example. Dithering and dithering about repairs, about maintenance, about public toilets. Except the Thames is bright yellow, people won't go swimming, and when somebody asks, they're response is "well, btw, we're actually £18,000,000,000 in debt. Make -£2,000,000,000 per year. Have for years. Nobody even noticed. lolz." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thames_Water Obvious optimization, nationalize while decrying the evils of the private sector. Quietly also nationalize the debt to the public in a line item somewhere that nobody writes about. Squander resources for years. Sell back to industry claiming the salvation of capitalism.
> Quietly also nationalize the debt to the public in a line item somewhere that nobody writes about. Squander resources for years. Sell back to industry claiming the salvation of capitalism.
Ah, the privatization switcheroo.
1) Have a state develop and pay for expensive and necessary assets
2) Preach that privatization is necessary because -something-something-government == inefficient.
3) Take prized assets at a bargain price. Under-invest chronically and strip valuable assets
4) Get paid again when company is re-nationalized
5) Goto 2)
To make the different steps smoother, you can add a good government-industry revolving-door policy. Nothing helps capitalism efficiency more than a bit of cronyism.
> The degradation comes from waves of austerity politics by right wing governments.
There was a right wing government in Finland before 2019 and there is a more far-right wing government since last year.
I don't like either of them for their politics, but I cannot see how they could be blamed for authorities getting increasingly dysfunctional. They have not done anything like fired 50% or even 20% of the employees.
>The degradation comes from waves of austerity politics by right wing governments.
This is nonsense. Your statement is flatly an ideological talking point in no way backed by actual practical evidence or a reasoned argument of the situation. Government budgets in most european states, (Finland included) have continuously gone up for decades and increase in complexity. A strong ideological focus on claiming "right-wing austerity" has been a common narrative despite nothing about these growing budgets matching that at all. The very idea presupposes that any current amount of spending, no matter how large, has no business being criticized at all and that it's "extreme" to argue that the state could afford to be more agile in doing better with slightly less % of GDP.
Aside from the fact that government budgets are at record levels of economic output anyhow, no, the state shouldn't just automatically have a right to these absurd budgets with any pushback being called "austerity". or "right-wing".
We had a right leaning government for 16 years and the “Schwarze Null” was the most important for them. Now nearly everything is a fucking mess or near its limit. We don’t have staff for the most important parts of society… but we are one of the country’s with the least deficit.. nice … and now we need als the money to repair the ruins . Germany is a hellhole. The austerity was only so that they can still throw shits of money on the industry.
Not every government less cavalier with other people's money is "right wing," not every "right wing" government believes in austerity, and not every implementation of austerity means just haphazardly cutting services to the bone and letting the proles figure it out on their own. So I think it's a bit intellectually lazy to say "oh the government doesn't work because those crazy right wingers intentionally broker it!"
'Services' are things like education, trains, hospitals.
I don't want my taxes to pay for a desk that I have to go to to show my passport to someone so they can make me an ID card with the same information as the card that the man-with-the-gun-at-the-airport thought was OK enough to let me in to the country with, but the bank won't accept as strong enough proof of ID.
Bureaucracy is not a service.
