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The degradation comes from waves of austerity politics by right wing governments. These services are expensive and require staff to keep things going. Austerity

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.

lifestyleguru 3y ago
> 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.
- shoubidouwah 3y ago
  "Austerity is dropout"
- sotillan 3y ago
  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.
  - denton-scratch 3y ago
    > Public services _are_ invariably inefficient 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.
alibarber 3y ago
'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.
somenameforme 3y ago
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? [1] - https://vm.fi/en/the-budget https://vm.fi/en/the-budget
- ruszki 3y ago
  How much change is that in real value?
- thejohnconway 3y ago
  A combination of Covid, and the security situation with Ukraine and Russia perhaps.
- jltsiren 3y ago
  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.
  - usr1106 3y ago
    > 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.
- 3y ago
concordDance 3y ago
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.
- fransje26 3y ago
  > (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.
  - concordDance 3y ago
    > So which costs have risen out of proportion to the point that none of that is possible today. Basically all of them. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-disease/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost... 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.
  - Rinzler89 3y ago
    >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.
fransje26 3y ago
> 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.
- araes 3y ago
  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 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.
JetSetWilly 3y ago
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.
- alibarber 3y ago
  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.
constantcrying 3y ago
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...
- ben_w 3y ago
  One person's Schwachsinn is another's Vernunft. 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.
  - constantcrying 3y ago
    The data is published in English as well. https://www.destatis.de/EN/Home/_node.html https://www.destatis.de/EN/Home/_node.html >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.
    - ben_w 3y ago
      > The data is published in English as well. https://www.destatis.de/EN/Home/_node.html https://www.destatis.de/EN/Home/_node.html Dankeschön. If I'm reading this right (I may not be, see previous comment: I am not an economist), half of the revenue is spend on social security: https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Government/Public-Finance/EU-Directive-Budgetary-Frameworks/Tables/general-government.htm https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Government/Public-Finance/... This is weirdly out of date, I don't know why the link was to a URL from 2013 whose content is about 2017, but it says for that year, 57% was social security: https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Government/Public-Finance/Expenditure-Revenue-And-Financial-Balance-Of-Public-Budgets/Tables/public-expenditure-by-selected-functional-areas-2013.html https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Government/Public-Finance/... > This isn't what I said. 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?)
usr1106 3y ago
> 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.
dash2 3y ago
So the US is usually thought of as more right wing than Europe, so is bureaucracy worse in the US than Europe?
pc86 3y ago
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!"
southernplaces7 3y ago
>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".
- bratwurst3000 3y ago
  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.

lifestyleguru 3y ago

> 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.

shoubidouwah 3y ago
"Austerity is dropout"
sotillan 3y ago
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.
- denton-scratch 3y ago
  > Public services _are_ invariably inefficient 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.

alibarber 3y ago

'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.

somenameforme 3y ago

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? [1] - https://vm.fi/en/the-budget https://vm.fi/en/the-budget

ruszki 3y ago
How much change is that in real value?
thejohnconway 3y ago
A combination of Covid, and the security situation with Ukraine and Russia perhaps.
jltsiren 3y ago
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.
- usr1106 3y ago
  > 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.
3y ago

concordDance 3y ago

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.

fransje26 3y ago
> (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.
- concordDance 3y ago
  > So which costs have risen out of proportion to the point that none of that is possible today. Basically all of them. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-disease/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost... 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.
- Rinzler89 3y ago
  >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.

fransje26 3y ago

> 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.

araes 3y ago
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 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.

JetSetWilly 3y ago

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.

alibarber 3y ago
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.

constantcrying 3y ago

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...

ben_w 3y ago
One person's Schwachsinn is another's Vernunft. 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.
- constantcrying 3y ago
  The data is published in English as well. https://www.destatis.de/EN/Home/_node.html https://www.destatis.de/EN/Home/_node.html >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.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    > The data is published in English as well. https://www.destatis.de/EN/Home/_node.html https://www.destatis.de/EN/Home/_node.html Dankeschön. If I'm reading this right (I may not be, see previous comment: I am not an economist), half of the revenue is spend on social security: https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Government/Public-Finance/EU-Directive-Budgetary-Frameworks/Tables/general-government.htm https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Government/Public-Finance/... This is weirdly out of date, I don't know why the link was to a URL from 2013 whose content is about 2017, but it says for that year, 57% was social security: https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Government/Public-Finance/Expenditure-Revenue-And-Financial-Balance-Of-Public-Budgets/Tables/public-expenditure-by-selected-functional-areas-2013.html https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Government/Public-Finance/... > This isn't what I said. 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?)

usr1106 3y ago

> 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.

dash2 3y ago

So the US is usually thought of as more right wing than Europe, so is bureaucracy worse in the US than Europe?

pc86 3y ago

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!"

southernplaces7 3y ago

>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".

bratwurst3000 3y ago
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.