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> The reality is that Finland won't be any richer (nor poorer, of course) if it spent 1+ billion euro on some EU or even Finnish alternative to MS. If Finland
by akdor1154 1y ago
> The reality is that Finland won't be any richer (nor poorer, of course) if it spent 1+ billion euro on some EU or even Finnish alternative to MS.
If Finland sends €1B to the U.S, then there's €1B more on a U.S. balance sheet.
If Finland sends €1B to Finish companies, then clearly Finland has €1B more in it than it otherwise would.
So 'Finland the government balance sheet' would be unchanged, but 'Finland the aggregate of people and businesses' would indeed be richer.
- ls612 1y agoThis is just as ignorant of comparative advantage as Liberation Day was.
- rwyinuse 1y agoYep, what I was thinking weren't just direct cost savings, but the ways how what money would flow to other parts of Finnish economy had it stayed here, instead of going to America. We're in recession, there are way too many fresh IT grads, and even experienced devs are having it hard in this job market. Ultimately this affects every area of our economy, as unemployed people aren't buying houses or spending much on services. Shifting some spending from MS licenses to developing local solutions would almost certainly have a positive impact on our whole economy, even if the solutions weren't any cheaper in the end. It should be also noted that we have a state-funded education system. It seems incredibly dumb to use lots of public money to train programmers, and then have them sit unemployed, while using more public money to buy mediocre software written by other programmers beyond European Union.