Summary
On Neuvotteluklubi, Otto Juote and MP Tere Sammallahti dissect the summer’s hottest political drama: minister Wille Rydman’s STEA cuts and allocation criteria, which forced the NGO sector and the political parties to show their cards. The discussion broadens to Veikkauskratia, the mechanism by which taxpayers’ money circulates through organisations and lobbying agencies back into lobbying politicians. Statistics Finland’s GDP revisions reveal that the Orpo government’s growth figures were better than thought, and the Marin government’s figures weaker than thought. Finally, they consider whether artificial intelligence could replace a significant share of the public sector’s 700,000 employees by 2031, and why Finland’s real fundamentals, such as the birth rate and the emigration of skilled workers, remain overshadowed in the debate. The episode ends with the question of whether the system will correct itself from within, or whether the IMF is needed to discipline the Finns.
Transcript
English transcript derived from validated English subtitles (WebVTT · SRT). Timestamps link to the original video.
00:00 All right, welcome to the Neuvottelijaklubi. With us are Otto Juote and senator Teräs .. Tere Sammallahti. Hey there. Greetings. Hi there. Hi. That Teräs Sammallahti, though. You’re just being tested. It’s a rhetorical technique called steelmanning Yeah, you’re really getting roughed up a bit there and, um, usually that’s more like strawmanning, yeah, but, um, my opinion is that people should actually do more steelmanning. Well, but you get used to it. It’s nothing. Yeah, so, parliament is on summer break and but um the permanent secretaries are grinding away for government harmony. So the Finns Party’s minister in charge, Ville Rydman, set off this kind of classic ‘off we go into summer’ drama, where, um, he announced that the social-sector cuts are proceeding within his, um, ministerial limits, and these have even been agreed within the government, that these will go ahead, and not a single social-sector organisation will then
01:00 get more than 10 million, though. This is a small relief, so, um, I understand that the minister in charge then even gets to make political decisions on these himself. This is talking about STEA, but STEA anyway, yeah, so, um, what do we think about this summer drama? Usually they’re some kind of anti-racism campaign, at this point there’s always this thing where Orpo digs up that government paper that has the anti-racism, um, promise. Right, right, well the Finns Party has a knack for always surprising people right before summer, like of course we’d manage fine without these too. But in itself this is a really interesting situation for me personally, in that on one hand I didn’t really see in Rydman’s um, criteria that he set. I think it’s important here for everyone to understand two things. Nobody is backing away from the cuts that are being made to STEA funding right now. So the timeline is that the previous government moved these old Veikkaus profit funds over into the state’s budget economy side, and then their nice idea was that this way you’d protect this, this old Veikkaus [unclear]
02:03 from, like, the drop in Veikkaus fund returns, and, and I myself wondered about this logic, because it was of course totally obvious that since we’d been wading through [unclear] and the deficits are wild, so, so then that also needed to be targeted with savings, and of course as far as I’m concerned they could even stop looking at those funds entirely, those funds, but, um, that this government has now cut roughly 200 million euros from this STEA funding. Something like 195, I’d guess, was left now. And what this controversy is actually about is how minister Rydman has then, for these remaining funds, set these distribution criteria. Well, everyone can have their own opinion about those. In my opinion they’re actually even a tiny bit too loose, like. Based on them you can distribute still terrifying amounts of money, like, all over the place, really, without any kind of impact assessments. And then some of us, meaning the National Coalition crowd, might have been worried about some other issues, but maybe this now, in my opinion, revealed all sorts of things about all sorts of
03:07 parties, and maybe the most important thing to look at now is how totally panicked that old, old NGO-world really is, because now they don’t actually know what’s going to happen to their funding. But um, I expect Otto’s much more sophisticated analysis, and we’ll get back to those, those things that are actually important. Right, but maybe it, it could be that it’s actually pretty raw and somehow, um, brutal. But, well, I mean, where that controversy came from — well, of course it’s that [unclear], or whatever you want to call the Veikkauskratia now, isn’t separable at all from the parties. So, I mean, why there was that kind of panic and panic and, um, this kind of foot-dragging — well that of course relates to the fact that really all of, um, well especially maybe the older government parties have their own cow in the ditch. They’ve got their own people in those,
04:09 in those organisations, drawing a fat salary, and I don’t know what Rydman actually did — he used his ministerial power exactly the way he’s supposed to, in his own domain, and there’s really nothing controversial about it. If he had increased some budget, or shuffled some money shadily into some pet cause of his own, the controversy wouldn’t be nearly as big as it is from him going in so brazenly to cut, and actually the worst thing he did was set it up so that he basically forced everyone to show their cards. So he can keep saying, well, tell me now what, where the problem is — is it now some recreational fund from Folkhälsan, or um, do you have some refugee center somewhere that brings in nice rental income, so then the money, the money would just go, like, from [unclear] — money that just misses the mark, kind of, if a great, great organisation got a little less money so the reason it’s such beautiful politics is exactly that
05:13 in a way Rydman basically forces those opposing these cuts into a really awkward position. Well, I’ll, I’ll latch onto that. This is I mean, completely true, and, and in my opinion the right analysis — of course these government-harmony things, and, um, in the name of that, we still have almost a year of the road together, and a hell of a lot of big things, um, to handle, so it would of course be nice if things were handled more smartly behind the scenes there, but I agree that basically when the cards are forced out into the open, then citizens also have the chance to assess and weigh different politicians’ and parties’ own agendas, and in this case, of course, the political move was pretty successful. Although it has to be said that in this government, as far as I understand, not a single minister, regardless of party background, has had that kind of um, power to be able to get a 200-million-euro pot and, and get to allocate it exactly however
06:13 he himself wants. So it was fairly clear that other members of the Council of State also had something to say about these criteria besides, besides um, Ville, but I do believe Ville knew what he was doing, and in my opinion it was really quite a good and, um, important move, so we got to see a bit, actually, who yelped and who didn’t. But I do have to say about these, these criteria themselves, that it was a bit of a clumsy move from Ville, then. And I understand it, like, from a communications standpoint, that, that, that now when they want to give the NGO hoarders money, like, and not toward frontline work, well in my opinion frontline work is kind of a nice idea from a messaging standpoint, that this is now the thing we’re investing in, but frontline work itself doesn’t automatically mean any results. Network marketing is frontline work too, but that doesn’t produce any economic benefit to the nation, or any real benefit to anyone else either, really, does it. So that’s why, in my opinion — I’ve been trying to say this elsewhere too, but I’d hope for it this way, that
07:14 market-right actors in the — in the government, or the Council of State, or in the Council of State, or in a government party, would take the angle that these criteria should be significantly stricter and focus specifically on the results of the work. So if you have to hand out 190-something million to these organisations, then at least you’d make sure that it goes to the most effective places, and, and this is where this Rydman criteria set doesn’t really address it. So there could be something in it for everyone, if the criteria were actually thought through so that, that results and efficiency, um, were emphasized. But the fact that if Folkhälsan has like a billion euros in assets, then I do question a bit whether they need STEA support, and why they nee— Yeah, and I’d add here that well, um, these kinds of lobbying organisations whose only purpose is basically to recursively influence the system so that, um, they stay alive, or whatever it is, their sort of left-wing [unclear],
08:18 well, well, that they’re specifically being tried to excluded here, that in my opinion is totally healthy. Of course, of course. Right, and I mean, that like, like in a certain sense it sounds good, but doesn’t, um, like, do these organisations actually accomplish anything any results whatsoever this way? And Wille — Rydman — didn’t have, in my opinion, anything like a 200-euro pot that he was handing out — instead he saved taxpayers’ money by cutting, in a way, activities which maybe aren’t so important for the state’s core functions in a situation where there’s really little money. Finland is in debt and our indicators are pretty, pretty far into the red in quite a few respects. I’ll push back a little. Ville, I mean, didn’t save anyone’s money or cut anything at all in this case — those are cuts that were decided back at the last budget session. So the whole Council of State, or the government parties, stand behind it as one, that roughly 200 million of these funds are being cut during this government term. But then this set of criteria — I mean, technically, with those criteria you could
09:21 still probably hand out a few billion, like, in money to those in need. So in that sense I do think it’s a little bit loose, that in my opinion a great goal for the government, or for the Council of State folks generally speaking, would be to narrow that fan, basically, narrow down what that money can actually be used for. Rydman, I mean, narrowed it significantly, but it should be narrowed significantly more. I feel like, um, yeah, well, okay, I mean it’s probably technically, technically true, yeah, it comes down to, um, let’s put it this way, that he directed, directed, basically, that money, um, to some extent toward narrower criteria, um, but it’s [unclear] wrong in general to talk about any kind of civil-society org- -anisations at all — they’re not civil-society organisations, they’re part of the state. Because if, if basically year after year you operate on state funding, and, and even in such a pathological way that they’ve started, in a certain way, taking taxpayers’ money from politicians, which they pay to communications agencies, which lobby on their behalf for them to get more money, and then
10:23 this just spins around every year, and, and grows and swells. So in this like, well we don’t have any — in Finland there’s no civil society at all. Here people don’t even really understand what that could mean. It’s just this weird state-owned thing, basically an expenditure apparatus, and, um, I don’t know, it’s actually all the same to me — like, in some, some sense the targeting too — I actually think it’s kind of nicer if the money gets used on some hand-waving, let’s say, over in, um, frontline work, than paying some umbrella organisation’s umbrella organisation some kind of pastry funding, just for the sake of some general um, fairness, even though, sure, sure, the whole thing overall is still massively undesirable, unjust as a starting point, basically, so if you’re a civil-society organisation, then you [unclear] get any state have to say about that already. So, I mean, in the world there’s this thing called NGO, meaning non-governmental organization, well, um, we don’t even have a descriptive
11:24 word like that at all — it’s just, like, third sector, or organisation, or do-gooder thing, where, like, that fact gets completely erased — that specifically, the state doesn’t put money into it. So specifically here then that isn’t even questioned on any level at all, that this money comes entirely from, like, the state’s taxpayer and debt pump. Um right, right, so it doesn’t matter at all, and a word like that describes like, our nation’s level of, like, socialism. I’ll second the two great remarks before mine, because any viewer who hasn’t yet read the excellent book called Veikkauskratia — the term Otto just used a moment ago — should read it. Then you’ll understand how this racket works. And exactly that mechanism Otto just described, where politicians are allowed to give taxpayer mon— -ey to organisations there, which then buy advocacy work from these kinds of influence agencies, which then lobby politicians, and so there,
12:25 in the ad — or influence agencies, as well as in the org-world, as well as of course then in parliament too — in all of them politicians occupy the most important positions, which, I mean, in my opinion is very clever. Sounds healthy, right, and then all of this is called civil society. Exactly what you said, that this is a completely perverse situation, that taxpayers’ money is feeding this endlessly circulating, circulating, um, deus ex machina, which is then still called by a name that in no way could call this an agency. I’ve called these state-organisations, but in no case are they civil-society organisations — they operate as sta— or socialism. But would that itself maybe come from that, sort of, that MP org- from this Veikkaus monopoly, when, basically, for decades this idea was built up that a Finn always wins, and actually it’s a bit honorable to play that, like, negative-expected value game — I mean, I mean, um, Veikkaus, some lottery or the like —
13:27 and then it was made to feel good, because you’re basically, like, a little bit supporting those, um, good organisations out there, which help those, um, a bit, like, yourself and other dumb poor people, um, and basically then when this got erased out of the middle of this, when this Veikkaus, Veikkaus’s, like, um, money-distribution apparatus, which was, I mean, still a lasting system. There you at least had to basically end up directly at some Veikkaus circles, so I could get my hands on that billion. Now that it’s basically been made to vanish, poof, well, well, then, um, somehow this thing has stuck around, so that nobody realized the magician has no clothes, or however that metaphor goes, and that it’s basically just a pure income transfer from the taxpayer’s cash, but nobody, somehow, with the old momentum, disputes this. Now the government made a pretty, um, clever move, or a slick, or good, um, Veikkaus reform, in that it only kicks in after the elections — apparently in Sweden, Sweden they made this mistake, that back when, ages ago, this state monopoly was fixed, like, in Veikkaus, well that was right before the elections, so people got to
14:28 then build their whole campaign war chest out of it. Well, so the advertising there got out of hand. We have tried, yes, to remove those, those mistakes from the law, because over there in Sweden digital advertising just totally exploded right in your face — you couldn’t see anything else but some Betsson and and other stuff. But, um, back to this, this Veikkauskratia thing, well, well, just— what you said about it earlier, and it comes out in the Veikkauskratia book too, the fact of how this lobbying activity has worked before — that previously um, they lobbied, basically — SOSTE and STEA have been the gatekeepers, which have then been in very close contact with Veikkaus’s people and, and then there are things like — I mean, think about it, there’s been at Veikkaus some kind of, like, lotto lodge, that’s been running all year round. They’ve been shuttling these, like, specifically politicians have been shuttled there to be lobbied, and all sorts of other things, so basically this has been going on — the heavyweight-category finale happens there at the Levi cabin. There’s like different, but this has been described — that there’s a middleweight-heavy category. Yeah, right, right, so, like,
15:31 basically there are big deals, that then youth organisations’ rep— political youth organisations and other beneficiaries’, like, groups get flown out for a week off somewhere there to Lapland to live it up on shared money, and then they emerge from there as, like, staunch defenders of the racket, and they’ve seen the light about how incredibly important the work there, like, [unclear] and everyone else does, so, in my opinion, as long as the sauna photos don’t come out, as long as they don’t, right, and apparently there apparently were, um, girls there too, yeah [unclear], and apparently at some point it came out that these were, I mean, lavish — I mean the way people were hosted there was, like, lavish. Some youth-org intern had gone, you see, and posted on Insta or somewhere, and then it started to come out — I’ll just say here that, that I’m not trying here to whitewash, basically, the racket’s actions — in my opinion it’s extremely awkward regardless of party, and of course there are National Coalition people too in these organisations, and organisations’ organisations, like, running that roulette wheel. And then the fact that even if from parliament
16:35 there’s a reaction, or from that organisation of organisations, from whichever organisation, there’s such a strong reaction to the fact that in a situation where we have like a chronic state-finances deficit of over 10 billion euros, people start, like, griping about, well, now they’re taking from us, and now just think democracy apparently ceases to exist, civil society, welfare services, everything’s been run into the ground because STEA funding has been cut in half. Yeah. As I recall, we don’t, we don’t have — we can’t afford democracy. That’s just a cold fact. It has to be faced with some kind of, like, I don’t know if it’s enlightened autocracy or some sort of short-term junta, so we get some [unclear]. Which won’t come to Finland anymore enough. So it’s totally clear, if you want to get out of this somehow, um, but that Argentina model, basically, well that window already closed. But this is heading in the right direction anyway, in that, well, if earlier we had a system where adjustment pensions for MPs were endless, and you could basically go off skiing on your pension
17:36 and still do side gigs, um, possibly right alongside it at worst. Now we noble MPs decided that then, basically, well, we still get these adjustment pensions, but after us it’s the deluge, so, so, so. Well, but Tere is already in this suffering category, in that you have this kind of quick, roughly two-year window, annoyingly fast. So then give the boomers still one more, uh— quickly disappear and fall into the void, but then that falling into the void of course this has been this org-world, um, which is actually a brilliant framing, which has been attacked really hard over on A-studio — that you’re not allowed to say ‘racket,’ that this is noble work. No ‘racketeering.’ It’s a perfect word. I mean it describes — in my opinion [unclear] gets upset. Don’t use that word. Well, but I’ll use it anyway, like, it’s, it’s a good descriptive word. They don’t like it over at the National Coalition. There it’s just going every which way and all over the place and whoosh, and someone whines. I mean even right now someone at National Coalition is watching this, probably like [unclear], and can barely get a word out of their mouth, just tears streaming. But since there’s this kind of off-ramp, where you
18:38 then get to, um, potentially earn like ten thousand euros a month just shuffling papers around like that, and, um, that doesn’t change. So taxpayers still pay for your job, like, even in parliament, and, um, possibly the work drops to a fraction — meanwhile these superstars are gone from the private sector, basically, like, from everything — they have brilliant ideas. They just go to waste there founding organisations, like unicorns, even right now. This, this is my point specifically — that when basically your safety net gets taken away, meaning your dumb decisions directly come back to bite you in your post-parliamentary reality, that in your self-made and political world you should get some kind of market-economy gig, whereas before it used to be that it didn’t matter at all, that you could totally crap on the system, completely, like, completely into socialism, and there was always that saving raft. Either the, um, adjustment pension, or then these lovely, um, paper- shuffling posts there at the racket’s core, um, preferably in leadership roles, so you don’t have to do anything at all. Right, right, so basically when those get removed, well, well, this is actually really healthy. Then a small kind of
19:40 small, like, steering effect starts to appear. Should I maybe build this society for the purpose that I’ll manage here after this, like, [unclear] afterwards. Right. But isn’t this pretty logical? Or I mean, somehow I think of it this way, that I’m not panicking at all about what’s next. Though it does worry me a little. Well, no, but I mean I do — I’ll find a job. It’s not like — I have 15 years of experience in the field. I’m not worried in any way. Of course, having put in years of work for this job, it would of course be a shame then if this ends after just one term. So that’s pretty clear as a matter, but there’s nothing — my financial or mental well-being doesn’t depend on whether I get elected in the next election or not. Which of course should be everyone’s situation, but unfortunately it’s not, as, as we all know. But I will address this, um, this word ‘racket’ a bit more, as to why — don’t say, don’t use that w— -ord, and in my opinion that’s totally, totally valid criticism, that, um, in practice, since good work is being done in that organisation anyway, some people find it uncomfortable that the whole
20:43 civil-society-org field, or at least the part of it receiving this support, gets basically branded with some word. And of course it’s true that many people, say, staffing some mental-health helpline as a volunteer, surely do much more meaningful work than many people, say, in a leadership role on a fat salary at organisations of organisations. So I don’t know how, how you’d even address that group of people, then, who give their own time to civil society, like, genuinely, and do that volunteer work. But I am fairly convinced that not a single organisation like Kulta ry, or SOSTE, or Fingo, is needed in that eq— equation for it to work properly. But well, this is of course just my kind of very idealistic worldview. Right, and I mean, I’ve long pushed for the idea that Finland would need a market signal, because our, like, basically second-best jobs are like state jobs, and the best jobs are the ones where you sell something to the state. You do some project, say, a national
21:43 flagship project. But then into the politician’s and the elite’s life some uncertainty creeps in that isn’t wanted there. Yeah, it, it could be that there, um, you’d have to, have to swap the pastry for some [unclear] croissant, and but, and, and I mean sure, like, that class defends itself, but I’m not at all sure that any kind of tweaking or cutting or adjusting actually helps all that much. It just doesn’t pay off, often, like, the effort for an individual politician. Because there you’d need much bigger structural reforms. I mean, you can already see now that if some kind of Mickey Mouse, um, targeting is done somewhere, then you’ve got, like, half, half of society out there shouting somewhere, or it looks like all the communications agencies out there are running some campaign. They say there’s some granny dying because of the project, and, um, and children are being abused. So when here, like, Vertti now gets given some kind of — I don’t know, I think he ended up laying himself off somehow on behalf of the whole country, and it’s just, like, um
22:49 because there’s this kind of, like, taxpayers are in a much worse position, and actually politicians too, to some extent, tied into that system, because basically it’s worth their while to go there every day, sort of greasing palms, and flying off to Levi and talking about how this is really important. that, um, we’re doing this kind of valuable work. Look, even here there’s this volunteer. Like over there, that’s — that person does volunteer stuff. Who can say that maybe someone doesn’t benefit from that after all. Who knows? Maybe. It might not be, or it could even be harmful, but at least it looks good. And so there, like, sure, completely consciously and deliberately, it gets muddled — that kind of association gets created, as if, like, the umbrella organisations’ umbrella organisations’ umbrella federation, and its international secretary, and, and their sort of PR work were the same thing. Of course it’s not. And then because they basically have that, or they’ve arranged for themselves, a mechanism where they can take taxpayers’ money through politicians
23:49 and lobby politicians, saying, hey, we need more organisation funding — so there’s this kind of public-choice problem here, that in practice, for us as individual citizens, it doesn’t pay to oppose these. So even when we basically win that scrap, we’ve saved like a couple euros a year, while Vertti has made those tens of thousands every month. Mm, mm and then he just lays himself off, when out of this comes another Social Democrat government. Yeah. But I don’t understand how these get defended, like — somehow, I mean, once again in my opinion the problem is that the national economy gets misunderstood, that as if this kind of investment, meaning income transfer — totally pure socialism, somehow, creates something positive for the economy. That of course destroys the original, um, owner’s, um, wealth, and resources, and ability to operate in the market. It gets transferred somewhere then, and then, um, that, and then people make up stories like this — sometimes the effect is five times the investment, or something, like, basically, where there’s not a shred of logic in it, like, in the first derivative of the thinking, and usually it just gets worse from there in the second derivative, when people start, like, hallucinating about how this
24:52 effect works with this money, and what, what nerve, that you still live in this, like, the most heavily taxed in world history, like, socialism, meaning Finland, and then they still dare to say that their work is important, like, well, just as if people’s money basically doesn’t matter to them. We’re probably like, sort of, going along with it, sort of, at home, sort of, like, yeah, right, that we won’t take the kids to the beach this summer, like, yeah, it’s like, damn good that this umbrella organisation got saved because of this, this work is being done, it’s worth waking up, like, [unclear] over there, this is, in my opinion — I’ll get a great derivative out of this, and maybe, maybe Sami will get some clip out of this, who knows, but on this — as to who is, or for whom, each thing ultimately matters — well, in Finland there are about 100,000 organisations, registered associations of this kind, according to PRH, um, and last year I’d be willing to ban — so, and last year 724 associations or organisations got this
25:52 STEA support, and now we’re being led to believe that if these 724 organisations don’t stay in on this racket and don’t get taxpayers’ money, then democracy dies, welfare services die, civil society dies. So how insulting this kind of talk is to almost all of those other 100,000 organisations, and their volunteers, those people who pay membership dues so that the organisation can operate and do everything. So how insulting this kind of talk is toward them — as if their activity has no significance for civil society, for democracy, for any services, but it’s only this elite of elites here in these 724 organisations, which live off taxpayers’ money. In my opinion that’s irresponsible. Maybe we could move on now to another topic. I’ve been, um, waging this kind of long simmering war, um, with another, um, gentry, which I call sweater economists. They’re often in that kind of organisation, which gets state support, and, um, then they
26:54 write these kinds of, um, papers, which then say that this kind of extra socialism is vital for the national economy and for gross domestic product growth, and they use terms like, say, hysteresis, that, um, there might be delays when that money gets shoveled toward the public sector side, but then good things still happen from it, they do happen, and they happen with a delay, but they happen anyway. Is that a bit like trickle-down? But yeah, it’s this kind of left-wing trick— trickle, trickle down, that, um, that it’s like a really potent, um, and in my opinion for that witch doctors are needed. It does this kind of yeah, but those mechanisms are, like, basically — say the magic words and do certain rituals, and then sometimes the economy arrives. Yeah, those mechanisms are, um, they’re not microeconomic mechanisms, they’re macroeconomic mechanisms, those big lines, a bit, um, there’s a bit of, um, how should I say, um, Hegelian spirit to it, in that, um, the thread goes: when a left-wing, um, guy says, um, public spending and socialism, and to the common, um,
27:58 purse, and, um, income transfers and Gini coefficients, then beautiful things happen — meaning GDP growth. And then, just as an aside, Statistics Finland put out a kind of, um, revision blog post, in which the headline is that actually Petteri Orpo’s government’s, um, growth last year wasn’t actually the 0.2 that was first guessed off the lottery machine — it’s actually 0.8, and then it was mentioned kind of as a side note that, um, well, initially for 2024 they guessed −0.2, two— well, well, it turned out to be, um, 0.9, so, um, here we’re already getting into some pretty, pretty tough like a 1.1% error, downward like that, for the right-wing government’s, um, first year, and 0.8% then for the right-wing government’s second year, but then nothing was said about this, um, Marin government’s term, for which also adjustments were made, like. So, um, I calculated that one too, um, or from the same one dug it up, that the first announcement was for 2023, meaning in the transition year, it was first supposed to be minus 1, it’s actually −1.3, three, so it was pulled 0.3% downward. 22
29:02 was supposed to be 2%, um, it actually turned out to be 0.8 — this Marin government’s um, last term, so it was pulled 1.2% down from that first guess, and then also, um, 21 [2021] there was this kind of, um, Marin’s party, corona boom, extra year, when they spread out, like, from 400 billion of overspending the big part of it, like — it was supposed to be 3.3, but that too ended up being just 2.7%, so that too got pulled downward. I haven’t heard these anywhere, specifically these downward revisions to Marin’s Social [Democratic] government’s, um, GDP series. Not anywhere. Now there’s a bit of this celebration going on, that actually the right-wing government has actually gotten a bit of growth after all. Right, and that’s wild, given all that. You have to immediately, like, question it when you think about what kind of hurrahs Marin’s government got back when it was spreading around that corona support, and even, like, the sweater economist would surely, if they’d been honest with the public, have said, okay, that when Europeans, and of course North Americans, and central banks all over the world, like, fired that, that fiat money, like,
30:05 with a cannon around the world in the name of stimulus, then you get some effect, but we can see it in our own, like, employment and GDP figures, that first we went up at a terrifying pace thanks to corona support, and then when the stimulus money ran out, or it went into some Italian window-mafia guy’s pocket, then we ended up, like, coming down, and now we’re heading back up again out of that pit. So maybe this is some kind of pattern — these four, four- year stretches here now, one after another. And it’s good to, like, realize, um, that Juhani Huopanen, as I understand it, the Finns Party’s kind of these brains behind the economic calculations there — in my opinion had done quite a good [unclear], advanced math, almost-graduated business-school trader, and it was, in my opinion, um, that, that basically having the government term start and end at the, like, last or first and last, like, budget decisions — that, in my opinion, is like more logical than starting it from the election — from election
31:08 to election. And, and compared to that, well, well, the numbers are pretty, pretty ugly to look at for socialism, and, um, quite a lot better for this, our pseudo market economy that we’re currently, currently doing so, I mean, I don’t know, isn’t it roughly, like, for the last 20 years Finland’s economy hasn’t really actually grown much at all, that it’s been on a respirator, more or less. And then I looked at, like, for example the Ministry of Finance’s, um, economic forecasts for the following year, because when you look at them year by year, well, well, um, when you add them up, Finland’s gross national income or gross domestic product should be, like, if I remember right, about a quarter bigger than it actually is. So I don’t know if the problem is entirely with the sweater economists either, because the Ministry of Finance has traditionally been considered kind of, like, at least a somewhat responsible body, in that they don’t basically, like, go quite so wild, maybe, as, um, this sweater
32:08 economist clique, that probably there’s somehow, behind it, the fact that the fundamentals just don’t want to be talked about, because it’s somehow too depressing and too bleak — how, how bad the situation actually is — that there really isn’t probably any growth coming, um, unless something really radical happens, and probably it won’t, because our, our, um, in this extraction machinery, like, those who’ve tied their interests to it, various, among others the gentry, um, are still getting out of it this kind of large personal benefit. So for example that GDP growth is a pretty, pretty poor metric, because it doesn’t necessarily actually tell you whether, say, an ordinary Finn’s standard of living has somehow improved, or worsened. Because it could very well be that a pretty big part of that GDP growth is because, say, large numbers of, um, we could call it, say, labor-based immigration, are brought here, but that could very well be net-negative for the national economy
33:11 and that causes, say, the fact that there are tenants in apartments, and then all sorts of integration work can be done and other org busywork. It can show up as that kind of GDP growth, so from this kind of thing — like Neev Parvini has written this kind of ‘humanitive easing’ thesis. So it goes roughly like this, that when central banks print M1, well, well, um, then that inflation growth can, can be curbed by just taking in a lot of immigration. Of course its long-term effect can be, like, terrible, but in the short term it can look like GDP is growing. Then some mister prime minister might then declare, look, our, our, um, witch-doctor tricks are working, the indicators are now in the green. I’ll grab onto that a bit — in that sense of course you could think that, well, are these forecasting institutes of ours even any good in the first place, so what should we ultimately think of their forecast — because it’s a totally crazy idea, no economist actually forecasts any economy at all. I mean that
34:14 historians don’t forecast history, or future history either. I mean that, that, that just isn’t the kind of project that’s possible. There’s always that caveat, that as long as everything, like, basically at the edges stays the same — but they never do stay the same. Of course not, because the world is a dynamic place where things happen. Well yeah. And then especially when you see from those figures that even years after their, like, actual outcome, they still get refined by whole percentage points in some direction, which in my opinion is just too big a range at this point. As a forec— as a forecast it would probably be, like, quite good, since the range — well, they always give those sensitivity ranges in there — but, but already like, say, four years later you’re still, like, like, off by whole percentage points, way off — that’s a bit, a bit worrying, like, what’s our, like, better metric, since GDP, as Otto’s saying here, is a pretty poor one and you can pump it up in quite a few ways. We’ve pumped it up precisely by taking on debt money — what matters is what that debt gets used for. Is it used for, um, immigrants’ integration and various social services, or is it done like
35:17 in Eastern Europe, where they build some roundabouts, and, and, um, intersections or some stretches of railway out into the middle of [unclear] with some EU mon—, and then pretend that a huge amount of good stuff has been produced. Right, — I’ve thought that the mafia could in a certain way be better, that Finland would need one, because right now we just have this one giant intertwined public sector, which together defends its own interests, and, and um, its privileges against the people, so there’d at least be some kind of basically a third. Well, at least the mafia counts its own money and is reasonably upfront about it. Now that we’re on these macro- sweater-economist bashing, let’s bash a bit more. I mean, I actually happen to have quite a lot of non-sweater-economist friends, and here there’s, um, I mean there’s a measurement problem here and a methodology problem — meaning Statistics Finland, which in itself, I mean, um, I don’t want to undermine public trust too badly, but it isn’t exactly some, um, pinnacle of objectivity either — that first GDP forecast uses these very crude, um, signals, which overweight this, um, socialism.
36:18 So, say, that public consumption spending gets overweighted in that signal, and then when these, like, real economists, um, the microeconomists, use this kind of nowcasting, meaning they look at the real signal there, um, in the real world, in actual economic flows, they see that this, like, is very biased, this first signal. And it’s not that — well, at Statistics Finland, of course, it’s slow work to go prompt the, um, AI there to make better models, so, um, you have to be forgiving toward them, that they’re doing their very best there, um, in that, that modeling, and it always, like, these fail exactly toward the socialism side, this, this signal, and so I don’t mean it badly, like — we do have certain established metrics, purchasing power, and, and GDP, and others, but there should be so many of those metrics that when you do that analysis you’d be able to tell these signals apart from each other. So, for example, our purchasing power has grown now for three years running, but I do think you should be able to somehow create a metric where, for example, the public
37:22 sector’s, like, catastrophically large pay-raise programs have been removed, which the municipal employer, for example, like, completely against all reason, like, commits to and just gives in to, just like that. So we can’t just pretend that our purchasing power has grown in a healthy way, if like, the public sector’s total payroll grows 10 percent in just a few years, for example. So, so it’s not, like, it’s not on a sustainable, sustainable footing. And then when we get real metrics and the right kind of analysis, then we’re, like, exceptionally — without exception — wrong about everything we’re trying to do here. Yeah. And there, I mean, this Juha Majanen um, um, spoke, in my opinion, um, whether by accident or on purpose, the truth to Hesari — well, um, said that it’s totally possible that the public sector could be changed by 2031, um, into an AI-based one, and this is of course like, wonderfully, right around, probably, that, um, Lindtman… Orpo’s, like, um, first government’s, um, term end, so really, really, really close to when
38:26 it’ll be really interesting to see whether the next government programme then shows this kind of vision, that the whole public sector’s 159.4 million public — entirely fused total expenditure, like, um, gets AI-ified like that, like, radically, and 700,000, um, public employees’, um, tasks, um, get replaced, like, to a significant extent, um, by this kind of AI system, but, but I mean that’s just — I mean AI is just going to be the next sort of administrative ideology. Yeah, it’s going to be the next miracle machine. It’s going to be, like, um, a carbon target, or some, some, um, sustainable-development program, or, or whatever, whatever, like, basically those crazes have been in recent years. So the point isn’t, I mean, that those jobs would start being streamlined with that AI, of course, but rather they basically sell their own bloat with the fact that they have some kind of AI-transition budget, and money has to go into this now, and then there, like, somehow with a totally straight face they explain how Ritva is now basically teaching the AI
39:27 to fill out that form, and there’s probably still something, like, some separate thing needed, meaning, meaning in practice it means that you need a lot of consultants to tailor that, like, working product into a little, little less functional one, so that, so that it can be adapted to some of these really demanding civil-society-org, minister, and civil-servant needs, which, which no superintelligence could ever, like, manage. AI — the public sector’s AI-tool most important metrics include, for example, equality and gender impacts, so those need to be looked at a bit first, and then you can decide whether it’s worth streamlining or not. On the other hand it’s also good to remember that it’s extremely important that the AI also understands Swedish. That’s — well, but I can and that it doesn’t too openly reveal, basically, about that system to citizens. Well, but with this speech I can declare that, um, my Samantha AI is both um, presumed-female as well as Swedish-speaking, this original, this part of the population. So, I mean, this is basically how it should be done, that those agents
40:29 that get brought into that system, they replace those headcount numbers, those inefficient types, those 700,000, so that every single, um, person, who from there can be replaced and then go do productive work in the market economy, is that, um, system’s primary goal. I’m probably pulling, pulling, pulling the rug out from under my own feet, but when I think about an average parliamentary committee starting, like, a morning or afternoon committee session, it’s pretty depressing to think about that kind of thing in summer. Yeah, it is depressing to think about. It’s better thinking about it. It’s — there are — you sit through those meetings, it’s depressing to think about during the session period too. So in that sense this holiday season isn’t any more remarkable, but I mean, I think about it this way, that most of the work we do, sitting there in meetings and so on, could be, like, streamlined really, really into short meetings, where you then get the core points — and imagine, if there were some AI agent that an MP could spar with, say,
41:31 on these, um, expert statements, and dig a bit, like, into the logic behind them or other things — but right now the idea is that we read those 50 expert statements, and, and internalize them, and make from them then a very thorough analysis, based on which we then act, but I have to say this here, um, in between — well, I mean, when there was the corona crisis’s like, first wave, when, um, exactly that Wuhan, um, virus, or whatever it is now — correct me here if I’m wrong — well, um, at its worst, basically the whole country was shut down, and Uusimaa was under lockdown — well, but I was invited to this parliamentary Finance Committee, from where, [unclear], I thought, now let’s put in the best analysis here, that a systemic crisis might be near, and um, the whole system might, like, collapse, and here are, like, my contingency plans, um, how, say, um, could, could be done, say, now, um, from various, um, that, um, [unclear] center, you’d already ordered several [unclear] — I just took care of it today, here’s this, um, shooting-related stuff
42:31 is here, and then I went and proudly presented it, then, and, um, then, um, then next to me there was one, one guy, whom I — um, I heard, a professor — and then he, um, mentions as an aside in his own presentation that, well, we have this payday-loan legislation here, um, that should be advanced — and then I watched in horror as the whole room chattered, discussed for basically an hour that [ __ ] payday-loan legislat- -ion’s current state, rather than, basically, the systemic crisis’s possible solution. So, so, um, that was, like, a shock to me. To go this way maybe hits a little too close to home here. Sami, there’s no such thing as ‘the system.’ Don’t talk like that — the crisis affects citizens, and the system is completely safe. There’s nothing to worry about here. Finland will manage just fine — Finns won’t. And I mean, like, why would you, Tere, want to streamline something that’s already basically, like, net-negative work? So is there a risk with how this is a good idea, that the damage gets done faster. That’s actually a really good point. But maybe on this economic signal still, I mean, here,
43:35 while we’re describing this — well, um, the May economic signal has been very positive. The first quarter was solidly in the black, and so from this year — I can, even though I’m not a sweater econom-munist, still venture a guess that this’ll turn out to be a really good, like, um, gross domestic pro— -duct year. And that’s going to be awkward, awkward, like, in an election year, then, um, next year, meaning, um, where that thing everyone hates comes in, um, the corporate tax cut too, 18, and still some of these dynamic changes are still, like, coming, coming into effect, so how are we now going to frame this as — well, but back during Marin’s time, that growth was better, and yet, I mean, um, everyone got a fairer share, and you could spend more, and the system could be kept, um, stable, and yes corporatism, and, um, tripartite bargaining now, um, should be brought back more strongly. So, um, well, this’ll be quite interesting to see whether this turns into a bit of a final sprint from the right-wing government. So tell, tell — you, as the only intelligent person in the room,
44:38 how do we, how do we sell citizens on the situation where all the, um, all the statistics point more or less northeast. I mean despite, of course, the fact that our problems certainly haven’t in any case been solved anywhere close yet, and, and by many metrics we’re in a really bad situation. But yeah, I have thought a bit that Finland does need, every once in a while, those good-news stories too. We’ve talked so many times about, like, the ’90s buzz, and how good the vibe was back then, and, and, like, that get-things-done spirit, and so on and so forth. And I think that when Finns should of course get, like, into jobs, but also, like, through that work, like, see what, what function that work actually has, and what that standard-of-living growth and everything else was, which back then, in the late nineties and at the turn of the millennium, was seen. But, but how do we sell this idea to this new generation, which hasn’t maybe, in their own adult life, seen any kind of economic growth at all. They don’t necessarily feel that with work you get, like,
45:40 more stuff, which of course is, is a lie in itself. Of course you always get, through work, better things for yourself, but who — well, someone gets it, but in Finland it’s not necessarily the worker whose funds get redirected to someone else, but, but yeah it usually does produce something. I don’t — and I’m maybe not entirely sure whether it was, in the end, that work-voucher thing, [unclear] Martinen’s work voucher, and, and Espoo [unclear], basically Loinen’s growth [unclear], basically that was, that was where the turnaround started. That was basically when we started, like, believing again, and then Finland’s national economy’s [unclear] started, like, crawling down that, like, downhill in that, like, direction. Don’t, don’t now, don’t keep putting me in these tight spots. On your side — hey, hey, ‘I want to believe’ — I, um, Neuvottelija studio um, is offering this kind of, um, summer voucher, um, to someone — you can sign up. Mm come on, come on now, Finland, rise up, this. Come on, the guy’s taken it, the guy’s grabbed the employment [voucher]. Isn’t there some socialist money here too, in my opinion, that belongs to me as well — doesn’t it come from the state, this, this, still, still, like this, like this — well, um, okay, well, it’s worth applying for.
46:44 Yeah, I mean, I’m not, I mean, I’m not saying there isn’t, isn’t basically some kind of these kinds of, like, psychological, macroeconomic, some kind of, like, market spirits that Keynes talks about. So sure, there could probably, like, be like, psychological effects, but in my opinion it’s somehow let’s say, it feels a bit, like, suspicious, that the growth would be somehow, like — the obstacle to it is that we’ve gaslit Finns enough. That you all must now believe that the economy is growing. Growing, like, what if it does grow — that it grows. It grows if you believe. You all don’t believe enough. That’s why you’re all so poor. So, so, I mean, that belief in the economy, in a certain way, like, comes from those, um, changes in circumstances. People notice it in their own lives — that someone gets a raise, someone gets a job, someone makes a good deal. The fact that housing— Well, I don’t know, Finland is of course, um, a problematic country, since we don’t have any other wealth besides, basically, our apartments that have been pumped full of empty value — our flats. So I don’t know if that’s actually a great signal, but let’s say it this way, that economic activity probably shows up in people’s everyday lives, if it
47:46 exists. So, kind of, basically, now let’s hope for hope, sort of, and trust in trust, and, and now you’re not allowed to say anything unpleasant, because otherwise somehow people’s collective psyche breaks, and then they no longer dare to go to Tokmanni to buy that juicer, and just order it from Temu instead. So so, so it’s probably not really the problem so much as the fact that, that the fundamentals are actually pretty much hell. Our birth rate is something like 1.25. That’s totally abysmal. That’s actually the biggest problem in our whole country. Compared to that, it’s a bit odd that it’s not talked about. Um, and then the fact that our best people, like, keep leaking away all the time. That gets masked somewhat by the fact that we’re, like, constantly taking in, like, lower-productivity and lower-skill labor from abroad. But what doesn’t get counted in the statistics is that the best ones leave us — the ones who have, have, like, um, founded companies or could found ones, who are highly educated. And that — it could at worst be permanent, because, um, as much as, basically, Finland and
48:49 Finns — as much as I do like them — in this kind of objective sense we have pretty few, like, competitive draw factors, so, so if there are any, they’re probably, like, exactly for those, those Finns who have been [unclear] their whole life. Right, right. Well, no, not for those who like an easy life. I mean, sure, Finland in many ways is a paradise, but people specifically need to be made to believe. And I, I totally agree with this analysis, that trust in the future comes from what you see around you, not from the fact that Tere goes around the country telling people there’s hope now, and that you now have to, like, trust things. It really comes from normal everyday experience, and if you don’t have safety in your everyday life, or if you don’t have a job, or in your circle people are suffering or something else, then you probably don’t have that trust and belief in the future. Here I had Samantha crunch this a bit while you were talking, there were a couple couple of theses, well, um, actually, um, people with foreign backgrounds have been leaving Finland more now than, um, native Finns — and then, um, they’re not
49:52 — I mean there’s, um, this elite that leaves, and basically those really high-productivity types. [unclear]. But then this second thesis also, that [unclear] would have drained away — well, here’s actually, um, it could always be credit due to this government too, it was back then, um, back during the Oulu, Oulu, um, abuse cases, it was, um, closer to 30 percent, that Islamist, um, share of the group — well now it’s gone down to nearly 20 percent anyway, so this, basically, this Islamization has like, um, decreased, or been brought under control, or whatever word you want to use. should maybe be closer to zero percent, but maybe now we’re getting — so are we going deeper into the immigration debate here, or into whatever else, but, um, we still have a million things in this country that should, like, be twisted into the right position. For example, that thing Otto referred to earlier — the fact that when a person works, how much of the value they add through their own work actually ends up, like, in their own pocket, how much goes to feeding the system, how much goes to taxes, and, um, the side costs the company pays, like our pension contributions, and, and everything else. So this is, like, one hell of a big
50:57 issue. Same thing with the conditions for entrepreneurship and starting a business — it’s a total terrible tragedy, that, that I keep hearing from all over the place, that, that like, extremely successful serial entrepreneurs have moved their assets either to our southern neighbor, or then straight off to somewhere like Switzerland or somewhere else, and they then operate from there, well, this kind of thing shouldn’t be allowed to happen. Well, inheritance tax, gift tax, corporate tax, um, the taxation of work and entrepreneurship, whatever dividends, or, um, unlisted companies’ dividend taxation, um, keeping it as is, or in some way even supporting it — the tax system’s harmonization, dismantling the universal applicability of collective agreements, removing employment protection — like, a million other things that could be done a hell of a lot better in Finland, and, and then even though it of course looks, to your average person, like they’re being scared by the — I mean, the barely-alive trade union movement’s — even though its communications machinery is tuned to an absolute peak, and
52:00 scaring people with these, these scenarios of how terrible things will happen if any power at all is taken away from Hakaniemi, and then once we’re living through this now, after this government’s own labor-market reforms, the aftermath already, nobody even remembers what changes have ultimately been made here, except in Hakaniemi’s communications, that, that we should just, like, just goddamn push it, like a public prosecutor, and, and do even more, and get people, people to somehow, like, understand that change is basically a necessity, or else we hit rock bottom first. So, well, like you said at the start, Milei versus — what’s then the next step from there. Right, and I mean maybe there’s some kind of, because in my opinion the right’s basically fantasy isn’t the general strike, it’s the IMF fantasy — that, that, these are, like, that’s also a paternalism fantasy, that someone comes and basically nurses Finland’s national economy back into shape. That idea, that someone would basically do something themselves here — that’s
53:02 somehow foreign also to that, like, basically right-wing politician too, that then we just, like, drift into some kind of paternalism. Our job is to fine-tune the margins in such a way that some credit rating agency stays somewhat like, satisfied enough that our, like, national-debt bomb doesn’t blow up in our hands. So, so, I mean, I have — well, like, let’s say I have, like, marginally, at the bottom of my pocket, sympathy for politicians who basically try in parliament to change these things, because the ordinary citizen doesn’t see what kind of, like, minefield they’re operating in the middle of, and what, like, basically with limited limbs they’re getting by there, because well, yeah, in elections of course you have to LARP that now the country’s affairs will be fixed, and firmly, like, we’re just going to get things done — and then there, sure, you notice pretty quickly that, well, actually not much gets done, and you don’t have much in the way of, like, powers, especially, like, as a first-term MP, so it’s more like, um, some kind of, like, a stolen, like,
54:06 cake being sold on the street, more than the thing where you’re issuing some commands there. And then when our, our powers have been signed away for so long to various structures, which aren’t under any kind of democratic like, control, then often that parliamentary institution unfortunately acts as a kind of pressure, like, valve, where you can direct all that, like, dissatisfaction, and, and anger, and bitterness, which, which is in itself quite justifiably, like, legitimately felt, but unfortunately that same institution has, like, over the decades, like, basically given away its own power to such an extent that these kinds of big structural reforms are pretty much impossible. at least as long as we’re, like, committed to some kind of, like, rule of law, which in practice now means that the system is locked into whatever position it’s in, and it can’t really be changed much, unless someone is willing, basically, like, to just say, well, we’re not going to follow that, that, um, now, now this is over, that this model is driving into a wall, and that’s just, like,
55:09 totally crazy to be on board with then. I’ll, I’ll soften this a bit. I mean someone’s going to get a juicy clip out of this when Otto says the rule of law should be abolished, but I, I believe I know what you’re referring to there, because I run into it both as a council member and as an MP constantly, and earlier as a wellbeing-county council member, that there’s some reform that needs to get done, and it’s been, like, weighed with the politicians and it gets brought to the table, and the first thing the civil servant or the presenting official says is that it can’t be done. And then when you ask why not, well, it’s the law or an EU directive that forbids it — and then after that it’s purely and solely up to the politicians whether it happens or not. And, and if politicians take that power for themselves, which is rightfully theirs, and they push that reform through, then it eventually turns out it wasn’t the law or the EU directive that was preventing it in any way, but it was in practice just the official’s own personal opinion, and, and a certain kind of political will lurking behind it, that, um, this, like, or was about to, like,
56:14 water it down. And this is something that far too many Finns unfortunately don’t see — that how goddamn thick a brick wall you constantly have to bang your head against out there. Sure, it’s of course not just about civil servants — there are of course cross-cutting interests too, and, and like you said, a first-term MP who, say, wasn’t involved in the government negotiations, their ability to influence things is, like, fairly marginal. I just got incredibly lucky that this happened to be a government with National Coalition, the Finns Party, and, and a couple of small parties, like, LARPing as bourgeois parties, whose, like, shared inter— interest group, well, well, um, whose shared agreement gave us a government programme that fits really well, like, with my political profile, and we’ve even mostly gotten it through, too. I wonder if, um, here — if I ponder Otto’s thought here for a bit — well, um, we’re kind of, like, a bit Slavic too, in that we’d have a bit of a wish, that since there’s this, um, good tsar and bad boyars thing, meaning
57:14 the boyars are, like, the civil-servant racket, and then the tsar is good — and sure, Putin isn’t much of a ‘good tsar’ right now, but generally speaking the people have trusted, like, that dictator-like power — well, we in Finland have kind of spoiled this with the presidential institution, in that the good president does things there, but really they don’t have, like, any power. None at all. And then again that, um, next level, meaning this prime minister, is somehow like a stale, um, figure, who right now isn’t hugely sympathized with, so should this be brought into this, um, at the start — basically that kind of Rydman-style thinking. Meaning the minister in charge starts being like, well, I’m making decisions now, I’m doing this Kela stuff with a pretty strong political mandate, and from there, like, we might get some public respect, since we’re somehow such sheep in this collectivism. Well, that way, in that sense too, technically it should like, be taken. Well, okay. Probably nowhere in our system was it thought that a minister uses absolute power in his own administrative branch, but you could think that if a minister had this kind of ability to decide, quite unilaterally or autocratically, about what, say, gets brought out from his ministry,
58:16 then that would be totally fine, as long as the committee also had, like, this kind of autocratic power to step over that minister too. But right now this whole thing actually works in such a way that, in fairly good mutual understanding, first the government programme gets negotiated, negotiated. Then, within the Council of State, the details of individual legislative initiatives or bill proposals get negotiated before it’s sent out for comment. Then, after the comment period, or after the comments, it gets negotiated again, and at that point, when it comes to us in the committees, most of those details are more or less, like, locked in place, even though we, like, always have the chance to communicate with the minister in charge, and and, um, the Council of State’s people — well, well, basically this system of ours has gotten a bit, a bit perverted, in that technically the committee no longer has the power today that it was originally meant to have. That reminds me of Otto’s, like, legendary episode about Krista Kiuru, that sometimes the system can, even at the committee level, show its power. Well, yes, if you, if you greedily use
59:19 the, um, procedures and, um, everything else to your advantage, then, then you can definitely do it this way, but, but, um, then you’re not exactly in high demand. No, but I mean, if you all think about it this way — Finland, for example, became independent, like, against the law, back in the day. Mm. And then you could think that with these kinds of systems, that, like, over time they get old, that all sorts of, like, buildup and, and coding errors and other things accumulate — was it Tacitus who said that the more laws, the more corrupt the state. So, so I’m not sure that that apparatus can still, like, be fixed from within its own rules, so to speak, so, so if, if there’s a visible situation where the whole, whole system is, like, driving into a wall, completely, then I guess, hopefully, someone, someone at some point raises a hand and is like, hey, like, what if we don’t follow this after all, like, what, what if we just
60:21 like, stop following this — mm — like, what if we just decide Finland doesn’t — we don’t, say, declare, like, we, we don’t apply the equality principle, that we favor Finns, because this is Finns’ nation-state, and they’re basically, in that sense, more important to us than the rest of the world’s people, because they just are, and we decide it that way, or, we remove certain kinds of protected categories, so the law applies to everyone the same way. Now no special extra needs for any particularly sensitive group, some kind of their own own special, um, law, but, um, the law is the same for everyone. Put — or, like, you enact, say, a flat tax, and then, like, if you don’t have — to these, um, constitutionally defined, um, rights — the funds, then there just isn’t, then it just doesn’t get implemented but since the alternative is that this system drives into a wall, it’s not the kind of thing where it’d be — it’d be nice, or, well, in theory it would be possible, but since in practice it isn’t, everyone knows it, nobody dares say it out loud, and I — and that’s scary yeah, yeah right, but I mean this is — and I’m not longing for any kind of
61:23 leader principle, but I mean at least honesty, in my opinion that would be like, appropriate. Well, this, this — well, on the other hand that’s what we’re doing here, informing the public, like, about what situation we’re ultimately in, but but clearly, um, a certain kind of crisis awareness is something we still lack. I mean, if we go back to, like, the start, say, like, these these STEA cuts — well, right now we’re basically fighting over how some 200 million gets divided up. Not hugely relevant to the big picture, but what if they weren’t divided up at all? Mm. So could that be, like, an option — or, like, you were talking about the law — well, I’ve sometimes thought, what if, say, this — what’s it called — the Church Act. What if you just, like, pulled your suspenders up and said this doesn’t exist anymore. What’s the worst that could happen? I’ve sometimes pondered this kind of thing, that would there be time to go through — maybe Samantha could go through it for us for the next episode, like, which laws would technically be the kind that could simply just be removed. So, like, a zero-based-budgeting spirit. Yeah. And in that idea of Otto’s, I mean this certain kind of, like, national
62:27 whether we call it now rationality or selfishness, its universalism, meaning, like, equality of starting points, not equality of outcomes, so that you don’t spend, like, a huge amount of, like, energy on chasing some kind of, like, outcomes for specific interest groups or minorities or for this or that, and the entire, like, system’s, like, resources just go into how to, like, shuffle things around a bit there, like, pilfer a bit, and, um, just try to create, like, that baseline, where everyone is, like, basically universally the same — but specifically at that nation-state level, so that you’re not out there trying to save the whole goddamn world, that well yeah, this reminds me — this maybe relates to AI, all this, so I talk to people, or especially with people in the public sector, like, about whether there’s, like, any room for savings anywhere, and if I ask, well, could we get 10 percent — like, do you think in your work you can see that kind of 10% like, savings, how you could use your time more efficiently, or could leave some unnecessary thing undone — and the typical answer is that it’s at least 20 percent. Mm. So let’s think, if we now
63:29 have the social and healthcare syst- -em, it’s that productive work — you can’t replace it with AI, if um, that work shouldn’t have been done in the first place. So if, um, at the state level, whether it’s now 36 billion or 37 billion, that social-and-health-side, like, pot of funding, then 10% of that, um, is, well, 3.6 or 3.7, whichever you want, or if you look at the state level, a bit under 92 billion euros, then that’s almost our entire deficit right there with that ten percent. So what if here we now just simply did it this way, that, that let’s say five years’ time for all organisations to adapt to this change, that now we’re saving this country from, like, inevitable bankruptcy, and, and, um, you don’t do anything fun, that we give a bit more, like, free rein to take those AI tools and reorganize things, and remove, say, those employment protections in between, so that we get all the troublemakers and others out of the ministry, and then just, like,
64:29 see what happens. So politicians don’t need to be there explaining that now this, this decision has to have these kinds of gender impacts, or these kinds of child impacts, but that now, goddammit, we simply save this country from complete economic catastrophe, and after that we can think about, like, other things. Good. Um, I’d still propose, though, that I have to say this IMF fantasy tickles me too, so I’d propose that we go into this a bit more in the inner circle, discuss briefly about the IMF coming to take — I’ll just handle it, well, I know, I know, but I’ll tell you some hard truths quietly now — this turns me on, turns me on a bit, so let’s have one more short discussion about this IMF fantasy — so, thank you, Tere Sammallahti and Otto Juote, see you on the Sisäpiiri side, and let’s fantasize about the IMF, which comes and saves us with an iron grip, maybe through the troika, the troika. Thanks. Thank you, thank you.