Episode 175 · 2023-02-17 · 47:53 · Original in Finnish
Finland is not a free market economy | Lasse Pipinen, Tero Lundstedt | Negotiator 175
Originally published as “Suomi ei ole vapaa markkinatalous | Lasse Pipinen Tero Lundstedt | Neuvottelija 175”
Lasse Pipinen, executive director of the liberal think tank Libera, and content director Tero Lundstedt answer the claim that the age of think tanks is over. At the centre is Libera's two-billion-euro list of spending cuts, deliberately built from easy, research-backed targets — and which nonetheless brought the interest groups out. The episode asks why value liberalism advances in Finland while economic reform stalls, and why the process consequences of political decisions are so rarely worked out. Both guests run the think tank whose work is being discussed.
Core theses
- The cuts list was deliberately built from the easiest, best-evidenced targets, and the reaction to it is the finding rather than the list.
- Value liberalism advances in Finland while economic liberalisation stalls, which is a question about coalitions rather than about arguments.
- The process consequences of a political decision are rarely worked out in advance, and that gap is where think tanks claim their role.
- Both guests lead the organisation whose output is under discussion.
Watch and listen
Key moments
- 00:00 — Intro: a newspaper article, the cuts list, and why such lists are always blocked
- 00:45 — Libera's alumni
- 01:45 — How Libera changed since the Pursiainen years
- 03:10 — A newspaper article on the sunset of think tanks
- 05:40 — The strange period of restricted freedoms during Covid
- 08:30 — The economic left's era in Finland, and the missing cuts lists
- 13:48 — The government
- 31:00 — Libera's operating model
- 33:20 — The Atlas Network and Randian influence
- 35:30 — The Austrian school and crypto
- 39:16 — Libera's summer school
- 42:00 — Would Wahlroos come on the channel
- 43:30 — What Libera is working on
Summary
Lasse Pipinen, executive director of the liberal think tank Libera, and content director Tero Lundstedt answer the claim that the age of think tanks is over. At the centre is Libera’s two-billion-euro list of spending cuts, deliberately built from easy, research-backed targets — and which nonetheless brought the interest groups out. The episode asks why value liberalism advances in Finland while economic reform stalls, and why the process consequences of political decisions are so rarely worked out. Both guests run the think tank whose work is being discussed.
The list, and the reaction to it
Libera’s two billion euros of proposed cuts were chosen for being easy and well-evidenced rather than for being large — and the interest groups came out anyway. That reaction, rather than the list, is the episode’s actual finding: the constraint on this kind of reform is not the quality of the evidence.
The asymmetry
Value liberalism has advanced in Finland over the same period that economic liberalisation has stalled. The guests treat that as a question about which coalitions can be assembled rather than about which arguments are better, which is the more useful way to read it.
Watch
The recording lives on the Neuvottelija channel: Suomi ei ole vapaa markkinatalous | Lasse Pipinen Tero Lundstedt | Neuvottelija 175. A Finnish edition of this episode is published at www.neuvottelija.fi.
In depth
The Neuvottelija AI editions carry a long-form write-up of this episode: English · suomeksi.
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People and topics
Guests: Lasse Pipinen, Tero Lundstedt