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Comment by jamesblonde | Hacker News Reader

Anybody can play this game. You give me you 2 examples of inefficient organizations and then generalize. I live in Sweden and can give you 2 counter examples of where govt organizations are efficent and effective (healthcare and public transport).

I won't generalize, though. I will agree that without mechanisms, individuals will play the office game. Two mechanisms in Sweden are "offentlighetsprincipen" - anybody working for a govt job can have their costs/emails/documents/etc examined by other citizens by requesting them (no need to even motivate the request - but some docs are kept secret). "The right to roam" is another one that keeps rent seeking behaviour under control when it comes to property - a billionaire keeping the public off a big beach (like Khosla near the Valley) cannot happen - http://www.mercurynews.com/2016/04/27/martins-beach-appeals-....

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Personally I believe it's culture. A high trust and low corruption society will probably succeed whatever system it uses. It's very very difficult to quantify this or tease out cause and effect. But I really feel like Europeans are more likely to "Do The Right Thing", than Americans or Indians. Like less likely to take a bribe or exploit the system for personal gain. More likely to be outraged when someone is caught doing that. Not perfect, just better.

Compare to third world countries which have very low trust and high corruption. Bribes are common in every area of life and no one trusts authorities. It's very difficult for any system to function in a culture like that. Just replacing the government or changing to democracy doesn't seem to help that much, because the underlying culture is the same.

Well... how do we build a high-trust low-corruption society?

With good education and not prioritizing money as THE thing to seek in life. By giving people a purpose to live beyond economics and slaving for the nations GDP.

You don't, unless you want to brainwash culture.

all culture is brainwashing. it's just if someone agrees with it they don't call it that.

I'm sure you have some justification for that ridiculous statement but I'm specifically not asking.

Ban financial lobbying and unlimited campaign financing.

I thought Sweden's system is focused on cohort local groups for health care. So while the government requires national healthcare, all decisions are made locally within your 10k group of peers.

No, it's organized by municipality. So the whole of greater Stockholm is under one organization (~2m people). But it's a national health service, and patient outcomes are better given its costs than any privatized health system in the world.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Sweden

> Costs for health and medical care amounted to approximately 9 percent of Sweden’s gross domestic product in 2005, a figure that remained fairly stable since the early 1980s. By 2015 the cost had risen to 11.9% of GDP -the highest in Europe

> According to the Euro health consumer index the Swedish score for technically excellent healthcare services, which they rated 10th in Europe in 2015, is dragged down by access and waiting time problems, in spite of national efforts such as Vårdgaranti

Seems like the effects of socialism is starting to take effect

I could not find much details on public transport in Sweden

Ironically Sweden has moved in the past 20 years from a fully public healthcare system to a mixed public/private model (similar in many ways to a voucher approach where the customer picks a provider).

So what you're seeing in those numbers is not really "effects of socialism".

Your profile says that you use this account specifically to support conservative viewpoints. You need to try harder than just pick random statistics and proclaim socialism.

> Ironically Sweden has moved in the past 20 years from a fully public healthcare system to a mixed public/private model (similar in many ways to a voucher approach where the customer picks a provider).

So the healthcare quality could be because of privatized healthcare ?

Yes, possibly! And on the flip side, Sweden's recent drops in European healthcare quality rankings could be due to advanced privatization too. 1980-2015 is too long a period to easily draw any single conclusion.

The larger point I'm trying to make is that Sweden is nothing like its Breitbart caricature. It's a very competitive free market economy with a hybrid approach to most social services. Socialism in the early 20th century sense doesn't describe 21st century Sweden.

Sweden's population is also a lot older than it was in the 1980's. Drives up costs substantially.

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