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Comment by usr1106 | Hacker News Reader

I am familiar with both German and Finnish bureaucracy.

German bureaucracy is (in)famous for paperwork and using faxes. Citizens/residents have no unique identifier (more and more weakened recently) and need to present documentation for everything. If you have no paper birth certificate you are not born...

Finland has had much higher digitalization for decades. You have a person number and authorities store everything centrally. A big brother nightmare for Germans.

20 years ago many processes in Finland went quickly, much more smoothly than in Germany. However, recently more and more authorities went into meltdown. It takes 3 or 6 months to renew a passport (or you queue in the street for many hours to get it done without an internet reservation). Certificates needed for inheritance processes delayed for many months each, so in the end heirs don't get access to their property until years later. If an elder person needs a legal guardian because they are unable to handle banking or similar anymore, you are more or less openly told: Does not make sense queuing, they will die first.

Where the degradation came from I have no idea. At least digitalization is not a guarantee that things work smoothly. In some areas (but probably none of those examples I mentioned) failed IT projects are the direct cause that processes break down.

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For all it's many many faults, I have to say I'm sometimes surprised by how efficient some South African bureaucratic state organs function. To get a renewed passport is a 5 minute online form, electronic payment, and then a 30 minute appointment at a local bank branch to get biometrics taken. Then about 1-2 weeks later you can go and pick up your new passport.

Driving license not much different.

For most people, paying taxes is a non-event, and tax returns happens automatically in most cases.

Then the bad: - Firearm licenses: more like months if not years in some cases. - Birth and marriage certificates: 4-6 months - Permission for building/construction/alterations: Don't even waste your time. - Healthcare: get private insurance if you value your life. - Public transport: lol

It's interesting how in sufficiently large and complex bureaucratic systems (Governments, Microsoft, etc), you get little pockets of excellence because somewhere in the mess of it all, there is someone who cares about their job, and they put the effort in to make it better for their users/customers.

In South Africa's case, these pockets of excellence are often and frequently replaced, because they are being measured by different metrics than what we as citizens care about, and deemed lacking: Party first, enable corruption, etc. So then you have these government institutions that every 10-15 years or so get renewed, and then coast on that renewal while it gradually goes to shit, before someone steps in and fixes it all up, before them being fired again for not allowing the right amount of corruption to take place. Vicious cycle.

This is interesting because I have the exact opposite experience. I'm a South African but I live in the EU, for me, I need to book my new passport 1 year+ in advance of it expiring because it takes on average about that long (if I pay the bribes).

The trick is not to do it at the embassy, but to take a two-week holiday and do it in South Africa.

thou, you are in a world of hurt if it takes a extra day

I was thinking about exactly this was I was writing my original post.

I'm currently also an expat living in the EU. The common sentiment from a lot of other South Africans here is to go back to SA for a 2 week holiday to get your passport. Apparently dealing with anything home-affairs related via your local embassy is a total shitshow. People have been waiting years for birth certificates for new babies and such.

It seems that the intersection between Home Affairs and International Relations (embassies) is in total shambles.

I didn’t have to leave my bedroom to renew my Irish passport!

Our passport office is phenomenal. Too bad about everything else!

> Citizens/residents have no unique identifier

actually that's not true: people in Germany have MANY unique IDs: they have not one but TWO tax identifiers ("Steuernummer" and "Steuer ID"), social security number ("Sozialversicherungsnummer"), national ID number ("Personalausweisnummer"), passport number ("Reisepaßnummer") and health insurance ID ("Krankenversicherungsnumer"), among others.

Yes, I know. But having many IDs means that your information cannot be found by the same ID in all offices and actually many companies, too. That's the way it works in Finland (Sweden, too). While that is a data protection nightmare from a German perspective it should at least allow efficient processes. But as I wrote efficiency is increasingly suffering in Finland, too.

Several of these IDs change when you get a new Personalausweis, Reisepaß, or Health Insurance, respectively. They don't identify you, but the document or contract. Some of the tax identifiers might be specific to you and a tax authority, ie change when you move to a different Land.

For what it's worth, while it does not often come up in a positive light on this forum (and others), Hungary has almost all processes digitalized. Passport renewal is an exception, but after a quick in-person appointment, you get your passport shipped to you in less than a week (usually), even to a foreign country. You have your taxes prepared for you automatically, you just need to click a button to accept the draft. That said social services is pretty bad, especially for elderly care, but to no fault of IT services. They even have a free, state-provided VPN if you want to watch TV programmes back home, from abroad.

IT in general is stuck in blind valley and doesn't make anything easier anymore with its aggressive outsourcing and profit extraction. The only systems which go quickly and efficiently are those against the interests of an average citizen - e.g. the covid certification apps determining and limiting basic citizen rights. Oftentimes I prefer to show up in person with ID and fetch a printout with confirmation, than to install their bloated sloppy apps tracking the shit out of me.

Biggest problem: Germans don't understand digitization.

They often try to recreate the paper process with IT, instead of making a complete new setup.

Example:

Previously, you had to go to the City Hall or whatever in your pace of birth to get a birth certificate.

Now you can email them, pay, and they mail you the certificate via snail mail.

How it should be: Use an online token, log into your account, request a birth certificate and just print it. It should have a URL that can be used to verify that it is valid. This would be faster and the risk of forgery would be much lower. A seal - and Germans love seals, they wank of to seals - can be forged much easier.

> Previously, you had to go to the City Hall or whatever in your pace of birth to get a birth certificate.

> Now you can email them, pay, and they mail you the certificate via snail mail.

> How it should be: Use an online token, log into your account, request a birth certificate and just print it. It should have a URL that can be used to verify that it is valid. This would be faster and the risk of forgery would be much lower. A seal - and Germans love seals, they wank of to seals - can be forged much easier.

That's an unreasonably high (or weird) standard. What country has a process like that? Switzerland certainly doesn't.

Luxembourg...

Even Brazil. Things like Background Check works like this. You can create a PDF that can be online validated.

Yes those seals rly invite you to misuse them. It’s ridiculous easy to forge them.

Yeah, I worked in a German startup for 2 years, managers were running it like we were manufacutring cars.

Lots of decision's, made no sense in software development.

> Lots of decision's, made no sense in software development.

But we must have process and governance in place. Let us set a meeting to discuss.

Aggressive outsourcing is hilariously out of touch.

Western consultancies win contracts to build IT systems. The project is outsourced to India for low cost. Indian outsourcing team hires the cheapest talent possible. Cheap talent provides cheap quality. Website is bloated and slow. Some person on the internet uses these systems, hates it and develops a strong negative bias for all Indian (replace with any 3rd world country) talent.

On the other hand, Indian Govt hires the competent Indians at fair prices. (These aren't even our best or that well paid). It treats them with (moderate) respect and allows them to own their projects. Indian Govt. websites turn out to be seamless, performant and handle 10x the scale of western IT systems. This is a recent phenomenon, but India's digitization of railways, covid management, aadhar, social welfare and UPI has been best in class.

Reminds me of when westerners visit India, eat at the most suspicious looking street food place, and inevitably get sick. You never want your street food (programmers) to be cheaper than the bar set by local middle class (or their taxes). Yeah, outsourcing will save money. But, have some standards.

You get what you pay for.

There is massive corruption and lobbying in the decision chain. I cannot imagine responding positive, without any incentive, to a proposal "Shall we outsource this stuff to Bengaluru?". Anyway this applies mostly to corporate EU, profit extraction in public sector in many EU countries means rather hiring local software house with local students on some non-permanent volatile contracts.

Same experience in Sweden. It took me 1.5 years to get to full European healthcare (i.e European Health Insurance Card). Only to learn that moving within the country, they basically lose all your health records. Seems digitalization is not quite implemented for any non-totally-daily processes and as soon as a single human is needed in the line, there are not enough people.

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.

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

Finland has been a very poor country after WW II until the 1970s (compared to Sweden who had no war or Germany who lost the war). An economy best compared to Portugal or Greece.

The was a first overheating boom in the end of the 1980s, until a heavy recession took over in the 1990s. The next boom was Nokia driven in the 2000s until the global banking crisis. Since Nokia has fallen (well, it still exists but with a different business and more modest success) there has been little to no growth and heavy deindustrialization.

So basically Finland is back to the previous state of being a poor country with weak industry (I am exaggerating a bit). But the spending has continued to grow like the Nokia boom years had never ended.

Edit: Finland has one of the least favorite population pyramids in Europe. People getting older and no children. Very little immigration until maybe the last decade. And now a far right government with a strong anti-immigration agenda.

This is basically it, with the addition that Finland is no lomger in control of its own money. From the war up until adopting the Euro, Finland would devalue its currency a little over once a decade to keep commodity exports going.

The EMU is a mechanism effectively set up to extract wealth from the european periphery, for the benefit of Germany (and maybe to a lesser extent Framce). Finland is very much on the losing side, along with Greece, Portugal etc.

Perhaps with the difference that the culture is very protestant, with high trust in government. So rather than letting the situatiom deteriorate to what it was in southern Europe durkng the Euro crisis, the populace will flock to the stern faces speaking of deficits in the media, and dutifully vote them in.

> From the war up until adopting the Euro, Finland would devalue its currency a little over once a decade to keep commodity exports going.

True. When Finland dropped 2 digits from its currency in the 60s the Finnish Mark and the German Mark where roughly 1:1. When the Euro was introduced 40 years later the exchange rate was 3:1. So 200% inflation over the years more than Germany which was far from stable either. So Finland was a high inflation country all the time.

I don't think high inflation countries are known for good economy. Finland for example had massive emigration. I don't think by having continued the high inflation route after 2000 the situation would be significantly brighter today.

I don't understand this putting the blame on the EMU. The demise of Nokia has nothing to do with it. Finland getting de-industrialized also has nothing do do with it, but with the openness of the European market which brought us incredibly cheap commodities at the expense of our own industry. Even Germany is struggling.

> The EMU is a mechanism effectively set up to extract wealth from the european periphery, for the benefit of Germany (and maybe to a lesser extent Framce). Finland is very much on the losing side, along with Greece, Portugal etc.

Nonsense. „Devaluating the national currency“ is a euphemism for extracting wealth from the citizens without them realizing getting poor. The stability criteria are there to protect you from a government destroying your money.

I don’t get why so many Europeans think the Euro is hurting them economically while in reality it was holding them back (especially in Greece and Italy, their national currency was practically worthless). However, it takes time for member state governments to get used to an independent central bank.

Best regards and hot kisses from Germany.

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.

> 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.

A combination of Covid, and the security situation with Ukraine and Russia perhaps.

As Weber observed, the free market requires a lot of bureaucracy.

How much change is that in real value?

> 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.

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.

> 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.

"Austerity is dropout"

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...

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.

The data is published in English as well. 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.

> The data is published in English as well. 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/...

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/...

> 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?)

Social security is also the budget to allocate the money. It’s ridiculous expensive in Germany. For example. 3 billion is spent on jobless people… half of that goes to burocracy.

Half of 3 billion is 1.5 billion.

There's 2.713 million unemployed.

552.89 euros per person per… year? Even per month that does not seem unreasonable.

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=€1.5+billion%2F2.713+mi...

It’s per month… sadly.

1.5billion per month is the salary of 300.000 office worker. So Germany needs 1 person to manage 10 persons … so why the fuck does it take 3-6 month until they reply ? It’s , here the end of contract and give me money till I have a new job or for max a year.

> 1.5billion per month is the salary of 300.000 office worker.

A common suggestion I've heard, is that the cost of hiring someone is around twice their actual pay (things like insurance, HR, rent or maintenance on the office building, equipment, site security etc.), which means half as many case workers, and each case worker probably has 20 unemployed people.

> so why the fuck does it take 3-6 month until they reply ? It’s , here the end of contract and give me money till I have a new job or for max a year.

You could try working for them to find out? Ich vermute, dass meine deutschkenntnisse ist nicht gut genug für das.

My guess, based on all the customer support workplaces I've heard about is: 85% of the people in the system are basically fine, 10% have difficulty understanding the system, 5% are a colossal PitA who need to be constantly chased or are even outright disruptive — and most of the cost is with that 5%.

System failur seems to be missing as option. I think the 5% are system errors.

There may also be system errors, but I mean actual people — 5%, for various reasons from mental disorders, to being unaware how bad they are at the language (like my first two years in the country), and likely other categories, will need a lot of hand-holding to get through any particular system.

Das ist eine Übersetzung des Oscar Wilde Zitats.

Oscar-Wilde-Zitats

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.

> (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.

>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.

I don't know of that's the cause, but it could be an interesting theory to look into.

But taking job offshoring, as an example. It could be fairly straightforward to determine how much tax revenue a car produced in, say, Germany, contributes to the economy, vs the same car imported from abroad. But where it gets complicated is that, German unemployment being low, the worker that lost his or her job to offshoring didn't turn out jobless, and by his or her work is still contributing to tax incomes. So what is the loss?

A lot of money is lost to tax havens, but the hourly productivity has also increased drastically, meaning that governments might still get more income per worker, per working hour. Governments are loosing in absolute terms, but have they lost income in relative terms?

The general feeling I have, is that a lot more money is lost to greed. As an example, we could take healthcare. It is undeniable that the average quality of healthcare has increased (for instance, looking at cancer suitability), but the cost of basic healthcare items have also, in some cases, increased disproportionately. (For instance looking at the cost of insulin in the US, or a dose of COVID vaccine, etc). So the general impression is that we are paying a lot more than before for only a slight increase in health and well-being.

And how does that apply to other trades? Construction costs have exploded, but we are not getting much better houses for it.

And therefore the general question was more: which parts of society are profiteering from forms of greed and price-gouging, how can we quantify that, and what can be done about it so that we, as a society can continue to improve on the care and the services we offer to our citizens, as opposed to accepting regression as the inevitable way forward.

* >So what is the loss?*

Less bargaining Power and less wages therefore less revenue for the state and spending power for the people.

Decades ago a factory worker could support a family. That's not the case anymore.

Offshoring doesn't automatically result in mass unemployment.

Less bargaining power, that's a fact. But I'm not certain about the lesser wages.

I've been looking at the inflation + CPI index in Europe [0] over the 1990-2020 period. The result is that for an equivalent €100 in 1990, you would need to earn about €200 in 2023. According to [1], the wages in Germany have not increased enough (due to the well known wage stagnation of the 2000-2008 era). But the wages in France [2] (with data over the 2000-2023 period) have. Over the 2008-2019 period, the wages in both countries were increasing at the same rate.

The inflation + CPI index is not perfect, but it gives an indication of the costs changes of a "representative" consumer basket. With our sample of 2, this means that those basic costs have not increased disproportionately w.r.t. wages over the 1990-2023 time period. The pill was a bit harder to swallow for the Germans, but they also started at a higher level.

But what the inflation + CPI index totally fail to take into account is the explosion of other costs that now put single-income families in great difficulties w.r.t. a few decades ago. And the mechanism behind those costs increase is the one that would be interesting to understand and analyze.

[0] https://www.inflationtool.com/euro

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/416207/average-annual-wa...

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/416204/average-annual-wa...

But maybe those experts should've been raising alarm over this? Western Europe is doing pretty poorly when it comes to economic growth. And prior to that Germany got a lot of help from the US, Spain did not do well, Italy was questionable, Portugal did not do well. Netherlands did well, but a lot of it is down to their location as a place for trade. That only leaves France and Belgium. Did they do well?

>We've been able to finance better healthcare before

Modern healthcare is better than anything before. Even in its dysfunctional state it is better. Sure, you might have to wait longer to see a specialist, but the number of cases where the reply you get is "nothing we can do" is lower.

The things you mention are more expensive to provide today. One of the reasons is that our requirements for those services are much higher leading to much higher inherent costs.

> That only leaves France and Belgium. Did they do well?

Looking at France and the quality of their industrial output in the 70s to 90s, ranging from high-speed trains, rockets, passenger airplanes, Concorde, helicopters, (racing) cars, submarines, nuclear power plants, medical labs, etc. I would say yes. Their infrastructure has also been of high quality, so has the education system of their elites, and their healthcare.

And from what I could see of Belgium and their infrastructure, it also looked like that period was good for them.

> Modern healthcare is better than anything before. Even in its dysfunctional state it is better.

This is a more relevant point. The question is if we aren't well past a point of diminishing returns. For instance, for France, the data shows that the life expectancy of women was increasing by 2 years every 10 years, until 2010. It has increased by 0.5 years since then. The life expectancy of men followed a similar trend.

In fact, we might not have seen the full effect dysfunctional health care just yet, and we could be riding on the momentum of previous gains. And the ever increasing delays to see a specialist can only have detrimental effects in the long term. In parallel, the disproportionate increase of healthcare costs per patients means that, at some point, life expectancy is going to go down.

> One of the reasons is that our requirements for those services are much higher leading to much higher inherent costs.

No, I don't think I agree. The house you are getting has not improved 3 fold in quality compared to 20 years ago. The roads you are driving on are not 2 times better. Train travel is not a lot safer, nor faster, nor with more frequent service. On the contrary. The food quality in your supermarket has not improved. The electricity you use still has the same voltage and the same frequency. The clothes you wear are not of higher quality.

>France

France also has kind-of a colonial empire still going on. Could that have an effect?

>The house you are getting has not improved 3 fold in quality compared to 20 years ago

That's true, but there is likely the 80/20 principle at play. Every additional level of quality costs more and more to achieve. Not to mention that often the increase of quality isn't really noticeable. Eg lead paint vs not, better wiring (fewer house fires), better insulation (lower heating costs), better air circulation (less mold) etc.

You also have the problem of survivorship bias. The old homes that are still used today are the probably the better ones. The worse ones from back in the day just didn't last.

But all-in-all, I can only suggest reasons. I'm from a former Soviet state. Some of the transformations are that good. Eg sidewalk roads actually feel 2x better if not more. These days they are nice and smooth roads you could skateboard on. Back in the day I'm not sure I would even want to ride a bicycle on them because they looked like the surface of the moon. And clothes are much cheaper in relative terms and even in absolute terms. But I think this is an exception and not a general trend.

> France also has kind-of a colonial empire still going on. Could that have an effect?

They were officially post-colonial by that time, and what is left is perhaps more a financial drain than a net income gain, although geostrategically invaluable.

> Every additional level of quality costs more and more to achieve. Not to mention that often the increase of quality isn't really noticeable. Eg lead paint vs not, better wiring (fewer house fires), better insulation (lower heating costs), better air circulation (less mold) etc.

They might increase cost, or they might not, as they are logical continuation of progress (as in, does lead-less paint really cost more to produce than leaded paint?) but in the end, they are "marginal" costs on a house, maybe in the order of 15%? So by themselves, they are not going to increase the price by 300%.

> I'm from a former Soviet state.

That brings a very different perspective, yes. Having spent quite a lot of time in eastern Europe, it is clear that the life experienced in that period was very, very different, and that many improvements where brought in, in quality and quantity.

But taking the road example, if you go to Belgium, you will have the joy of experiencing the inverse phenomenon, with a decrepit infrastructure that has been much, much better in the past. Imagine the moon surface you described, and then on a motorway, with cars driving by at 130 kph.. I've seen motorway signs covered in moss, as if an apocalypse had hit.

For clothes, I have items that were bought at the turn of the century and are still "wearable", but no recent clothing item seem to survive more than a year or two, independently of the cost. Which is an annoyance: I wouldn't mind paying more for something that lasts, but, so far, haven't found a brand that does. Of course, the current state of affair is an upgrade on the quality and quantity of clothing that was available in ex Eastern-block states. (Although, as bad as the fabric and colors were, I can only assume that they were built to last?)

Based on what data ? I checked and I can't see these claims being supported. I could be wrong but and may have misunderstood something.

How well the countries are doing? Nominal GDP/capita has been relatively stagnant in most of western Europe:

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...

Why are we using nominal GDP/C? You should use real GDP/C

This is the Gini coefficient for those countries: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.GINI?locations=F...

> 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...

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.

High government spending doesn't mean the government is bigger necessarily. The big expenses are just getting moved right back out to the private sector for agricultural subsidies, energy subsidies, etc...

The better metric would be how many employees work (directly or indirectly) for the government and then compare those numbers.

> Any large org tends to get more inefficient with time as it accumulates inefficient components it can't get rid of

This is really the crux of it. Same incompetence and inefficiency, we see in tech industry. Are there any serious studies on the disease that comes with scale, and possibly its cure?

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.

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.

> 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.

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 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.

> 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.

Ah, the privatization switcheroo.

1) Have a state develop and pay for expensive and necessary assets

2) Preach that privatization is necessary because -something-something-government == inefficient.

3) Take prized assets at a bargain price. Under-invest chronically and strip valuable assets

4) Get paid again when company is re-nationalized

5) Goto 2)

To make the different steps smoother, you can add a good government-industry revolving-door policy. Nothing helps capitalism efficiency more than a bit of cronyism.

> 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.

>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".

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.

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

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!"

'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.

It sounds like these are just issues with processes taking a long time. In other words, that there are long queues. Of course that is a problem too, but it sounds like there's less "active time" and it's more streamlined, if still with long wait times?

Anyone know more about this? Find this really interesting and surprising!

As someone who was advised to wait 6-12 months for a tax refund in Finland (not a standard payroll/prepaid tax) [1] I'd say it's because 'the system' is still the old system from the past that hasn't entirely kept up with the fact that in this day and age:

- A limited company is not always a giant manufacturing concern

- An ever increasing amount of the population will not have been born in and will not be living their whole lives in Finland.

IT is a nice frontend for it and can serve you in many languages and with the latest and greatest UX - but the actual processes and decisions are not keeping pace. Changing these is a high-friction, low-reward endeavour for politicians.

[1] https://www.vero.fi/en/About-us/contact-us/processing-times-...

I thought those delays were meant to encourage you to declare everything in advance on your tax card.

I am talking about transfer tax on property which is completely different.

In my opinion, the tax card system effectively just moves the deadline for the tax return to Nov/December so you can ensure it's completely up to date then and not pay anything extra.

Try building a house in germany.

We've been arguing with authorities, send hundreds (not an exaggeration) of papers to different involved parties, but still, one and a half year after purchasing a bit of real estate, we are not even allowed to start building. This includes dozens of funny anecdotes, an example would be changed rules for the width of your fence gate - meaning that you have to scrap the old one and have someone build a completely new one because it was 3cm (!) to narrow. Of course, it would take weeks after applying for the building license before any of their concerns would be communicated to us.

I don't think digitalization would solve this. If you have a shitty process and digitalize it, you have a shitty digital process. I do think arbitrariness of the people involved at the government offices and the time it takes them to react is way more of an issue.

If you just give me a bunch of paper to fill in, with actually understandable instructions, that's fine. Digitalization would save me a day here because I'd get it directly, but that doesn't really help if it takes six weeks for the clerk to actually react.

> doesn't really help if it takes six weeks for the clerk to actually react.

Neighbouring country here. The clerk has to react within six weeks, but to satisfy the letter of law, the reply is "we received your requeat and it's being processed"

The actual reply takes ~6 month.

> You have a person number and authorities store everything centrally. A big brother nightmare for Germans.

Should be a big brother nightmare for all humans.

Your number is 666.

So having a health database, drivers license database, social security, banking etc are all ok but creating a proper national ID system would somehow push it over the edge to where an authoritarian government can come about and take control of our lives?

Your argument boils down to “let’s purposely make our government inefficient because it might one day turn on us”

Which, judging from other countries, is actually the opposite of what happens.

The worst offenders of human rights and government overreach are the ones that don’t have their shit together.

Health data is a difficult topic.

But for what do a drivers license database, social security numbers exist? And why should a country/state know your bank account number(s)?

Etatism is cancer.

> But for what do a drivers license database, social security numbers exist?

To keep bad drivers off the road? To suspend privileges when you kill someone with your car?

Social security numbers were originally created for linking people to their social security accounts but has now become our national ID because there is an inherit need for one in the modern world. The problem with SSNs is that they were never designed for their current use-case.

> And why should a country/state know your bank account number(s)?

A state will always have access to and the capability of seizing your account funds. This is a necessity for a multitude of reasons that I can list out, but I'll let you use your imagination.

Take a look around the world. Take a look at history. Autocrats don't need an efficient ID system to take control of their citizens. People willingly give up their freedoms and align themselves with autocrats when they use the same propaganda and fear-mongering tactics that have been used for centuries. It has nothing to do with the government amassing a database of their population. Once the autocrats are in control, they will create whatever system they require.

The only way to avoid tyranny is to fight for liberal values at the ballot box. Anything else is bullshit. Your guns won't do shit when your local militia is aligned with the autocrat in control.

> To keep bad drivers off the road? To suspend privileges when you kill someone with your car?

A document is not sufficient for that? Doubt it.

> Social security numbers has now become our national ID because there is an inherit need for one in the modern world.

Why?

> A state will always have access to and the capability of seizing your account funds. This is a necessity for a multitude of reasons that I can list out, but I'll let you use your imagination.

But not one good reason. For law enforcement, there are other possibilities.

> Take a look around the world. Take a look at history. Autocrats don't need an efficient ID system to take control of their citizens.

But pseudo-democracies do.

> The only way to avoid tyranny is to fight for liberal values at the ballot box. Anything else is bullshit. Your guns won't do shit when your local militia is aligned with the autocrat in control.

No. The only way is to send politicians with their political idiocies to hell and establish direct democracies. When the people have to participate in the organisation of a country/state (or better in a cooperation of peoples; is there really a need for geographical limits?), and discuss the distribution of resources, instead of just balloting from time to time for one or another political idiocy, don't you think they could make that way better than the current systems?

Why?

There’s always a lot of hand-wringing and FUD around giving people ID numbers, but never a coherent rational argument. What makes it a big brother nightmare for all humans?

Like all automation, having a database of your population greatly increases your efficiency, without regard to whether this power is used to do good or to do evil.

There are many still alive who remember the evils done by the Stasi, when I was a child, there were many who remembered the evils done by the Gestapo; when those are your core examples of a citizen database, such thing naturally seems "big brother".

The irony is the mirror image: America seems almost* totally willing to have private databases while disliking government ones, Europe seems almost* totally willing to have government databases while disliking private ones.

* to anyone about to reply "not I": don't be blind to the "almost", I know many here will be exceptions

> Like all automation, having a database of your population greatly increases your efficiency

Really? For what purposes exactly?

All the things that surveys do but where surveys would be really slow, repetitive, and suffer sub-population sampling biases; and all the things that censuses do but with better temporal resolution.

Sorry, saw your answer just now.

And you think that those fine granularities are really needed?

I suspect the degradation came from Eastern Europe, what you wrote is what I was told EE looked like in the 80-90s.

What do you mean by that? Did Finland change location over time?

Also, two Eastern European countries that I have first-hand knowledge of: Poland and Estonia are much more digitised and efficient at those things than Germany (and, from what GP wrote, it seems Finland as well?).

The same processes that led to Eastern Europe in 80-90s ending up as a nightmare where everything took ages to be handled happened to Finland with the same outcome. Bad algorithms basically. Maybe PL/EST still remember how bad it was back then and make sure they are running better algorithms, whereas Finland has no clue how bad it can get due to a lack of experience?

I don't know why does everyone on HN think that Estonia is Eastern Europe when it is actually Northern Europe (https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Europe). All of the Baltic countries are Northern.

A subset of Northern Europe is in Eastern Europe. They’re not disjoint. In particular all Baltic countries are in Eastern Europe (as is visible on the map in the article you linked to (CIA World Factbook)) Eastern Europe has been historically defined by the Iron Curtain. Other definitions are fairly arbitrarily just trying to put a line somewhere on the map without regard for history and its effects on culture and politics.

It's the same as Czechia, Poland, Slovakia and Hungary being Eastern European when they are Central European. Soviet legacy, west vs east.

The popularisation of the concept of Central Europe stems from some people being ashamed of being from Eastern Europe and feeling inferior to Western Europe. Eastern Europe is defined by the Iron Curtain whose effects are still visible today, while Central Europe is a category created purely by selecting a region on the map without regard for political or cultural factors, just to push Eastern Europe further East and exclude some countries from it. It’s fairly arbitrary. I don’t see Eastern Europe as inferior and am not ashamed of being from a part of it, so I see no point in using an arbitrary term like Central Europe.

Mitteleuropa is an old concept, much older than the Iron Curtain. For example, the old boundaries of the Austro-Hungarian empire catch quite a lot of it. I've been told that places like Slovenia are pretty different from places like Serbia, and similarly for western vs. eastern Ukraine.

In the case of Poland though only a tiny fraction of it was captured by the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The largest portion was captured by Russia. Second largest by German Empire. I have great-grandparents from each of those.

Moreover prior to the fall of the Iron Curtain the term Central Europe wasn’t used much. After that though some people like Milan Kundera started popularising it much more out of sense of inferiority.

East and West used to be be not only a geographical distinction, but also political one.

Estonia belonged to the East, even though not voluntarily.

They actively left the Eastern block when they had the chance (like most of the others, so the block is no block anymore), but the terminology lives on, especially used by people who did not suffer from it.

A couple of years I went to a technical event. The event T-shirts were red. Someone from an "Eastern" country felt very negative about that: "We had communism, I will never wear a red T-shirt."

Those in the "West" who don't have the history of suffering don't have any strong feelings about those old things. Many of those who suffered (either personally or at least in stories from their parents) can be rather sensitive about such "mistakes".

To me it's just about what was taught in schools to me, and what I can find on my own. If you Wikipedia Estonia, it says right in the opening paragraph that it is Northern Europe. It's also what was taught to me in schools. Admittedly, being born in '92, I am a first-generation free Estonian and never experienced the soviet union so I don't have any strong feelings of East or the color red, but it is true that Eastern Europe is often talked with the vain of ex-soviet block countries that are corrupt and stuck in time, which is simply not the case with Estonia and I feel just minimizes the work we've done since.

And I thought racism wasn't a thing on HN...

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