Jacob Christensen

If you are a regular reader of Swedish crime novels – e.g. Sjöwall and Wahlöö, Mankell, Marklund and so on – you are likely to be under the impression that 1) Ystad is the Murder Capital of Europe and 2) the Police always gets its man.

Both assumptions are wrong. Compared with other West and North Europeans, Swedes are not particularly homicidal, while the quality of Swedish police work belongs in the same sorry category as that of the Springfield Police Department. You really have to be a stupid criminal to get caught by the police in this country.

July is the big holiday season in Sweden and guess what: The policemen are on holiday as well. A representative for the Stockholm Police was quoted in Dagens Nyheter as saying that the fact that investigations were routinely delayed for a month or more didn’t affect the success rate for solving crimes. He may be right: Last year a study of policemen’s attitudes showed that the organisational culture was such that it killed all aspirations of and morale among new recruits within a year of their entering service.

The point of this rant is that a group of criminals carried out yet another armed assault and robbery of a money transport in the Stockholm region late Monday evening. The – usually very violent and dramatic – assaults have been a part of everyday life in Sweden for some years now, and as a matter of fact Sweden is one of the most dangerous countries in all of Europe when it comes to assaults and robberies against money transports.

Transport companies are angry about the performance of the police and so are the trade unions which after a previous incident blocked money transports for a short period. That initiative almost led to a panic among retailers who feared that they would be left with the responsibility for providing citizens with cash.

There are a number of things that I find interesting in this sorry story. One is the naivety on the side of the state when it comes to the risks connected with transporting large sums of money around the country. Basically the National Bank has shut most of its regional offices and privatised the physical distribution of bank notes and coins. Commercial banks and private transport companies are left with the responsibility but lack adequate means to handle criminals.

Another aspect is the way Swedish police works. That an organisation can degenerate and develop a very destructive internal culture is nothing new. But what is interesting and rather scary is that managerial and political initiatives to change the culture are absent. But maybe armed robberies aren’t seen as a problem among police chiefs and bureaucrats.

Note: There is one exception to the rule when it comes to the indifference of the Swedish police. The government has been very forthcoming when it came to following the demands of the record industry for abandoning privacy on the internet and allow for surveillance of data traffic.

Update: The Wikipedia server was up again so I’ve added links to the articles about Sjöwall/Wahlöö and Liza Marklund.

I’ll hate myself for doing this but I am posting this quote from Robert Scoble’s blog with a purpose:

But, this is an important point: research is NOT done because of commercial pressures. It’s done to study something and come up with new approaches.

This is why it’s so important that our industry continues to do real research. Not just product development. You never know what Marc will learn from studying the social behaviors of those who hang out in newsgroups. Maybe he’ll find a new algorithm that’ll prove very useful in a blog search engine.

You see, what Danish (and Swedish) politicians want from the public universities is product development – the “research-to-invoice” approach.

So in research policy, we have a private company acting as a state ought to and states acting like they think a private company does.

There is a Danish equivalent, by the way: Carlsberg and the Carlsberg Foundation.

Correction: That’s Robert, not Richard Scoble.

Back in the early 1990s, the UK led the way in privatising railways and splitting ownership of the tracks from train services. From then on, it has been a bumpy road for British train services (bad pun, I know), even if there has been more investment in the infrastructure than before 1990.According to a report in The Times, the Conservative Party which originally pushed the idea of privatisation, is about review its earlier policies and call for a reintegration of track and service ownership. One of the arguments made is that the entire set-up of contracts made neccessary by the split is excessive and too costly. The Conservatives now want to promote a model with regional contractors and joint-ventures.Perhaps Monopoly will be the new Competition?In other news, only 3 out of 4 long-distance trains in Denmark arrived on time in June. DSB (the operator) blames BaneDanmark (the owner of the track) – and ultimately politicians – because of a severe lack of investment in railway infrastructure during the last 30 years. (My word of advice is: If you need to go somewhere in Denmark this summer, go by car or take a bus. Trains should only be used if you have no other means of transport available).Update: Link to the press release from the British Conservative Party. And here is the Guardian’s take on the Conservative Rail Review. Note the number of “wills” in that article.

The right to ridicule. New York Review of Books, March 23, 2006.

Three months late.

I know.

Well, I’ll be… For once Dagens Nyheter publishes an article with a sensible argument as its main editorial.

A screen dump from Technorati’s front page, taken today at 21.08 CST. I’m still trying to figure out how to interpret this distribution of searches.

The Almedal Week came and went without making too much of an impact on the general public. One obvious reason for this is that it is summer holiday time in Sweden and when the Swedes go on holiday, they do so big time. Another, that the parties are saving their ammunition for the election campaign which will only really start sometime during mid-August.

However, we did see one potentially important – and very dangerous – initiative from the centre-right “alliance“: In an announcement the four party leaders promised to abolish the property tax and replace it with some kind of local government charge.

Opposition to the property tax – along with energy taxes – has long been a defining issue for the small and struggling Christian Democrat Party and the property tax is also an effective populist issue for politicians and media in a situation where house prices in the larger cities have litterally exploded during the last 6-7 years.

Why – and How – Property Taxes Are a Political Issue

The thing about family homes (houses or appartments) is that they have a double nature: At the same time they are a consumer good and an investment. Most consumer goods lose value as you use them – for instance a house needs constant repairs and occasional modernisations – while an investment is supposed to bring you some rate of return. The consumer good aspect is immediately obvious to home-owners, the investment aspect less so. But as noted above, economic and demographic developments have meant that the rate of return on owning a house or an appartment in places like Malmö, Göteborg and especially Stockholm has been very good indeed.

And so what, you may ask.

Well, the political problem is that property taxes build on some kind of assessment of the property’s market value which can only be realised if you either sell your property or take a loan against security in the property. Most home owners, on the other hand, will be paying taxes out of their current income which does not co-vary with the market value of the property.

This invariably leads to the by-now-familiar “taxes force Ordinary Guy out of his seaside home that he has owned for 60 years”-stories in the media. And if there is one thing politicians like, it is being seen to defend Mr. Ordinary Guy. Especially if he is retired.

One slightly odd aspect of the story is that the Swedish Christian Democrats on the one hand have an ideological preference for home ownership but on the other hand have the strongest support in more peripheral parts of the country. On the other hand, the anti-property tax stance could be a menas to attracting socially conservative voters in the larger cities.

The “Alliance’s” Proposal

The proposal presented by the centre-right contains two steps: 1. A promise to immediately frezze the taxing value of properties which means that taxes in 2007 would be on the same level as in 2006. 2. The introduction for the tax year of 2008 of “a low local government charge” which is promised to be independent of properties’ market value. (Note the rhetoric: Instead of a heavy property tax, you will get a low charge).

The parties haven’t come clear about what kind of tax the new local government charge will be and there are several good reasons for this. A guess could be that this kind of charge will have to rely on some parametres of the property that are unrelated to its market price: It could be based on size (households with big houses will pay more, bad for you if you are a large family which has moved to a cheap neighbourhood), the number of persons in the household (yes, the famous community charge which helped bring down Lady Thatcher) or a standard sum for all properties or households (again some kind of poll tax). Finally, you could shift the charge to a tax on water, sewerage and garbage (again, bad news for people with children).

Media Comments and the Economists’ View

In the public, the proposal to abolish the property tax hasn’t been med with universal acclaim. The Social Democrats have duly criticised the proposal – but that isn’t surprising, of cause – and the economist Lars Calmfors has also made negative comments about it

In general, comments have concentrated on the probable effects on the personal distribution of income – if you own a house or and appartment, you win; if you will have to buy an appartment or a house, you lose – and some have also discussed regional effects – Stockholmers will win, people in the countryside will lose.

What has surprised me is that there has been very little discussion of the consequences and abolition of property taxes will have on the over-all income of the state and local authorities, the distribution of the tax burden between personal and capital income and finally the taxation on different kinds of capital income. My guess is that an isolated abolition of property taxes will drive up the price of property – especially in the larger cities – and that investments will go from investments in shares and the like to investments in property.

Finally, the property tax discussion has a fascinating Danish parallel. The thing is that Danish economists for a long time have argued that in a global economy, taxes have to shift from mobile sources of income – such as wages and rents – to immobile sources in order to provide a reliable tax base. Yes indeed, economists argue that property taxes ought to go up, not be abolished.

The thuds you hear are not the sound of Zidane’s head hitting Mazzerati’s thorax. It is the sound of economists banging their heads against the nearest wall in desperation.

PS: In case you wonder – this post does not amount to an endorsal of the Swedish Social Democrats’ housing policy. The Social Democratic approach to housing policy can best be described as the continued implementation of a Soviet-style planned economy. It hasn’t stopped the development of ethnic ghettos in the larger cities and the only real benefactors are people with connections and Social Democratic apparatchiks.

There must be some kind of link from Pierre Boulez to Paris Hilton. Or is my musical taste really that bad?

Besides eating my way through a backlog of issues of the New York Review of Books (oh pluh-leeze, just HOW pretentious can you be…?) and some stuff about Swedish school policy, I managed to read two books during my time away from Umeå.

Wilhelm Bleek: Geschichte der Politikwissenschaft in Deutschland. If you read German, this is a fascinating introduction to a very long history of the discipline in Germany and partly also Austria and Switzerland. Bleek is stronger on the institutional and political side of the story than on the purely academic but given the explosion of the discipline during the last 40 years this is understandable. The surprise to me as a Dane was the description of the lack of professional identity among German political scientists.

Albert O. Hischman: The Rhetoric of Reaction. Hischman is best known for Exit, Voice and Loyalty (and for some reason “loyalty” is always forgotten in the discussion of how the links between public organisations and polities on the one hand and citizens on the other work) but Rhetoric is a relatively accessible and quite entertaining discussion of how reforms and revolutions are met. Hirschman distiguishes between the Perversity, Futility and Jeopardy approach. Read my post and Jørgen Grønnegaard Christensen’s essay on university reforms and discuss.

If you read any of the Scandinavian languages, you ought to read Jørgen Grønnegaard Christensen’s essay about university reforms in Denmark which is published in Tuesday’s edition of Politiken.

Grønnegaard who is a professor in Public Administration at Århus University is very sceptical with regard to the avalanche of administrative and organisational reforms that have hit higher education and public research during the last five years.

To sum up Grønnegaard’s argument: Hierarchy and bureaucracy are replacing cooperation and flexibility, all in the name of – well, what?

The typical political arguments have been that universities and research should perform at the highest international level – see also the idea that merging Copenhagen Business School and the Technical University will create a “Danish MIT” – and that “the elite” should be strengthened. Aalborg University has already started to implement the latter strategy on certain programmes: If you’re not an “elite student”, you will not be allowed near any of the professors.

The question is of cause if mergers and bureaucratisation will lead to the desired goals. There are several reasons to assume that this will not be the case:

• First, the bossism which is an integral part of the reforms means that administration will get a higher status than research (teaching is something which will be left to people who have shown themselves to be incompetent researches).
• Second, giant mergers go against the inter-organisational micro-level nature of most research network. If you work in a big research organisation, you won’t be more creative; you will be a smaller cog in a bigger machine.
• Finally, the bureaucratisation of the system of research grants and opportunities means that the start-up costs of new research will be huge. Instead of writing a paper to develop your ideas, you will have to write an application for a research grant where you explain how you have developed your ideas (yes, I have noted the change in time here), and if you really want the money, your only chance is to gang up with at least twenty other people in advance. Alternatively, you may choose to get a life, have children, enjoy your garden, go to the opera and so on.

There is one aspect of the reforms, however, that Grønnegaard does not address and that is its intellectual heritage. As I see it, the plans for turning universities into giant hierarchical organisations with an emphasis on management rather than research haven’t been dreamt up by Helge Sander, the Danish Minister for Research, the are the product of the combined talent of the bureaucrats at the Ministry for Research and come straight out of the New Public Management school.

As political scientists we should ask ourselves: Who educated these people?

Answer: We did.

For an interesting discussions of administrative reforms, see Christopher Hood’s “The Art of the State“. Hood is a very insightful and funny writer on administrative politics.