I really doubt any western government could pull this off as either they or their population would balk at the cost if not the concept.

Yes it’s a matter of the incentives, but a government entity has fundamentally different incentives than a private entity. Countries ranging from Canada to Sweden to India to China invested heavily into state-owned industries in the 20th century, and every single one reversed course. Because it just didn’t work.

Sweden's state-owned enterprises were sold purely because of politics. No one reversed course. It's just the right wing got majority and sold what they could when they had the chance including a large amount of public housing, schools and healthcare facilities.

No, it wasn’t some accident of Swedish politics. The same thing happened all over the world at the same time. It happened in India, it happened in China. It happened in Germany. The movement toward state owned enterprises in the 1960s and 1970s was reversed in myriad countries with myriad political systems because it didn’t work.

I didn't say anything about the rest of the world. You made a statement about Sweden, even highlighting that it was "every single country" which, unless you want to qualify that statement, simply wasn't accurate. State-owned enterprises in Sweden weren't sold off because they didn't provide service or even didn't make profits but because of shifting politics in Sweden and the EU. Politicians who never wanted state-owned enterprises came into power and the EU made many ventures outright illegal as unlawful state aid. The same politicians who privatized everything else and ended conscription so Sweden had no choice but to join Nato. You can of course argue that "it didn't work because it wasn't wanted" but then the same thing goes for anything else that was changed like government owned nuclear power plants. Which these days of course also requires approval from the EU.

> Politicians who never wanted state-owned enterprises came into power

And pray tell, how did that happen? How do people come into power in Sweden? I thought that it has a system where people propose what they will do, and the population votes on whose ideas and proposals they like the most, doesn't it?

What happened in other countries is relevant because it shows that it wasn’t just something you can explain away as specific to Swedish politics and who got elected when.

> every single one reversed course. Because it just didn’t work.

Didn't work for whom?

To suggest that political changes happen due to "it didn't work" seems like a pretty shallow conclusion. There are a lot that can be said about the last decades of free-market privatization & reforms in Europe, and in Sweden in particular, but that it was done out of necessity rather than a general political shift after the collapse of the Soviet Union is simply a biased take.

> Didn't work for whom?

Everyone from voting public in liberal democracies (Sweden, Canada, Germany), to the voting public in less liberal democracies (India), the Islamic world (Egypt), to communist regimes (China, Vietnam).

What do you mean didn't work for the voting public in Sweden?

The voting public didn’t like the slow economic growth and high taxes, which is why they voted for parties who promised to reform the system.

So "heavy investment in state-owned industries just doesn't work" is actually just you drawing far-reaching conclusions over shifting economic policies and/or voting patterns. That line of reasoning doesn't even pass the most basic correlation is not causation test.

When many different societies with different political systems all try something around the same time, and all retreat from that approach a few decades later, that’s really significant real-world data. The country I’m from has socialism written into its constitution, but now is strongly neoliberal. Maybe that’s just correlation, but otherwise it has little in common with Sweden, reducing the possibility that some common third factor is in play.

I mean, discussions about this free-market/neoliberal political shift have been going on for a long time. To just assume state-owned industry "just doesn't work" because of that post-Soviet shift is confirmation bias on an already weak correlation.

In Sweden it's glaringly obvious that the privatizations have provided worse outcomes than before - even the free-market think-tanks are smart to avoid that subject. Unfortunately for us, they instead tend to focus on supporting voices that blame immigration for the consequences of sky-rocketing inequality. I guess they'll have to wait another decade or so before the myth building of the inherently incompetent state is on more fertile ground.

The shift towards SOEs and back away is close to the largest scale economic experiment we have ever done on the planet. Many of these countries, particularly India and China, invested heavily in terms of political and reputational capital into the approach of a government-run economy. They had tremendous incentives to stick with a system they had assured the public was the way of the future. When the same approach is tried in everything from Scandinavian social democracies to Islamic socialist societies to Asian communist regimes, and then all of them change course after a few decades, that’s not just “confirmation bias. That’s data.

Maybe voters in Sweden and voters in India and party functionaries in China all just got some “right wing”virus at the same time. Or maybe they were reaction to the unworkability of an economic system they had tried. You know what they say: those who don’t understand history are doomed to repeat it.

It's hard for me to take doubling down on "correlation is causation" seriously, especially on such an obviously multi-faceted subject, it's simply too unnuanced. Just the assertion in passing that China has supposedly moved away from SOEs could be a debate on its own.

You talk about incentives? The amount of money that has been concentrated to the wealthiest portions of society is simply staggering, even in superficially equal countries like Sweden. The privatization of state-owned industry, properties, and the welfare system has been an unprecedented goldmine for private interests. Essentially a smaller Scandinavian version of a post-USSR wealth transfer. The incentives for people in power in less democratic and/or corrupt countries is even more obvious.

The virus was the global shock-wave due to the collapse of soviet-Union? Come on. It was not like the shift to third-way social-democracy was a grassroots movement. Party politics is more fluid than voting patterns. A sentiment of "It's new times now, we need to go along with the flow" (not that dissimilar to today's politicians accepting the gig-economy, but that's another topic), rather than "we can clearly see that state-owned industry just isn't working, we have no choice but to try something new". If it actually was the latter, it would've be repeated by right-wing representatives on every political debate since the 1990, but that hasn't happened.

I'll leave it there, I think I've gotten my point across.

Hopefully they don't keep spending 4 million on a single toilet everytime