The challenges of the Nordic countries in a globalized world

Along with the rest of the Western World the Nordic countries are also in decline. This is a relative decline due to the fact that there are new winners in the globalized world. China is the most prominent example of a new rising economy that is shaking the old world order.

In this globalized world efficiency and competitiveness is vital. We need to be competitive in order to get investments which create more jobs. These jobs create welfare. We have a declining work force in Finland and large youth unemployment. According to the bank of Finland the word force in the private sector is declining by 0,2% annually until 2030 while the workforce in the public sector is increasing by 0,4% until the same year. This is due to the negative demographic growth where larger older age groups are withdrawing from the work market. These small percentages may not sound much. And are around average all over the Nordic countries except Sweden where they have a growing labor force due to larger immigration. More workers would push down prices of labor making the job market more efficient. The issues in the Nordic countries are the structural changes and the small amount of people. Old industries have been offshored to China. Several of the transnational companies have gone for cheap labor in China leaving large amounts of people unemployed. This labor force is forced to re-structuralize themselves which costs a lot of money for society during the transition. But this is a far cheaper solution than permanent unemployment.

Since we have a small and declining labor force several people have presented the idea of immigration. An increased immigration would revitalize the economy. This might be a part solution. But not much is talked about policies designed to increase child bearing families. Policies should be implemented to cut-off the negative demographic trend. Besides it is difficult to get skilled work force to a cold and dark North. If we are to get skilled work force there must be extensive marketing and awareness rising. It’s quite pointless to get unskilled labor force to the Nordic countries as it get expensive. How are our educational systems which are primarily designed to deal with homogenous populations going to cope with people far away? There are no magic switches that would make people all of a sudden functional in a new culture and its language. These things take time. Thus there should be put a priority on skilled labor force which would only need to learn the culture and language and the rules and laws of society.

 

Youth unemployment is around 18%-25% in Finland and around the same in the other Nordic countries, except in Denmark where youth unemployment is just about 10%. Youth unemployment is a big issue. In Finland there are about 40 or 50 thousand young people unemployed. The saddest part is that most of them are unskilled with only primary school education. Their issues are massive. They are not part of society in anyway. Saddest part is their personal misery but society pays terribly much for them. It’s expected that around 40% of those young people will be permanently unemployed. This trend has to be cut. One person who is cast away from society costs around 1,6 million euros to society. It means that the total cost for society would be at around 24 billion euros! In Finland. This is a terrible tragedy in a situation where Finland needs every single person to work and keep active in society, because we are so very few.

This trend must be broken. Measures are luckily already taken in order to deal with this issue.  With the youth guarantee policy by the Finnish government taking effect rather soon. We must ensure that these people get a prosperous future with jobs. It’s in nobody’s interest to have them become welfare bums. They are needed to help to take care of the ageing population. Besides we don't want a growing radicalization amongst the homeland population.

Furthermore the issue points are that careers usually start relatively late in Finland at around the age of 22-27. Those more highly educated start at the latter. The second issue is that a lot of people exit the labor market at around the age of 52 due to illness. The average retirement age is 60,4 when the target age is 64. How will we get people to work earlier and how will we get people to work longer? Because efficiency is ever more important now. At least for the time being when there are massive demographgic changes.

Could a country wide online-company-network slash public sector common labor market lessen the time of unemployment? Imagine if Finland or another country would create department of labor doing matching. Imagine a national matching-service. Where people could leave their CV’s and where employers could easily recruit workers. This would be an instrumental solution. Employer gets easily and quickly information of a possible employee who would match the job description. And job seeker, future employee, would get hired more quickly into a job. This could be a service that the country funds with public money as it would be of the interest of all. Issues are physical distances. How would these be solved? Must there be different geographical sectors for the employee etc?

There are of course many ''matching companies'' but a public one could be more accessible for small businesses. It could compete agaisn't the more expensive consulting firms. Thus supporting small businesses.
  
Thus the objectives are to: get people quickly from job to job. To maximize the labor forces potential. And to get the youth back to working. Policies must be implemented which encourage to create more jobs. We must get the people working again and create policies which support small businesses. So we can get real innovations. We must encourage innovations because that’s the way to create jobs. 

Denmarks flexsecurity as a model?

Labour markets for tomorrow

Opporunities for Youth

New foreign policy to help in competiveness?

We live in a globalized world and the issues facing the Nordic countries are large by far. Our advantages are a highly skilled (educated) work force a functional society with liberal democracy. We respect, we not only respect we love human rights. Lets compare with China. They have no functional liberal democracy. They are a one party technocratic state. Do they respect human rights? No. Do they thus respect the rights of the labor force? No. Furthermore they don’t even respect our intellectual properties our patents. They just copy everything and produce cheap copies to their own markets. Virtally making our products pointless in their markets. China has no functional  trade unions defending the rights of the labor market unlike the Nordic countries.

What is to be done in order to fix this unjust competition? How about enforcing transnational companies which aim to sell their products in European and American markets to enforce western laws in their offshore production facilitates. It’s not a very comparable competition if there’s different rules from country to country. We must ensure the human rights of the people in other countries. That’s our responsibility. After all we buy their products. Products must be ‘human right’ certified. To broaden the perspective this same principle could be expanded to environmental policies. Why would we want to buy products which are ruining the planet? (more than the ones we produce).

- Trade unions could also be used to spread human rights. Helping workers in developing countries to organize themselves.

The fundamental question and matter is to make the globalized part of the world to come on the same page. We need rules which are implemented on everyone not just for a few. Offshore oppression and neglect of human rights and the environment can no longer be tolerated. This is something we should promote in the EU-level and something America should also realize. I suggest that the western world should come together in this to make common rules which transnational companies have to respect, inorder for them to be able to sell their products in the respective markets.

It would be in our interest in the North to promote human rights and environmental policies on a global level. At least on that level we are the most competitive part of the world. And thus it would be in our very interest to promote those Nordic values.

The task will be difficult due to the special interest groups, but it's not an impossible task.

Challenges of globalization

The following series of writings will be dealing with the dawn of the new globalized world. My writings will be dealing with questions such as relative decline of the Western Civilization and the rise of Asia (and other parts of the world). These writings will be dealing the decline of the power of the classical modern state which is developing into a globalized state. The world is much smaller than before and far more complicated. The optimism of ‘’the end of ideology and history’’ can be said to be over. We are in a brave new world with new challenges which my and the following generation are to be left dealing with.

This writing will be dealing with the Afghan and Iraq wars and terrorism. 

Our small world is increasingly moving towards an ever more virally and physically connected one. People – products and information flows are incredibly faster yet terribly woundable. What if somebody managed to cut off the internet? Or cut off the oil supplies from the Middle East? Destroy the financial flows of the world? These are the sort of matters we should pay interest to. Matters that are in a way increasing in their complexity.

Today is actually the first time in world history that troubles far away can affect the previously superior Western civilization. If there’s war or famine in the Middle East or Africa it will result in a surge of refugees in Europe. Organized crime and terrorism has become a global problem, whereas before we could just turn a blind eye to the problems in our colonies. The locals could kill our merchants, officials and soldiers but they would never be able to physically reach our own world. Where as we had the monopoly of being able to affect theirs. Those days are over now. The game has changed. The game has changed and can most dramatically be remembered through those dramatic events on 9/11/2001 when a group of terrorists set to harm the financial center of the world in NYC, NY, USA. Air traffic in America was shut down for days and the financial center of the world closed. Functionally it shook the world during those dramatic days, paralyzing the world finances. With humble means a few terrorists had achieved this. Security regulations had to be changed and most fundamentally we all were changed. We woke up into the realization that a small terrorist groups from the other side of the world had reached us in such a terrifying way. So America along with her allies set out to straighten that terrorist haven in the Middle East. N.A.T.O. mounted on two massive military campaigns in the Middle East to Afghanistan and Iraq.

This was over ten years ago. And we can now look at Afghanistan as a costly venture, both in human life and in resources. A mighty military force set out to social engineer a society near the middle age standards. We thought that we could somehow overnight, through physical military force convert a black terrorist hole into a moderate western liberal democratic society. This was a terrible mistake. Afghanistan is by no means a stable western liberal democratic society today. There’s a Karzai regime in Kabul (which has not even been elected out yet). And the humble ‘’talibans’’ are still keeping the fight on because they have the will power. Now these offensive wars are turning into a general withdrawal because the western world is no longer willing to sacrifice more human lives and resources onto this unfutile and expensive venture. The western world is in an economic crisis so the people are losing interest to sacrifice more resources on these sorts of costly ventures. Thus victory over night will not be possible in Afghanistan or Iraq. ISAF is preparing for a general withdrawal. And there are great doubts the Kabul regime will manage to keep the country intact without western help. The Taliban’s have played the long game successfully so far. What did we learn by this daring venture? Perhaps that it’s not possible to overnight physically social engineer a poor agricultural country into something that it’s not (a liberal democratic society). A people must want to be something and then realize its capacity and environment to achieve its goal. If a country lacks the functional means to become a liberal democratic country it also fails to become one. And the enviorment also plays its role. But what is perhaps the most important part is the desire. You get far with desire but you get no where without it.

America has already learned from its costly social engineering mistake. Moving into a more intelligence (secret service) based strategy along with its Special Forces and drones. These are the new precisement instruments which are designed to surgically destroy terrorist organizations. How far can America go with this strategy? It will of course challenge the concept of human rights. But the new approach to combat global terrorism seems to be working far better than a clumsy attempt to social engineer a whole country. Will wars abroad be incresingly delegated to the local people as we have seen in Libya? The Libyan war was actually quite a show case of a new war strategy. Where the superior west gave the means (weapons, resources and air force) to a revolt willing to topple the Gaddaffi regime. Minimal western resources were spent to topple that regime!

Other high profile terrorist attacks:

- Madrid 2004
- London 2005
- Norway 2011

The reasons for the 9/11 attacks and Norway attacks were criticism agaisnt globalization. However in Norway the attacker seemed to have operated alone which was not the case in 9/11/01 attacks.

U.S. Presidential Debate vol. 2

We are arriving into one of the most crucial debates of the current American presidential elections. These televised TV-debates are game changers in American politics. We have seen Presidents such as Ronald Reagan dismantling his opponents arguments with clever one liners and charm. Some candidates have simply failed or frozen on facts. Which has shown suprising cracks in them. Americans love confidence and firmness. And expect the president to be both physically and mentally fit to be in charge of the worlds largest military forces. Although the U.S. president has surprisingly little power with regard to the checks-and-balances in the American political system, yet he/she does yield a tremendous amount of influence. Although the president is an executive chief he is also the leader of his or her respective party. And can thus get a ''cooperative'' congressman to propose policy motions into the congress. The president is not only able to do so but actually expected to do so (although he or she can never do motions personally). Even if his party is not in charge of the under and over house he''ll have a lot of leverage as the executive chief (with his presidential veto). These combinations leads to a situation where the president truely is a powerful person - if they want, can and know how to play the game of politics correctly. The responsibilities and strain can be great for a president and, thus the Americans desire for a physically and mentally fit person can be understood. Just for an example think how long J.F. Kennedy had to stay up during the Cuba crisis. Other countries may prefer some other sort of qualities above those... but it can be justified understood that those qualities are especially important in the U.S.


Enjoy the debate and don't forget to do the N E C analysis.

Normative = Idea of how the world should function.
Empirism = ''Facts'' The understanding of how the world is with all its goods and troubles.
Constructivism = How these troubles should be solved.



The debate turned out to be quite interesting. Obama is clearly on the defensive while Romney has taken the offensive path. Obama improved his form on this debate but Romney was not weak either. Romney and Obama criticized each others policies. The debate was tense and fierce.

En politisk skrift

Det är intressant att vara med och skriva en politisk skrift. Där man ska vädja till människor för att göra aktion. Då man granskar politiska skrifter och uttalanden är de saker man brukar leta efter det normativa, empiriska och det konstruktiva. E-posten som jag och en vän skrev innehåller alla dessa element. Jag ska göra för skojs skull en liten analys av texten som jag och min vän har skrivit. (N)ormativ betyder att det är en normativt påståelse dvs. det är en värdering om hur man vill att världen ska se ut. (E)mpirisk betyder en empiriskt ''fakta påståelse''. (K)onstruktiv innebär att man erbjuder en lösning till något problem.

I vår e-post börjar vi med att förklara hurdan typ av förening vi är. Det är som sagt empiriska fakta påståelser. Då vi går vidare slingrar vi in med en normativ syn. Därpå följer vi med motiverade empiriska och konstruktiva synpunkter. Analysen fortsätter på detta sätt.

Då man skriver en e-post av denna art måste man vädja till människors känslor och moraliska världsbild. Tyvärr kan man ju inte utveckla sina tankar allt för långt på så kort e-post eftersom då kan man enkelt tappa läsarens intresse. Istället är målet att man strävar efter att försöka skriva kort och koncist men ändå med tillräckligt mycket substans. Svagheten är ju såklart att det uppstår vissa luckor i skriften - men det är sådana luckor man antar att en läsare som är intresserad fyller genom att ta reda på saken.

Till exempel på den sista (K) biten anser vi att det är viktigt att lösa samhällsproblem genom att vara en aktiv samhällsdeltagare. Men i stället för att svara på frågan om att hur man ska lösa samhällsproblemen ställer vi vissa retoriska frågor. Utan att svara på hur man ska lösa problemen. Tanken bakom det är att få läsaren att känna att man själv kan bidra till att lösa problemen i samhället. Det är ju dessutom nära ett empiriskt fakta påstående.

Det var verkligen skojigt att vara med och skriva den här text och ha alla dessa punkter i tankarna. Dessutom var det ju också trevligt att få göra denna analys och försöka förklara hur det går till.

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Hej och välkommen med i Åbo Socialdemokratiska Studerandes verksamhet!

Åbo Socialdemokratiska Studerande (ÅSS) är en högskolepolitisk specialförening som är verksam inom Åbo Akademis Studentkår. Föreningen består av unga och energiska finlandssvenska studerande. Vår uppgift och ändamål är att förbättra studerandenas vardag både lokalt inom Kåren och nationellt samt engagera människor till att vara samhälleligt aktiva. Under våra möten diskuterar vi förutom studierelaterade ärenden också samhälleligt intressanta och aktuella ämnen. (E)

Åbo Socialdemokratiska Studerande tror på en studentkår för alla oberoende ort (N). Därför är vi verksamma i både Åbo och Vasa. Våra medlemsmöten är gemensamma och sköts via videokonferens i studentkårens utrymmen. Det har visat sig vara ett lönsamt arrangemang eftersom man lärt känna varandra även om man inte bor på samma ort. Därmed får man också perspektiv på hur det är att vara studerande i Åbo eller Vasa. Utöver de gemensamma mötena träffas vi även lokalt och ordnar evenemang inom ÅSS eller tillsammans med våra finskspråkiga systerföreningar TOSY i Åbo och VSDO i Vasa. (E) (K)

Vårt arbete bygger på socialdemokratiska värderingar, såsom frihet, jämlikhet, mänskliga rättigheter och solidaritet. En av våra viktigaste uppgifter är att vara den finlandssvenska rösten inom den socialdemokratiska studeranderörelsen i Finland (N). Gemensamt för alla socialdemokratiska studerandeföreningar är att vi är underordnade SONK (Socialdemokratiska studerande i Finland). En dylik takorganisation ger oss en reell möjlighet att inflyta i både högskole- och rikspolitiken i Finland. ÅSS, SONK och själva partiet brukar ordna trevliga evenemang för oss som är väldigt roliga och intressanta.(E) (K)

Åbo Socialdemokratiska Studerande är ett nygammalt finlandssvenskt socialdemokratiskt projekt som behöver nya unga studerande som är redo att arbeta för en bättre framtid och värld (E). Fråga inte vad någon annan kan göra för att förbättra studerandes angelägenheter – var i stället själv den brinnande förändring och kraft som förbättrar angelägenheterna. Hurdant samhälle vill du leva i? Hur ska din högskola se ut i framtiden? Kanske du vill vara med i vårt projekt där vi tillsammans försöker hitta lösningar till de problem som finns i samhället. (K)

Du är varmt välkommen med på vårt följande möte den 18 oktober där vi kan knyta närmare bekantskap och planera något lättsammare evenemang där vi bekantar oss närmare. Du kommer att få möteskallelsen via e-post.

  

Välkommen med i detta spännande projekt!