If this is true, it is nothing short of an outrage. No democracy is possible if public figures are to be protected by such strict laws. Merely being impolite can’t be a reason to clamp down on free speach. I didn’t believe a democratic Western European country like France could employ such policies…

He was party secretary of the Labour party from 1945 to 1969, a period through which the Labour party was in government for most of the time. The joint leadership between Lie and the most prominent prime minister during the period, Einar Gerhardsen has become famous in Norwegian politics both for its effectiveness in building the country and for its latter days bitter rivalry.

Lie was one of the people who rebuilt the Labour party from a party of class struggle to a broader mass party building the welfare state on a compromise between capitalism and socialism. He was one of the ideologers that formed a new kind of socialism where anti-capitalism was replaced by a modern social democratic quest for liberty for all. In domestic policy he pushed for social reforms along with his comrade in arms Gerhardsen.

In foreign and security policy he was much more controversial. He was driven by a distaste for communism whose anti-democratic tendencies he felt was a corruption of socialism.  He feared its spread and favoured NATO membership and nuclear armament. He went as far as agitating for nuclear arms on Norwegian soil and was somewhat of a Norwegian McCarthy in actively organizing networks to report on “suspicious activities”, and demanded internal loyalty. These things created a growing divide between him and Gerhardsen who had a less realist approach to foreign policy and a more open approach to dissent.

In 1967 the conflict between Gerhardsen and Lie came to a boil as Gerhardsen confronted him at the party congress, proposing to depose him as party secretary. According to eye witnesses Lie responded by threatening to “crush you like a louse”. Lie’s reign survived the attack at the ’67 congress, but he stepped down in 1969.

This was however not the end of his political influence. Even unto his sickbed for the last half year of his life, at age 103, he was approached by politicians and journalists alike for advice and comment. He remained an outspoken critic of the Labour party leadership whenever he meant that they strayed from the right path of social democracy. His retirement was also spent writing books, of which he published a respectable number.

Haakon Lie remained a giant in Norwegian politics until his death, and although controversial in many ways he will remain in Norwegian history as one of the architects of the post-war welfare state.

See also

• Obituary in the Guardian
• Haakon Lie on Wikipedia

“As a socialist, I have always said that the market can’t regulate itself,” she said. “But even I was surprised how strong the failure was.”

These are the words of Norway’s Finance Minister Kristin Halvorsen from the political party Socialist Left (SV), which is part of the current centre-left government coalition in Norway. The words come from an article in the Global Business section of The New York Times, which praises the economic management of the Norwegian state, among other things  how it has stuck with its social democratic welfare model through boom and bust.

The global financial crisis has brought low the economies of just about every country on earth. But not Norway.

With a quirky contrariness as deeply etched in the national character as the fjords carved into its rugged landscape, Norway has thrived by going its own way. When others splurged, it saved. When others sought to limit the role of government, Norway strengthened its cradle-to-grave welfare state.

And in the midst of the worst global downturn since the Depression, Norway’s economy grew last year by just under 3 percent. The government enjoys a budget surplus of 11 percent and its ledger is entirely free of debt.

The debt free government is of course something the current centre-left coalition can’t take the credit for alone. The Norwegian government has passed between Labour, centre-right and centre-left governments for the last decade.  Since 1990, there has been a broad consensus in the Norwegian parliament for a programme of  national savings in a government pension fund, to preserve value for future generations and avoid “Dutch disease“. I mentioned this policy in an earlier post on this blog.

The description of Norway as always sticking with its welfare model is another issue, though. Norway did go through a phase of privatization of welfare, for example the schooling system, during the last government, but this was abruptly stopped by the centre-left Stoltenberg administration when it came into power four years ago. Of course this didn’t necessarily affect government expenditure.

If the right wing were to come into power in the upcoming parliament elections, we might see another shift in this policy. Although supportive of the need for government stimuli to the economy, their preferred stimuli come in the form of tax cuts rather than the countercyclic government expenditures the current government favours. Last week’s conservative party congress heavily emphasized this.

(Hat tip to Tromp for bringing this to my attention).

No reason has been given for the refusal, but I can hardly see how it can be a positive sign for the Sri Lanka situation.

Norway’s role as peace broker in Sri Lanka seems pretty much played out after Norwegian police failed to prevent damage to the Sri Lankan embassy in Oslo on the hands of Tamil protesters. The Sri Lankan government has reputedly declared Norway unwanted in the process.

But according to Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt’s blog, he is going to Sri Lanka to try and handle the humanitarian situation – together with French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner and their British counterpart David Milliband. It’s a real show of force from EU to apply pressure on the parts of the conflict to refrain from further bloodshed. It may also be a sign that the EU is really serious about its role as a global peace broker with  a different focus than that of the US.

The Tamil Tigers (LTTE) have according to various media already asked for a cease fire, but the Sri Lankan government has rejected it, demanding a complete surrender.

Reading it made me take a political economist view of the apparent discrepancy of rights and ownership between consumers and industry. For the political economist, the market for pirated music and movies is an interesting and peculiar case. It appears to me that the current state of affairs is that the majority of young people view art as a public good, while the music and movie industry insist on treating it as a private good.

There are two important conditions for a public good: That it is non-excludable and non-rivalrous. With the current state of technology, it should be obvious to anyone that music and movies are no longer excludable. Only the most stalwart fundamentalists of copyright law think that it’s possible to stop piracy altogether. For the sake of interest we can call the good “poorly excludable”, as the pirate will with the current state of affairs at least incur the psychological cost of breaking a law by gaining access without paying.

Just a few years ago, I would admit that movies and music were at least partly rivalrous. The intensity of bandwith necessary for everyone to enjoy music and movies online made it difficult for everyone to do so at once. But that restriction is getting weaker and weaker by the day. Today it’s very difficult to claim that music and movies aren’t at least not very rivalrous goods.

What might then be the reason to treat these forms of art as private goods? The movie and music industry answers in black and white letters that piracy is stealing and thus wrong. Art is the intellectual property of the creator and shouldn’t be enjoyed by anyone without his consent.

But this seems to be a moral interpretation that has less and less resonance with the general populace, especially younger generation. Young people are less concerned with the moral right to your own work than they are with the non-rivalrous nature of the good. Services such as Youtube, Flickr and others are a success because a huge amount of people are happy having others enjoy their work and thus expect the same in turn.

But there is of course a big difference between professional art and what amateurs upload to Flickr and Youtube. I do realise that major feature films cost money to make, advertise and distribute. The problem is that movies have a very high investment cost and a very low marginal cost – meaning that it costs a lot to make a movie, but costs very little to let more people enjoy it once it’s made. It’s the same problem we’ve seen for example with electric power – it costs a lot to invest in infrastructure and power plants and not so much to distribute it afterwards.

Electric power supply is often considered a natural monoploy for those reasons – there isn’t room for more than one supplier of the good. To get someone to be willing to invest, they have been promised exclusivity of supply by the government. But electric power is a very easily excludable good. It’s no problem to disconnect the power lines of consumers that won’t pay. A movie fan that won’t pay can now simply get the movie from a different location.

For public goods, the solution has most often been direct government intervention. Parks are a good for everyone in the vicinity and are most often maintained by the government. It’s difficult to exclude anyone from using roads, so the government is paying for them. Is this a possible way out for movies and music? To have movies and music funded by the government? Libertarians will surely be outraged at the idea, and it will certainly cost a lot of money if we are to maintain the quality and diversity we have today.

But it’s not unthinkable. The most prestigeous painters and writers in many countries live off government stipends. Almost no feature length movie is made in Norway today without a sizeable contribution by the government. Is it conceivable that the population might accept not paying per movie but rather paying for movies through taxes? Probably less of a utopian idea in Scandinavia than in the United States. Perhaps it might it be possible to start with the Norwegian government financing Norwegian movies for a free access market and compensating producers in other countries for Norwegian movie consumption? It’d take some really smart solutions and a lot of tax dollars, but I don’t see it as completely inconceivable.

This radio program about research in social science really interested me. It features interesting topics and interviews with leading social scientists and thinkers. Political science seems to have a pretty good presence among them. I’ve listened to the broadcasts for the past three weeks – of particular interest in those were a discussion with Michail Rykin on Russian democracy and the rehabilitation of Stalin, with Anthony Giddens on the politics of climate change and with Kevin Doogan on “New Capitalism”. A pretty impressive lineup.

As a program from perhaps the most established public broacasting institution in the world, we expect the technical quality and the host to be of top notch quality, and they are. There isn’t anything to put my finger on there. The host, Laurie Taylor, isn’t a scientist himself, but he seems to have enough insight paired with being a good radio host. It all makes for interesting radio.

The professional radio format is however also the program’s biggest weakness. It isn’t made for political science nerds like me, but for a general audience. Because of this, interesting topics are compressed into smaller sound bytes than I’d like to see. For the most part they’re not deep, lengthy analyses, but quick interviews and science teasers. For example I was very frustrated when the extremely interesting insights by Michail Rykin were cut short after just 10 minutes. I’m used to people getting to speak for one or two times 45 minutes. Still, I’m really happy I got to hear it, and it spurred my interest into looking up those perspectives on my own.

One last little annoyance also needs to be mentioned. For some reason, the podcast feed seems to include only the last program at any given time, unlike most podcasts that include a backlog of several episodes. If you wait for more than a week between updating your podcasts that means you’ll lose an episode. Luckily it’s possible to get old episodes from the website, but it’s a bit annoying that they’re not in the podcast stream itself.

The blog Anne is a Man also has reviewed this podcast.

Today was Saturday. I was going to be a good student and go to campus anyway, but my bus pass had run out. But the snow has mostly melted by now, and we haven’t had frost for a while, so I decided today was a good day to take out my bike from the shed. So I did and went to campus. I got caught up in my thesis work and thus didn’t have time to bring my bike home before I was due at the theatre with my sister and her friend. So I rode it into town. And that’s where we leave the bike out of the story for a while.

The show was a brilliant piece of hilariously funny amateur theatre and we came out in a good mood. We went for dinner and a few beers and decided to drop by a party a friend of mine was throwing. It was generally a good night. After a while we headed towards our separate homes – me going past the Student Society building. It was pretty late, and I wondered whether or not to drop by.

That’s where the cost-benefit analysis enters the story. I was considering the potential costs, and decided they were that I got to bed a couple of hours later than planned, which would probably lead to me getting up a bit later in the morning and missing out on time for doing some more work. The potential benefits might be zero if there were no people around, but if I ran into some good friends I might have a good time, potentially raising my motivation for doing more work over the following days because of my good mood. If I was really lucky, the investment in maintaining my network might even pay off even more at some date in the future.

The result of the cost-benefit analysis was that that the product of the likelihood of reaping the benefit and the potential gain far outweighed the relatively minor cost. Because I am a good student of political science it would be a bad idea not to act on such a clear result, so I spent a couple of hours at the student society.

And the benefit side really paid out. I met a few good friends, one of whom was even coming from a magician gig, so he kept entertaining us with card tricks. By the time my jaw was threatening with unhinging on account of my yawning, I had good fun – it felt like the perfect end to a good evening. And the story might have ended happily there.

But then there was my bike. This was a potential cost I forgot to include in my model. The variable that was missing from my analysis was the difference in the likelihood of bike theft in the area outside the Student Society as compared to outside the house in my quiet neighbourhood. As it happened, the inclusion of a new element in the cost side of my model, which should have been the product of the difference of those two likelihoods and the value of my bike could have altered the projected cost of the project significantly. And in hindsight it turned out that this was in fact the night on which this would prove decisive to the net total benefit of the project. In short: I came out to find my bike stolen, which would most likely not have happened outside my house.

As a result – I did not go home with my spirits greatly lifted, filled with motivation for continuing my work. Not only had I lost much of the motivation accrued earlier in the night, I had even incurred a large future economic cost in having to buy myself a new bike.

The moral of the story: When going home from a night of the town, a cost-benefit analysis might have much the same effects as in large public projects. Even though potential benefits max out, you can bet there’s some big cost you’ve forgotten to include. And when that happens, Murphy’s law will make sure it’s just the night when probabilities turn against you.

Fogh Rasmussen is certainly controversial in many places. One of the big problems Turkey had with his candidature may be his involvement in the Mohammed caricature controversy, in which he supported Danish newspapers quite vehemently. He is also closely tied to former US president Bush and has been very supportive of the war in Iraq. This is understandably difficult for a Muslim country partially located in the Middle East.

Fogh Rasmussen, a right-liberal politician, has also been controversial domestically. In 1992 he had to resign from his post as Minister of Taxation preempting a vote of no confidence for misinforming the Danish parliament. He is also known for his adherence to the liberal ideal of the minimal state and a preference for low taxes. On the latter point he has been criticized for not doing enough, but he has implemented a “tax freeze”, promising at the least not to raise any Danish taxes. The most controversial of his policies is arguably his government’s hard-line stance on immigration, by many accused of bordering on the xenophobic.

Fogh Rasmussen has also made a name for himself as a strong EU supporter, and has reportedly been considered for several positions in the EU leadership. He has however run into many problems on home ground during his years in the Danish cabinet, with Danish rejection of the Maastricht Treaty, the Monetary Union and most recently opposition to the implementation of the Lisbon Treaty.

The biggest challenge for NATO is however likely to be that many leaders in the Muslim world still connect Denmark and Fogh Rasmussen with the controversy over the Mohammed charicatures – a connection that could now spill over more strongly to NATO, giving more fuel to Muslim leaders that benefit from portraying it as an anti-Muslim alliance.