r/DeepStateCentrism

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The Country of the Week is: Czechia.

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The Country of the Week is: Czechia.

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The Country of the Week is: Madagascar.

>Republican candidates looking for an issue in November with broad bipartisan support might consider talking up school choice. To paraphrase President Trump, what do they have to lose?

>The poor quality of our K-12 system, particularly in large urban districts, is a perennial voter concern. Yes, good public schools exist, but they tend to be in communities where only the better-off can afford to live. Affluent families who don’t like their local options use private schools or relocate, while poorer families are relegated to schools where most children can’t read or do math at grade level.

>Democrats and their teacher-union confederates have been calling the shots on education policy for decades, and they’ve chosen to perpetuate a system that everyone knows disproportionately harms underprivileged minorities. Republicans haven’t spent nearly enough time talking about this, but now’s their chance.

>Last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law by Mr. Trump, created a federal school-choice tax-credit program. It provides a dollar-for-dollar tax credit of up to $1,700 to anyone who donates to a nonprofit organization that grants scholarships. Beginning next year, eligible families can spend the scholarship money on tuition at private or religious schools, or they can put it toward textbooks, tutoring services, after-school programs and other education-related expenses. In other words, low-income families would have more choices akin to what wealthier families already enjoy.

>The best feature of the tax-credit program might turn out to be its design. States must opt in, and while most Republican-run states already have done so, most Democratic governors have been reluctant. This reflects the left’s knee-jerk opposition to anything Mr. Trump supports, but it also demonstrates the influence of teachers unions, which steadfastly oppose school choice for low-income children because it threatens their control of public education.

>The unions and other opponents of school choice like to say that tax credits, charter schools and vouchers divert resources and harm traditional public schools. But the federal scholarship program won’t cost states a dime. It operates through voluntary private donations and requires no state funds. If states decide not to participate, their residents can still claim the tax credit, but all those dollars will end up underwriting scholarship programs in other states. The only question for blue states is whether they want to turn down free money that would otherwise go to red states that have already opted in.

>Last week New York’s Kathy Hochul became the second Democratic governor, after Colorado’s Jared Polis, to opt in to the program. The better news is that New York probably won’t be the last blue state to do so. Kentucky’s Andy Beshear and Kansas’ Laura Kelly vetoed opt-in legislation and were overridden by GOP-controlled state legislatures. But Ms. Hochul faced no such threat in New York, where Democrats hold commanding majorities in the state Senate and Assembly.

>Ms. Hochul is up for re-election this year and waited to opt into the federal scholarship program until after her primary opponent dropped out of the race. That isn’t exactly a profile in courage, but it does suggest that some Democrats in big blue states are coming around to the view that spurning federal dollars while pushing for tax increases is a bad look. They might also conclude that the wrath of voters is worse than the wrath of the teachers unions. An Emerson College survey last year put overall support for the tax-credit program at 64%, including 61% of Democrats, 68% of Hispanics and 63% of blacks.

>“Families shouldn’t lose out on resources just because of where they live or what party their governor belongs to,” said Jorge Elorza of Democrats for Education Reform, the advocacy group that sponsored the poll. “These findings show that voters, especially those in communities of color, want leaders who will say yes to opportunity.”

>The argument that school choice diverts education resources has always been a red herring. To the extent that students leave traditional public schools for a charter school or private school and take the per-pupil expenditure with them, it’s true. But it also means their former school has fewer students to educate, and public schools don’t immediately lose funding when enrollment declines. Moreover, school spending and staffing has increased dramatically in recent years even while enrollment has steadily declined, meaning traditional public schools now have even more money to educate fewer students.

>The New York Times reported this month that the number of students attending K-12 public schools has fallen in 30 states since the mid-2010s. It’s increasingly absurd to blame a lack of funding for poor student outcomes. Parents want options, and it’s mainly Democrats who are standing in the way. This is an issue Republicans should exploit. Shame on them if they waste the opportunity.

I had no idea that racial preferences polled so horribly for Democrats. It's not like I was a fan of them, but this article goes as far as to claim that conceding ground on this issue will have a greater impact than anything else on swaying independent voters. Maybe that's true. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts.

>Racial preferences in college admissions have long been deeply unpopular, and three years ago, the Supreme Court declared them unlawful, in a sweeping ruling that portended doom for other race-conscious policies to promote diversity or remedy past discrimination. Some research indicates that, in the aftermath of the civil-rights era, the achievement gap between rich and poor students now dwarfs the gap between white and Black students. Even so, well-intentioned blue-state Democrats keep pushing for race-based affirmative action, to their own political detriment, rather than supporting a much fairer policy of providing a leg up to economically disadvantaged people of all races.

>In February, the California State Assembly passed, by a 54–14 vote, a measure seeking to place on the November ballot a change in the state constitution to allow racial preferences in K–12 education and in higher-education scholarships. (The state Senate has not yet acted on the measure.) In New York City, Mayor Zohran Mamdani released a 375-page Racial Equity Plan last month that said, “New York’s history has been one of colonization, exploitation and racial oppression”; among other measures, the plan reaffirms the city’s intent to steer contracts to minority-owned businesses. Late last year, Democratic supermajorities in the Maryland House and Senate overrode Governor Wes Moore’s veto of legislation to study reparations for the descendants of enslaved people.

>In huge swaths of the country, the Democratic brand has become anathema. The party will struggle to recapture the White House and reclaim the Senate unless it can persuade some red-state voters to take a fresh look at it. One obvious move would be for the Democrats, who have hemorrhaged working-class voters, to abandon their stubborn support for politically radioactive racial preferences. Significantly more Americans believe that economically disadvantaged people of any race deserve special consideration in admissions and employment decisions, and such efforts do not run afoul of laws against racial discrimination. Nevertheless, many Democrats cannot bring themselves to accept the Supreme Court’s ruling—or the public’s attitude—even when doing so would help their prospects immensely.

>In a recent study, the political scientists David Broockman of UC Berkeley and Joshua Kalla of Yale tested potential policy shifts in 29 different issue areas—including immigration, transgender athletes in women’s sports, and Israel and Gaza—in an attempt to discern what might make skeptical voters consider choosing Democratic candidates. They found that moving to the center on racial preferences in college admissions was the most electorally fruitful move Democrats could make and that doing so on racial preferences in government contracting was the second most important.

>The findings are surprising. Affirmative action has rarely turned up in the top-10 issues most relevant to voters. Inflation, the economy, jobs, and health care almost always rank higher.

>Perhaps affirmative action has a powerful symbolic value to some voters. To proponents, it signals a commitment to the advancement of underrepresented groups, particularly Black Americans. To other voters, Democrats’ support of racial preferences suggests that the party favors some groups over others rather than seeking equal treatment for all Americans.

>As the center-left commentator Matthew Yglesias has argued, swing-district Democrats rarely play up the party’s most unpopular positions; many candidates merely try to avoid mentioning them at all. But Republicans are only too happy to bring up these issues. This is why President Trump emphasizes his opposition to “discriminatory DEI” programs at every turn. Republicans may disagree about the Iran war and entitlement cuts, but they are united in opposition to DEI programs. And they know that many Democrats are also opposed to counting race in deciding who gets ahead. In 2020, for example, California voters supported Joe Biden over Trump by a whopping 29 points and simultaneously rejected an effort to reinstate racial preferences by 14 points.

>Even among the intended beneficiaries of racial preferences in college admissions, ambivalence has grown. A Gallup poll taken months after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard found that 52 percent of Black respondents, and 62 percent of Black respondents under 40, said that striking down racial preferences was “mostly a good thing.” (I was an expert witness for the plaintiffs in that case and in a similar lawsuit against the University of North Carolina.)

>The most successful Democrats have long understood that support for racial preferences is a political albatross. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, the only Democratic presidents since Franklin D. Roosevelt to be reelected, both publicly questioned racial preferences. In 1995, Clinton said that he wanted to shift the basis of affirmative-action programs to economic need, “because they work better and have a bigger impact and generate broader support.” More than a decade later, then–presidential candidate Obama said that he thought his own daughters did not deserve racial preferences in college admissions and that working-class students of all races did.

>Neither president, however, fully followed through on his instincts. An Obama staffer once told me that the only way the president could shift policies toward class-based affirmative action would be if the courts forced him to. The Supreme Court’s 2023 decision striking down racial preferences was a defeat for Democratic priorities but also a political gift.

>New evidence suggests that, after the 2023 Supreme Court ruling, universities began the transition from racial to economic affirmative action. In a recent Progressive Policy Institute study, my colleague Aidan Shannon and I found that since the Supreme Court’s decision, the share of students eligible for federal Pell Grants (which go to low-income and working-class students) increased at 83 percent of top colleges for which data were available. Our findings are in accord with a 2025 Associated Press analysis of 17 highly selective colleges, which found that “almost all saw increases in Pell-eligible students between 2023 and this year.” In many cases, the increases are huge. In 10 of the 18 top colleges we studied, the share of Pell Grants rose by more than 20 percent, and at six of those, the share increased by more than 30 percent. In the Associated Press analysis, MIT expanded its Pell representation by 35 percent, Duke by 29 percent, and Smith College by 25 percent.

>The Trump administration has suggested that it may attack these new economic programs as proxy discrimination. Democrats ought to be defending these new initiatives instead of clinging to racial preferences.

>Parties can shift. Ask the Republican establishment, which watched in 2016 as a renegade presidential candidate remade the party on issues including trade, entitlement reform, and the Iraq War. Democrats should understand that the most successful reforms—such as Social Security, Medicare, and Obama’s crowning achievement, the Affordable Care Act—distributed benefits based on economic need, not race.

>Any Democratic presidential candidate who wants to jettison racial preferences in favor of economic affirmative action has a political opportunity. Among the party’s potential candidates in 2028 is Moore, the governor who bucked overwhelming Democratic majorities in the Maryland legislature. His position has a powerful precedent. In the 1960s, Martin Luther King Jr. argued that there exists a better path forward on reparations: a Bill of Rights for the disadvantaged of all races.

>The evidence suggests that a shift away from overt racial preferences, more than any other position change, will prompt skeptical swing voters to take note.

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The Country of the Week is: Czechia.

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The Country of the Week is: Czechia.

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The Country of the Week is: Czechia.

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The Country of the Week is: Czechia.

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>I don’t want politicians to be “authentic.” I want them to be decent. I want them to be honest. I want them to be competent. And if they fail those tests, they don’t redeem themselves by opposing Donald Trump.

>If you’re a conservative watching Democrats talk themselves into supporting Graham Platner, the Maine Democrat who until recently wore what sure looked like a Totenkopf tattoo (he covered it up after it became a political embarrassment) is to experience déjà vu. To a lesser but still familiar degree, I’m seeing Democrats engage in the same process of absurd accommodation and justification that Republicans use to excuse their deep love for Trump.

>Let’s talk about that tattoo first, no matter how sick you are of hearing about it. For those who are not familiar with the Totenkopf, it’s the death’s head insignia of the SS-Totenkopfverbande, one of the three key branches of Hitler’s Waffen-SS, the armed backbone of the Nazi regime. And the SS-Totenkopfverbande arguably represented the worst of the SS. Among other duties, they were concentration camp guards, the people who were responsible for order in the industrial killing machines of Nazi Germany.

>Platner has claimed that he didn’t know what the tattoo meant and that it was the result of a drunken mistake he made when he was in the Marines. If you believe this, (and obviously I don’t), he then, by his own account, carried a death’s head tattoo on his body for almost 20 years, apparently without the slightest curiosity as to what it was (though there are reports — which he disputes — that he called his tattoo “my Totenkopf” in 2012).

>After news of the tattoo surfaced, Genevieve McDonald, who had recently resigned as Platner’s political director, questioned whether he truly didn’t know what the symbol signified. “He’s not an idiot,” she wrote. “He’s a military history buff.”

>Platner also has a long history of internet trolling. He declared himself a communist. He’s said that all cops are bastards. He’s affirmed the belief that white people are “actually” racist and stupid. He repeatedly called people online “retarded.” Speaking about women who were concerned about sexual assault, he wrote: “Rape is a real thing. If you’re so worried about it to buy Kevlar underwear you’d think you might not get blacked out f——d up around people you aren’t comfortable with.”

>He’s agreed with the idea that Black people don’t tip, adding his own two cents: “It always amazes me how solid this stereotype is.”

>He once called war “the most enjoyable experience of my life” and even commented that a Marine who was punished for urinating on dead Taliban made “a poor choice, but only because of the current state of media affairs.”

>Platner has acknowledged that these posts were wrong and deleted them. As I said, he’s covered up the tattoo as well. He blames his comments on a difficult period in his life that began after his repeated tours of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq. And I certainly understand how a deployment (much less repeat deployments) can be traumatic, life-altering events.

>Lots of Democrats are willing to forgive and overlook all of this. He held a polling lead in the Maine Democratic primary before his opponent, Gov. Janet Mills of Maine, dropped out, and Platner has secured the endorsement and approval of a number of leading Democrats, including Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

>But that difficult period apparently wasn’t over in 2020, which is when he agreed that white people were racist and stupid, and it was still going strong in 2021, when he called himself a communist. He didn’t delete his posts or cover up his tattoo until after he decided to run for office.

>That’s hardly the record of a penitent man.

>Let’s be charitable for a moment. I believe in redemption and forgiveness. A person can absolutely go through an extended period of darkness and despair before finding his or her way out. I don’t think that we should define people by their worst moments.

>At the same time, however, I don’t want to put people in the U.S. Senate who’ve recently struggled and who’ve recently sported an SS tattoo, and I definitely don’t want to do it because “the base” is angry and “the base” wants nothing more than a fighter to take on the hated political foe.

>I know exactly where this process leads. For the last 10 years and counting, I’ve had a front-row seat at the festival of rationalization that’s turned the Republican Party into a Trump cult of personality.

>The slide begins when you tell yourself that the stakes are just too high for normal politics. Of course I wouldn’t support this candidate in better times. But now? American democracy is at stake.

>Millions of Republicans justified their votes for Trump in precisely those apocalyptic terms. To quote an influential essay by Michael Anton, a right-wing author and a former official in Trump’s State Department, “2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die.”

>If history teaches us anything, it’s that difficult times call for politicians to demonstrate a higher degree of character. Character is never a luxury, but it becomes an urgent necessity in the face of conflict and adversity.

>But still, you might think, if push comes to shove, isn’t it necessary to support the lesser evil? There are two problems with this argument, however, one that’s obvious and the other that’s more subtle and insidious.

>First, the obvious problem — the lesser evil is still evil. You’re still compromising your standards. You’re still empowering someone you’d never ordinarily support. If a person with an identical profile applied to be your manager at work, would you be comfortable hiring him?

>And if you’d have qualms putting such a man in charge of your team at work, why is it appropriate to put him in the United States Senate?

>We should not minimize the gravity of the position by thinking of him as merely a vote against Trump. A central problem of our time is a diminished legislative branch, and we diminish it even more if we hold Senate candidates to lower standards than we’d apply to virtually any other workplace.

>If you doubt the necessity of character in the legislative branch, remember the extent to which Trump’s effort to reverse a presidential election was aided and abetted by his legislative sycophants, and it is their failure to hold him accountable for Jan. 6 that immediately enabled his second term.

>Low-character senators can ultimately be every bit as damaging as low-character presidents. In many ways, low-character presidents depend on low-character senators for their very existence.

>Nor should you think of Platner (or Susan Collins, the incumbent he’s campaigning against), as “only a senator.” The moment a person is elected to the Senate is the moment he or she become one of the most powerful people in the country.

>It’s also a sad irony that Democrats are tempted to compromise their standards in part to unseat one of the few Republican senators who voted to convict Trump. If Collins had her way in 2021, Trump would have been ineligible to run in 2024, barred from federal office forever.

>The second problem is still more insidious. I’ve never met a person in my life who proudly calls their movement “the lesser evil.” No one starts a “lesser evil” chant at a political convention. You want to see yourself as a force for good, and as a result the temptation to overlook your allies’ sins or excuse their flaws becomes overpowering.

>In fact, if we can redefine aggression as courage and instability as authenticity, then — voilà — vice becomes virtue.

>The only thing it costs is your integrity. You twist yourself into knots finding ways to impose standards on your opponents while defending your allies for the same conduct. The exact wrong answer to a Republican Party that’s flirting with fascism is a man who chose to put vile Nazi imagery on his own body and kept it there for years.

>But there’s something even worse that happens. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. When Trump first won in November, 2016, I watched friends and neighbors transform. They weren’t holding their noses any longer. They weren’t embarrassed by their vote.

>He was the victor, the man who vanquished Hillary Clinton. If your compromise candidate wins — especially in an upset — he or she forms an immediate emotional bond with his or her victorious constituents. You’re relieved. You’re grateful. And you might even feel a tiny bit of personal gratification — see, I was right all along.

>As a result, the aberration becomes the model. The “good people” like John McCain and Mitt Romney lost to the Democrats. But Trump won. We need more people like Trump. And if Platner beats Collins — especially after Collins has vanquished so many other, more respectable Maine Democrats — then the call will go out, “Where can we find more Platners?”

>I know there are readers who will object strongly to this analysis. We’re not Republicans, you’ll argue. We’re not as vulnerable to demagogues. And maybe you’re right. Maybe you do have a stronger commitment to character and integrity than Republicans. After all, you didn’t nominate a man like Trump, right?

>But how strong is that Democratic commitment? The Democrats (and the country) just endured an electoral catastrophe in part because a prideful president and a phalanx of his advisers concealed the true extent of his mental and physical decline.

>Suffice to say, the list of recent Democratic political scandals is deeply depressing. One doesn’t have to excuse an ounce of Trump’s misconduct to say that the Democratic Party hasn’t exactly covered itself in glory during these dark political days. This is the wrong time to add a fresh compromise to a list that is already much too long.

>Humility is a necessary aspect of character, and a key aspect of humility is to not think too highly of your own integrity and capacity to resist temptation. The humble person doesn’t look at their fallen or flawed friends and neighbors and say, “That could never be me.”

>Instead, the truly humble person says, “There but for the grace of God go I.”

A harrowing report on the use of sexual violence by Hamas against israeli women and men during and after 10/7.

Full report here (read at your own discretion)

submission statement: Prolific YouTube video essayist, & political commentator, Natalie Wynn, returns to Bad Faith after five years to discuss her critiques of the left & backlash to said critiques. Infamous for saying the left doesn't want power, but wants to endlessly critique power, Briahna pushes Natalie on her own theory of change, and whether it is in fact, the left, who are focused on using leverage rather than engaging in fandom and wish casting around left-electeds. The pair also discuss a growing liberal interest in "violence on the left": Is it good faith concern following the latest Trump assassination attempt, or is it a strategy to derail legitimate anger -- the likes of which lead to healthcare CEO Brian Thompson's assassination? Finally, are women lonely?

>This paragon of collectivism is pivoting toward rugged individualism.

>For decades, Sweden was shorthand for the brand of high-tax, high-spend government that managed people’s lives from cradle to grave through state-run hospitals, schools and care homes.

>No longer. With little fanfare, this Nordic country of 11 million has embraced capitalism. 

>Today, nearly half of primary healthcare clinics are privately owned, many by private-equity firms. One in three public high schools is privately run, up from 20% in 2011. School operators are listed on the stock exchange.

>Sweden’s experience has lessons—good and bad—for other rich countries, including the U.S., where New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is looking to emulate parts of the state-centric model such as universal child care and city-run stores.

>The capitalist makeover has allowed Sweden to do what few industrialized countries have managed in recent years: shrink the size of the state. That has enabled the government to sharply lower taxes and, economists say, sparked a surge in entrepreneurship and economic growth.

>Its total public social spending bill—which includes healthcare, education and all welfare payments—has fallen to 24% of gross domestic product, similar to the U.S. and well below the over 30% for nations like France and Italy.

>Sweden’s economy is expected to grow by around 2% a year through 2030, roughly the same pace as the U.S. and double the growth rates of France and Germany, according to an April forecast by the International Monetary Fund.

>“Sweden is a real land of opportunity,” said Elisabeth Svantesson, the country’s finance minister. “I want people and capital to stay here and grow.” 

>While many European countries are raising taxes, Svantesson has cut them three years in a row. Sweden’s top income-tax rate has fallen close to 50% from nearly 90% in the 1980s.

>Considering the overall tax burden, “it’s more attractive here…than the U.S.,” said Conni Jonsson, the billionaire founder of EQT, a Stockholm-based private-equity firm.

>Critics say the paring back has gone too far. Inequality is soaring in this traditionally egalitarian country. Gang violence has surged in dozens of immigrant-heavy suburbs, creating areas where local criminal networks challenge state authority and hinder policing. A public debate is raging over for-profit schools, which critics say make money by skimping on playgrounds, libraries and staff.

>“The American perspective of Sweden is so far off from reality,” said Andreas Cervenka, a Swedish author who recently returned home after living in California. “We are going from a society which is like, ‘One for all, all for one,’ to ‘Everybody is on their own.’”

>Spurring entrepreneurs

>Sweden didn’t always have a big public sector. The country climbed from being one of the poorest to the third-richest country in Europe over 100 years through 1970 without high levels of taxation.

>But starting in the 1960s, the center-left Social Democratic Party—which dominated the country’s postwar politics—sharply raised taxes and spending, ultimately taking government spending as high as 70% of GDP by the 1990s. 

>The changes triggered a long period of weak growth, stagnant after-tax incomes and ballooning budget deficits and debt that culminated in a banking crisis in the early ’90s.

>Under pressure from investors, the government instituted sweeping economic reforms over the next two decades. They included cuts to unemployment benefits and housing subsidies and the privatization of public services, as well as tax cuts and a reform of the pension system to make it more affordable. Strict limits were imposed on government debt. (Sweden’s debt to GDP is a meager 36%, compared with 129% for the U.S.) In the mid-2000s, the government eliminated wealth and inheritance taxes.

>The result: Wealthy entrepreneurs who had fled Sweden’s high taxes have been returning, said Jacob Wallenberg, a member of the Swedish industrial dynasty that owns big stakes in Ericsson, Saab and other large companies.

>When Wallenberg was growing up in the 1960s and ’70s, Swedes weren’t very wealthy, he said. The country, he noted, famously only had one Rolls-Royce car.

>Today, international polling suggests Swedes are far more open to wealth than the French, Germans, Spanish or Italians, and more positive about the market economy than any European country except Poland. Sweden’s Rolls-Royce count is now over 800, and when the automaker decided to open its first showroom in Scandinavia in 2016, it chose Stockholm.

>As the state retreated, the private sector expanded. A study published in April by the Stockholm School of Economics found that after Sweden removed inheritance and gift taxes in 2005, private firms with potential family successors grew faster, invested more and paid higher corporate taxes than firms without natural heirs.

>Businesses championed new technologies in a bout of risk-taking with few equivalents in a region dominated by older industries and ambivalent about tech.

>Niklas Zennström, the billionaire founder of internet-telecommunications pioneer Skype, said the privatizations helped fuel innovation in sectors like telecoms, which have underpinned the country’s tech boom. Zennström himself started his career building fiber-optic networks for a private telecom operator in the 1990s.

>“Sweden was very early with mobile phones, with a high penetration of 3G and competition in mobile networks,” Zennström said. “There was a sense of entrepreneurship.”

>The country saw more than 500 initial public offerings over the 10 years through 2024, more than Germany, France, the Netherlands and Spain combined, according to a landmark 2024 report on Europe’s economy by former European Central Bank President Mario Draghi. It has now moved ahead of the U.S. in the number of billionaires per capita, thanks to a thriving tech startup scene and videogame industry that has produced hits like Minecraft and Candy Crush. 

>‘More for less’

>At St. Göran’s hospital in downtown Stockholm, radiologist Karin Dembrower huddled over a computer screen, pointing to tiny light spots indicating cancer on a black-and-white image.

>“We cannot see with our eyes that there is something going on here but somehow the AI is seeing” it, she said.

>AI has transformed the work of radiologist Karin Dembrower and her St. Göran’s colleagues, helping detect cancer and free up time.

>For nearly three years, Dembrower has pioneered the use of artificial intelligence at the hospital to spot breast cancer. The AI is so quick and accurate at detecting cases among the 80,000 women who get screened here a year that waiting lists at Dembrower’s radiology department have shrunk dramatically. 

>She and her colleagues have stopped working evening and weekend shifts. They have more time to run advanced diagnostics for women who’ve been diagnosed with cancer. St. Göran’s now regularly receives referrals from overcrowded hospitals with no AI.

>Like all Swedish hospitals, St. Göran’s is publicly funded. But it is owned by a private hospital operator, Capio, and its chief executive trained at McKinsey and talks about KPIs and the Toyota model of lean management.

>That mentality is one reason St. Göran’s rolls out productivity-enhancing tools like AI far faster than its state-run rivals.

>“We do more for less,” says CEO Gustaf Storm. He estimates it costs 15%-20% more at public Swedish hospitals to treat conditions such as appendicitis than at his hospital.

>CEO Gustaf Storm is helping oversee the rollout of AI and other tools that he says lets them do ‘more for less.'

>Aida Hadžialić, a center-left politician who leads the Stockholm region government that is responsible for healthcare, is a fan. She says St. Göran’s is more efficient at producing good outcomes for patients, with lower reimbursements, than the public system. 

>Private competition has had broad benefits across the industry. At a time when aging populations are costing governments around the industrialized world more money every year, healthcare spending per capita in Sweden grew around 1% a year on average between 2014 and 2024 after adjusting for inflation—roughly half the pace in the U.K. and a third of the pace in the U.S., according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

>At St. Göran’s, staff brandishing iPad minis closely track patient data while digital systems monitor costs. Patients’ vitals are automatically uploaded into a central system. A traffic-light system helps staff prioritize cases.

>The hospital has been testing an AI-based patient-observation system that alerts staff when elderly patients are at risk of falling out of bed, which leads to longer hospital stays.

>The changes are even more pronounced in primary care: Nearly half of doctors’ offices are now private, and tech upstarts are disrupting the sector. Critics say it’s also disrupting care, with a concentration of private doctors in wealthier urban areas, where patients are often cheaper to serve, leaving state-run facilities with more complex, expensive cases in poorer or rural areas. That, in turn, has fueled worries about a brain drain. 

>For many patients, the ease of tech-enhanced visits has been a boon. 

>When Ben Cooper, a Brit living in Stockholm, needed to check in with a doctor about his asthma recently, he didn’t leave home. Instead, he video-called the physician through an app on his cellphone.

>The app, built by local company Kry, was launched in 2015 and now has more users in Sweden than Netflix. Virtual appointments are available 24/7, and doctors speak foreign languages, including Arabic.

>“You open the app, put in your symptoms, they give you a choice of appointments. Never once have I experienced that the doctor has been late,” said Cooper, contrasting the service’s punctuality with frequent delays in the U.K.’s state-run National Health Service. 

>Private ownership creates efficiencies that allow Kry to save money and serve more patients, said Kalle Conneryd Lundgren, a physician who is Kry’s CEO. 

>Digital appointments tend to be shorter, saving time for both patient and doctor. The company recently started preparing medical notes and other health certificates using AI, which has reduced administrative time by 40% in the past year, he said.

>Physicians can suggest other improvements to the app, which has resulted in changes such as a chat function performing certain checkups, said Bjorn Stridh, a physician who works at one of the company’s clinics inside an upmarket shopping mall. The waiting room resembles a premium spa, with wooden chairs and an espresso machine. 

>Kry’s list of registered patients is growing at 10% a year, Lundgren said. The company is also expanding fast in other European markets like France, where it has over a million visits a year.

>Winners and losers

>Sweden’s transformation has many winners, mainly middle-class families who own their homes and have benefited from rising incomes and surging house prices, said Elinor Odeberg of Arena Idé, a progressive think tank in Stockholm. 

>The transformation also has losers: renters outside big cities, where there are fewer new jobs and shrinking public services, and urban, low-income migrant communities that have historically been more dependent on the state.

>The share of Swedes aged 20 to 27 living at home with their parents—traditionally among the lowest in Europe—rose to 26% in 2023 from 15% in 1995 as housing costs increased, said Ola Palmgren, president of the national tenants’ association.

>With less income redistribution, local governments in Malmö and elsewhere are being squeezed as central government funding has fallen, making it harder to deliver public services like education, said Malmö Mayor Katrin Stjernfeldt Jammeh.

>Public infrastructure investments, meanwhile, have been low over the past two decades, leading to delays and patchy service in the train network, with poorer Swedes feeling the bigger pinch. 

>“They took away resources from sectors that were supposed to protect the society,” said Jonsson, the private-equity entrepreneur. “But of course for the dynamism in the economy it has been good.”

>Stefan Fölster, an economist and former Finance Ministry official, argues that the vast majority of Swedes have benefited from the reforms. Households’ inflation-adjusted incomes have doubled on average since the 1990s, after stagnating during the 1970s and ’80s under high taxation, Fölster noted.

>Even so, the government is responding to concerns. In November, parliament voted to replace a longstanding requirement to maintain a state surplus with a new balanced-budget rule, allowing the state to loosen its purse strings. The government is also pushing through reforms aimed at tightening rules to run a school for profit so that only long-term, high-quality operators remain.

>“It was right to move in the privatization direction,” said Lars Calmfors, a prominent economist and longtime adviser to the Finance Ministry who helped shape the country’s economic reforms. “But we probably overdid it.”

>School grind

>Perhaps nothing highlights the promise and peril of privatization more than education, where Sweden’s embrace of the market goes even further than the U.S.

>The country has increasingly allowed public schools to be run by either nonprofits or for-profit companies. Roughly one in 10 teenagers now attends a secondary school operated by AcadeMedia, which is listed on the Stockholm stock exchange. 

>These schools receive public funds based on enrollment, but what they do with that money is largely up to them. They must follow the national curriculum, and their students take the same national exams as public-school students.

>In the southern city of Malmö, Bryggeriets high school is operated as a nonprofit after an initiative by the local skateboarding association. Every student gets a MacBook Air—an upgrade from the midrange laptops given to most Swedish high-schoolers—and lunch is free at a cafeteria perched above a cavernous indoor skate park. There are two teachers per class, compared with the standard one teacher per 25-30 students. 

>Principal Marie Svensson, who changes lightbulbs herself, said she saves money on maintenance and administration to invest in more teachers, art exhibitions and equipment like film cameras. The school rents cheap space inside a former brewery for its 191 students.

>Principal Marie Svensson focuses spending on teachers and artistic endeavors at the skateboarding-focused high school.

>“It’s kind of free here, you get to explore,” says John Wiforsen, a student who travels two hours each way to get to the school from central Sweden. Some Danish students cross over the bridge from Copenhagen every day.

>Private direction allows for nimble decision-making. When funding for public schools was cut recently, Bryggeriets stabilized its finances by quickly taking in more students and dividing two classes into three. That same decision would have taken up to a year in the state system, said Svensson, who previously worked in public schools.

>While nonprofit schools like Bryggeriets can work, Malmö Mayor Stjernfeldt Jammeh and others worry for-profit schools have incentives to cut corners because they are set up to make a profit. “These operators earn money by dividing pupils into different groups,” she said.

>Privately run schools are far better at recruiting the best students and wealthiest families. That leaves poorer kids with more dysfunctional public schools, which have higher costs because they are dealing with students with greater needs and a growing percentage of children of immigrants whose first language might not be Swedish.

>Bryggeriets is less than a mile from one of Sweden’s most notorious housing projects, Rosengård, where soccer star Zlatan Ibrahimović grew up. Principal Svensson said few children from Rosengård attend the school because their parents tend to prefer a more conservative approach.

>Rosengård is marked by its most famous former resident, soccer star Zlatan Ibrahimović, including an imprint of his feet.

>Sweden has recently fallen down international education rankings, a shift that proponents of free schools attribute to high levels of immigration. Private-school critics argue that when you cluster the high-performing students in one school and the struggling ones in another, the overall national average suffers. 

>Underscoring the country’s new psyche, school choice is now deeply entrenched in Sweden, with broad backing among parents and within both the current center-right government and center-left opposition Social Democratic Party.

>But ahead of September’s general election, fractures over for-profit schools—and societal shifts—are surfacing, and are expected to play a large role in campaigns. The Social Democrats are promising a ban on school profits. The party is also calling for higher investments in public services and social welfare and criticizing past tax cuts for the wealthy.

>“The system works well for some people,” said Åsa Plesner, a former school administrator. “It’s really a break from Swedish universalism.”