No silver bullets + Baumol Cost Disease + greater expectations = very unlikely that services will become cheaper. Someone promising to make public services much cheaper should be treated like someone offering to sell you a $10 Rolex. It's either fraud or theft. God help you if someone tries to sell you a computer system to improve public services, that needs very careful management (18F, GDS, not Capita and friends) if it's not to become a cost writeoff.

I should probably expand on Baumol Cost Disease: many public services inherently involve humans doing touchy-feely automation-resistant things, and as the rest of the economy becomes more automated or imported this gradually becomes relatively more expensive. Things like childcare, where the cost in childminder-hours-per-child is inherently fixed. You can raise the ratio (ie reduce quality), but you can't produce an hour of childminding in 50 minutes.

Besides, when redistribution is a goal in itself, it's a mistake to talk purely about cost and you have to look at outcomes.

> Someone promising to make public services much cheaper should be treated like someone offering to sell you a $10 Rolex.

That's what we do in the private industry the whole time. We try to improve processes, reduce wasteful behaviors, improve our efficiency and ultimately try to offer better services and products, while competing on value vs other competitors.

I don't see any reason why such a way of thinking would not be applicable to the public sector.

My experience of the public sector is rather the exact opposite: they have way too many civil servants for the work they do, and could benefit in simplifying/streamlining their processes to cut down costs significantly and at the same time improve their services.

> Besides, when redistribution is a goal in itself, it's a mistake to talk purely about cost and you have to look at outcomes.

That's a naive view. There is a lot of waste in the "processing" of redistribution.

I agree that a lot of processes could be improved and simplified to augment the productivity.

But we shouldn't expect a huge productivity gain either. Most of public servant are professors, police officers, nurses and doctors a least in France. They won't gain in productivity as the parent said.

I think that the public sector is really bad at marketing itself... When we think about public servant, we think about administrative clerks, whereas in reality they're a small part of the public sector.

I think given the choice, many Danes would prefer to keep that taxation as is, and and get more and better services.

If some public service would get cheaper (so fare all services seems to just get more and more expensive), there's a ton of other services that could really use the money that would be freed.

Honestly I think that the Danish public sector is a terrifying example of mismanagement of public funds. We simply aren't getting enough value for the taxes we pay. Part of it is insane ways of handling purchasing and outsource of public work.

Not unreasonable but so far unobserved. Any initiatives to reduce costs seem to increase an even costlier bureaucracy.

/generalization

Also if services are getting cheaper then there's a question of why the money isn't reinvested to make those services better for the same price?

Or you know, reduce taxes. Why do you need to keep the fiscal pressure if you can be more efficient ?

Far less risky to first make the services less costly, show a surplus and that service has not been degraded and then lower taxes than lowering taxea first.

Most obvious straw man I have seen on HN for a long time.

After reading the parent for three times I could not find anyzhing which would imply that he did saying anything implying this.

Nope. Extract that was far from just being factual:

> Danes are smart enough to accept that it has to be paid for.

This was clearly an opinion about the matter at hand.