Viktor Karlsson: Consultants Are Despised, but They Are the Future

Swedish politicians continue to praise a new industrial economy, while many of the jobs shaping the country’s future remain treated as less real. Consultants and communicators are dismissed, and trades such as shoemaking, tailoring and repair rarely appear in visions of a green economy.

The editorial points to a growing agreement among thinkers on the left and right: prosperity can increasingly come from services rather than large-scale goods production. Economist Thomas Piketty and two colleagues have argued for expanding education, healthcare, culture and care alongside fossil-fuel phaseouts and greater redistribution. Such services, often publicly funded, could create prosperity without increasing the economy’s use of material resources.

A similar argument comes from Fredrik Segerfeldt of the market-liberal think tank Timbro. In his book “After Industry: Freer, Richer, Greener,” he argues that Sweden’s self-image as an industrial nation built on exports and a mass of organized factory workers is outdated. TCO now has more members than LO, Spotify is valued more highly than Electrolux, and former industrial areas have become home to artist collectives and technology startups.

Segerfeldt welcomes that shift, presenting exchanges between people as a way to increase prosperity in greater harmony with nature while allowing more people to leave the assembly line and pursue their interests. The editorial says politicians remain stuck in industrial nostalgia, including a lasting assumption that wages should follow the industrial agreement and that care workers should not overtake industrial workers in pay.

It argues that service reform could begin by lowering the cost of employing people, since service companies rely heavily on labor. The text ends as it introduces higher taxes as a possible way to finance that change.