A Blindern student came home to say that things are about to change.
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There was coffee in a cardboard mug and a big bowl of twist, which almost no one stocked up on, a kind of academic coffee talk.
Opposition politician Trygve Slagsvold Vedum took his party to new heights by having coffee talks with ordinary people around the country. Now he was in Oslo’s academic heart – the university at Blindern – as finance minister.
There was something reassuring and recognizable about the cardboard and small chocolates. It was good, because the finance minister’s message was of the disturbing kind: The world is changing. Quickly.
Vedum should announce that the Ministry of Finance will start work on a new perspective report. More on that a little later. First a little about the man.
This was not the opposition’s Vedum, he who did not miss a single chance to poke at the Oslo elite. This was the day Blindern student Trygve returned home. He had graphs, he had an account of Count Wedel Jarlsberg (primus motor when the university was established in 1813 and later, among other things, finance minister) and he had broad, historical sweeps from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the present day.
In those parts of Oslo where the Center Party leader is regarded as a combination of a divine word from the country and a populist devil – i.e. a simple man with simple solutions – it will perhaps surprise. But Trygve Slagsvold Vedum may be our most intellectual finance minister for a long time.
By that I don’t mean that he is necessarily smarter or wiser compared to his predecessors. I do not know. Also, everyone knows that being intellectually minded is in no way to be confused with being wise.
Just as fully, Vedum has on several occasions revealed an academic approach which testifies to both growing up in an academic family – and to an intermediate subject in political science and a basic subject in sociology.
The perspective report is presented by the Ministry of Finance every four years. The previous one was delayed due to the pandemic and not laid out before February 2021. At that time, Jan Tore Sanner was finance minister in a government in which the undersigned also sat.
There may be a slightly different color to the messages depending on who is in government, but the core is largely the same. The perspective report will present the challenges of the future and outline how these can be met.
There are some themes that have recurred over the years:
- The challenges of an aging population. Vedum said at today’s press conference that he would never call it a problem, but it will be expensive. Pension expenses will increase, as will health expenses.
- The need to get more people into work, not least the many who go on one or another benefit.
- The importance of managing our enormous oil wealth in a sensible way – and being prepared that incomes will not increase in the same way in the years to come.
But the finance minister spent little time on the classics in his speech.
It was instead about how the security policy will also affect the Norwegian economy.
I wrote a few weeks ago about how we have all become centrists (almost). It was a pointed formulation of a central point: Throughout the West, the discussion is about how the states can arm themselves in a time of strong turbulence and great uncertainty.
One of the central points was pointed out by the finance minister himself. The long period of peace after the fall of the Soviet Union gave us what experts call the peace dividend: We could go from spending large amounts of money on defense and preparedness during the Cold War, to reaping the benefits of the fact that the main adversary was gone. We simply got more money to spend on other things.
Now we have to deal with both the aging population, economic turbulence and the most tense security policy situation since The Cuban Crisis in 1962 at the same time.
We will need not only intellectual power, but something old Count Wedel Jarlsberg would recognize: statesmanship.
