Can't Buy Me Love

It's tax declaration season in Sweden, and I found out I owe an additional 15000kr of income tax for 2023. Ouch! As far as I can tell, it's a side effect of how quickly I found work after the redundancy last year. I managed to start a new job while still in the old one's notice period, which meant I got two salaries for a little while, and I think that screwed up the preliminary tax deductions.

It got me thinking about Sweden and the UK again. The experience of paying tax in Sweden is really different than back home. Back home it was always this annoying thing you didn't really want to do. The British mindset on this issue is best summarised as “You've got to pick a pocket or two”. And I dunno what the hell they're spending the money on over there, but it's sure as hell not on parental pay or the posh kind of school buildings that don't randomly collapse.

Here in Sweden there's this cool idea that you actually get something for the money. My childcare costs here are a fraction what they'd be back home. I'll notice a pothole in a road here and then a month later it might be fixed. On top of that, there's this very Swedish concept that paying taxes is an expression of patriotism. I think this is really bloody clever. It's the first time the concept of patriotism even made sense to me as a force for good.

There's no doubt in my mind that I could get rich a lot easier in the UK. But every single day in Sweden my kids travel from their rent-controlled apartment to their state-funded preschool on protected, separated cycle lanes, and there's no amount of individual wealth that can recreate that lifestyle in the UK. Individualism can work miracles for the lucky few, but it's terrible at building whole societies.

It took me a few months of instalments to pay in the full 15000kr to my tax account. By coincidence, once it was done, the bosses over at Spotify renewed their political campaign to cut taxes and deregulate the housing market in order to attract more software engineers like me to Sweden. They've been pushing this since the day before I moved to Sweden, and they've chosen this moment to revive the campaign.

This came as a surprise on multiple levels. Obviously, a company whose headcount has been shrinking globally since 2022 isn't really arguing from a position of strength whenever they talk about competition for talent in any country. But more than that, it's an argument that contradicts the lived experience of many of us who've made the move to Sweden in particular.

When I accepted my Spotify offer, back in 2016, I had options. One of them was a startup in Barcelona. So I could have picked a lower capital gains tax and a deregulated rental market if I wanted, but I didn’t. I knew about these differences between the two countries, and I chose Sweden. Barcelona’s introduced rent control legislation since then too, by the way.

It's tempting to try to rationalise this somehow. Like sure, they hired me, but maybe they wanted to hire even more people? Thing is, the 2016 hypergrowth phase that I joined during suggests otherwise. Every day, you'd try to ask someone for directions to a meeting room and then find out they were even newer and more lost than you were. And more recently, the rationale for the layoffs was that the company had overhired during the pandemic. Spotify's bosses have been doomsaying about Sweden's tax policy for the better part of a decade now, and the claims are simply not borne out by the results so far.

So what’s going on here? Personally, I think that once you get above a certain level of individual wealth and power, everything starts to look like business to you. It’s your golden hammer after all, and it’s given you everything you ever dreamed of, so why shouldn’t it be able to fix society and save the planet too? Spotify's repeated attempts to justify a night work ban exemption on the basis of being "socially important" further suggests how grandiose the self-image is in the upper echelons.

My perspective is very different. I like business plenty. I daydream often of starting a company of my own when the kids are a little older. But I don’t see that we need to elevate the practice of business above all other fields of human endeavor, as if Spotify’s ability to poach a handful of machine learning engineers from Google is worth cutting jobs in healthcare and teaching across Sweden. And I think we should be especially cautious about the motives behind these kinds of statements from people whose personal fortunes would benefit from that kind of social change.

But these are powerful people. They have powerful friends too. Martin Lorentzon was even invited to the prime minister's birthday party this year. So they can do a lot of damage in pursuit of their next big stock market payout. And as long as Microsoft Excel shows them a green number instead of a red one, they might not even notice the negative impact on society at large.

Personally, I'm done simply shaking my fist at all this. The day after the 2022 elections, I made a decision to put all that energy into action instead. And one of the most impactful types of action we can engage in as software engineers is in creating the organising tools with which to build a bigger mass movement. In Sweden, Zetkin Foundation builds just that kind of tooling for the international left.

In September, Zetkin's hosting an International Code Camp. If you can fund your own travel to Malmö, they'll provide your accommodation and food, and together we can put our skills to work implementing our own vision for the future of society. Zetkin's a special thing, and I'd love to share it with more of the people I know. So have a think about coming down here on September 27th.