opinions
Arne O. Holm says:
The Population Declines, and Politicians Are Fumbling for Solutions. Time to Think New?
Comment: Population trends in the North are once again causing political concern. One of the solutions now being launched is to let the rural communities die. Yet, the communities are solving that particular problem themselves, without political interference.
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This is a comment written by a member of the editorial staff. All views expressed are the writer's own.
It is a recurring pattern: Statistics Norway presents its figures on population development, not least the development in the North, keading politicians gather around the campfire to present their solutions.
New billions
That is, before they go their separate ways and allocate new billions for roads and railways in the south.
This time, the leading researcher Troy Saghaug Broderstad, Associate Professor at the Department of Social Sciences at UiT, has created ripples in the political scene.
To the extent that this is an actual problem, that there is political ambition to save every village, it will resolve itself.
A problem that solves itself.
Although somewhat simplified, every single village in Norway without business and culture has been heading toward the cliff for decades. They are shutting themselves down without political assistance.
Some want to stay, and that is their sovereign right, but the underlying problem in population development is the age composition.
The young people move away. But even after moving to central areas in the North, they are not having enough children to create a birth surplus. Older people relocate to a lesser extent, and are not having children, for natural reasons. This is an accelerating development that will leave deep marks in the statistics for years to come.
It is pure mathematics.
Goes deeper
Yet, the problem goes deeper than that. To the extent that one can detect any glimmers of hope in population trends, i.a. growth, it is due to immigration, particularly from Ukraine. They are people on loan, and, according to another set of statistics, people whom we as a society are increasingly coming to dislike.
According to the Norwegian Integration Barometer, more than half of us believe that immigration threatens social cohesion and our national identity. The proportion who believe this has increased over the past year.
They keep both towns and villages in the North alive, but are nevertheless perceived as a threat rather than a solution. In this way, the population reflects an increasingly aggressive rhetoric from our political leaders. Immigrants as a threat have, to a large extent, become political common property.
One claim that repeatedly makes its way into the debate is that the economic incentives introduced in the North to slow population decline have not worked. We actually know very little about that, given that we do not know what the situation would have been without them.
Agreement
On the positive side, there is cross-party agreement that the flow of people moving from north to south must be stopped or reversed. Russia, through the war in Ukraine, has made sure of that. The disagreement, or the helplessness, if you will, begins when they are asked what this agreement is to be used for.
For many years, I have argued for income tax relief, provided it applies to the whole of Northern Norway, not only within what used to be called the action zone, but has now been more assertively renamed as the initiative zone. The towns and villages in the North are and must be the locomotives, also when security policy arguments are used.
Perhaps now is the time to tackle the most sensitive and controversial form of taxation, the wealth tax. A compromise between opponents and supporters could be to estimate the cost of removing this in our three northernmost counties.
No one knows what the agreement is to be used for.
The money exists
Because the argument is purely a matter of security policy, both sides can accept it without compromising their own ideology.
The rushed decision to cut fuel duties shows that the money exists, not to mention the billions currently pouring like raging rivers into tunnels and railway tracks in the south of the country.
The difference between such a measure and many of those tried over the years is considerable.
The greatest difference could very easily be that it works.
That is no small gain.
