agreed by unions haggling with employers—hardly the stuff of Milton Friedman’s dreams. But the Scandinavian paradox exists because something more curious is afoot. For Sweden is indeed different. In developed countries collectivism and individual liberty are generally treated as rivals: the more responsibility government assumes, the less room remains for citizens to fend for themselves. Sweden followed a different path. During the 20th century the state expanded not merely to soften inequality or insure people against hardship, but to reduce their reliance on other people—including their own families. A large impersonal state is seen as bolstering autonomy: when in need, Swedes feel it is better to be beholden to an impersonal bureaucracy than to a parent or some charity. Seen this way, a bigger state translates into more freedom, not less. The upshot is what Henrik Berggren and Lars Tragardh, two historians, call “statist individualism”. In their book “The Swedish Theory of Love”, newly updated in English, they argue that Swedes have come to prize relationships entered into freely rather than maintained by material necessity. Public child care helps women avoid financial dependence on husbands, state old-age homes liberate children from obligations to ageing parents, and so on. (Even marriage is a bit suspect: in France or Germany households are the basic unit of taxation, but in Sweden all adults file independently.) American parents sending their offspring to college must submit proof of their incomes for the youngsters to qualify for scholarships. In contrast, young Swedes are assumed to be on their own: the income of their parents is irrelevant. Their independence is a gift of the state, expensive as it is to sustain. The historical development of a smallish European country may seem tangential to other Europeans, let alone Americans. Few polities can match the conditions that made Swedish collective individualism possible: seven centuries or so of rule of law, a deeply felt trust in the state, and a taste for consensus that can make the place feel stultifyingly conformist. Can Sweden itself maintain its unique path, now that a fifth of its population was born overseas? But cross-border surveys of social attitudes suggest most countries are growing more like Sweden and its neighbours: secular societies that put self-
expression ahead of deference to family or tradition. That makes Sweden’s peculiar settlement, a form of overbearing statism that has helped people achieve freedom not just from economic want but from social pressures, more than a Nordic curiosity. To outsiders in America and beyond, big-state libertarianism can be puzzling. To Swedes there is no contradiction: they just want to be left alone, and to do it together.■ This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com/europe/2026/08/20/how-sweden-became-a-country-of-big- state-libertarians
Why everybody hates Palantir What the tragic death of Jason Arday says about Cambridge University The Hundred’s big-city revolution is reviving an old county-cricket tradition Two toots for England’s planning overhaul Reform UK tries to get serious The Great British Bunk Off
Why everybody hates Palantir Beyond America, the company risks becoming a victim of its own hype Aug 20th 2026 IN 2016 PALANTIR, an American software firm, successfully sued the US Army to win a second chance at a contract. A decade on, the fortunes of the company seeded by the CIA’s venture arm, and named after an all-seeing stone in J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy epic “The Lord of the Rings”, have changed. Business is booming (see chart). Domestic revenue has more than doubled in a year, to $1.6bn in the second quarter of 2026. The American government accounts for two-fifths of its global business. Despite concerns that AI might eat its lunch, American firms think its software can provide a layer of protection for their raw data, a privacy shield against frontier AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic.
“I’m struggling with our current popularity,” joked Alex Karp, Palantir’s CEO, on a recent earnings call. If Mr Karp, who once served on the board of The Economist’s parent company, is feeling too comfy, he need only look across the Atlantic. In July French and German security chiefs announced they would replace a “digital backbone” reliant on Palantir with European alternatives. In Britain, its biggest foreign market, and home to a sixth of its workforce, MPs have urged Andy Burnham, the prime minister, to exercise a break clause in February in a seven-year contract with the National Health Service. Palantir is suing Sir Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, after he blocked a deal with the Metropolitan Police claiming competition processes were circumvented. Its loudest critics focus on how Palantir’s tech has helped President Donald Trump’s administration track and deport migrants, and the Israel Defence Forces target Gazans. In a speech on July 30th Robert Jenrick, an MP for Reform UK, a populist right-wing party, claimed that Palantir “reduced discharge delays by 15%”, but that Mr Burnham was considering scrapping it from the NHS because “British Islamists were unhappy”. Critics also point to the firm’s lobbying: its first British government contract, matching patients to ventilators, came during the covid-19 pandemic for a
token fee of £1 ($1.30), after it charmed civil servants over watermelon cocktails. Zack Polanski, the Green Party leader, unfairly notes that Louis Mosley, who runs Palantir’s British arm and its European headquarters, is a grandson of Oswald Mosley, a 1930s fascist leader, and “insists on wearing a black shirt every single time he is on TV”. “Palantir derangement syndrome”, as the Spectator magazine put it in a recent cover story, is not the only explanation for the backlash against the firm. It has sometimes overstated what its software can do. And it is a lightning rod for a broader anxiety about tech sovereignty, risking a reaction that could deprive Britain of useful software. No one disagrees that a key problem for the British state is its fragmented data. Police spend most of their time on admin rather than investigating crimes, accessing dozens of systems, each with its own login details. Disjointed data cost lives. A recent official report on England’s maternity care found that patients routinely get lost between services because of poorly integrated tech, and that staff have to write on scraps of paper during emergencies. Palantir can help solve such problems. Its engineers take vast quantities of scattered data and join them into a single source of truth that non-tech-savvy staff can interact with. The armed forces, for example, are using Palantir’s software to work out which plane is nearest to which target and how much ammunition it has, and to assess military readiness down to the individual nut, bolt and screw. In Bedfordshire the firm’s software helped police review 62% more child- protection incidents over an eight-day trial period, and convict a Romanian criminal gang by trawling through around 100,000 messages—something that would previously have taken months. Responding to Sir Sadiq’s decision to block the Metropolitan Police contract, Sir Mark Rowley, the Met’s commissioner, said the lost productivity will mean the force must cut hundreds of front-line staff. A contract won in 2023 to build what the NHS called its federated data platform (FDP) has received most attention. Over seven years, the platform
is expected to cost £1.1bn, or enough to run the NHS in England for two days. Palantir’s fans believe this is money very well spent. Trusts in charge of hospitals can use the software both for back-office functions and to run tools on top of it. It can flag when a patient is behind on the steps required for cancer treatment, say, and let staff schedule appointments or update a record. Some trusts and regional health boards, such as Greater Manchester, can already do this, and more, without Palantir. But it is a huge upgrade for less tech-savvy parts of the NHS that have only recently stopped using paper records. The FDP also enables different parts of the NHS, which use distinct data systems and structures, to link up. Tom Bartlett, who led the NHS team that helped develop the platform, is most excited about how it will allow parts of the health system to share innovations. He recently watched a nurse and a paramedic at a hackathon build a prototype of a tool their service needed in just two days. He also believes the FDP will help make the NHS AI-ready: the software provides a structured layer for AI agents or applications to run on. The case for using such technology to improve productivity in cash-strapped public services is strong. However, Palantir and its advocates weaken it by overstating what the software has achieved. In an interview with The Economist, Mr Mosley points to 110,000 additional operations in the 40-odd trusts using the software for in-patient scheduling, figures derived from an NHS dashboard promoting the FDP. Yet the impressive figures did not disaggregate the software’s effect: they showed all additional operations since 2020, including those to catch up with the backlog from the pandemic. In July Britain’s statistics watchdog reprimanded the NHS for using them without a caveat. “You can’t say that the 110,000 operations only happened because of Palantir,” admits Mr Mosley, when pressed on the figures. But “directionally, it’s very, very clear that the software is having an impact.” Mr Mosley complains that most acute trusts have signed up to the FDP but do not use it because the NHS doesn’t mandate it: “You have a volunteer army, not a conscript army,” he says. But four days before Mr Jenrick’s