Everyone from voting public in liberal democracies (Sweden, Canada, Germany), to the voting public in less liberal democracies (India), the Islamic world (Egypt), to communist regimes (China, Vietnam).
So "heavy investment in state-owned industries just doesn't work" is actually just you drawing far-reaching conclusions over shifting economic policies and/or voting patterns. That line of reasoning doesn't even pass the most basic correlation is not causation test.
When many different societies with different political systems all try something around the same time, and all retreat from that approach a few decades later, that’s really significant real-world data. The country I’m from has socialism written into its constitution, but now is strongly neoliberal. Maybe that’s just correlation, but otherwise it has little in common with Sweden, reducing the possibility that some common third factor is in play.
I mean, discussions about this free-market/neoliberal political shift have been going on for a long time. To just assume state-owned industry "just doesn't work" because of that post-Soviet shift is confirmation bias on an already weak correlation.
In Sweden it's glaringly obvious that the privatizations have provided worse outcomes than before - even the free-market think-tanks are smart to avoid that subject. Unfortunately for us, they instead tend to focus on supporting voices that blame immigration for the consequences of sky-rocketing inequality. I guess they'll have to wait another decade or so before the myth building of the inherently incompetent state is on more fertile ground.
The shift towards SOEs and back away is close to the largest scale economic experiment we have ever done on the planet. Many of these countries, particularly India and China, invested heavily in terms of political and reputational capital into the approach of a government-run economy. They had tremendous incentives to stick with a system they had assured the public was the way of the future. When the same approach is tried in everything from Scandinavian social democracies to Islamic socialist societies to Asian communist regimes, and then all of them change course after a few decades, that’s not just “confirmation bias. That’s data.
Maybe voters in Sweden and voters in India and party functionaries in China all just got some “right wing”virus at the same time. Or maybe they were reaction to the unworkability of an economic system they had tried. You know what they say: those who don’t understand history are doomed to repeat it.