The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life

by Anu Partanen

“If you want the American dream,” Miliband quipped at the conference, “go to Finland.”

I was lost in a wilderness. And in the American wilderness, you’re on your own.

American society, despite all its high-tech innovation and mobility, just doesn’t provide the basic support structures for families—support

What Lars Trägårdh came to understand during his years in the United States was that the overarching ambition of Nordic societies during the course of the twentieth century, and into the twenty-first, has not been to socialize the economy at all, as is often mistakenly assumed. Rather the goal has been to free the individual from all forms of dependency within the family and in civil society:

The express purpose of this freedom is to allow all those human relationships to be unencumbered by ulterior motives and needs, and thus to be entirely free, completely authentic, and driven purely by love.

At the same time the Nordic theory of love has become an overarching philosophy about how to structure a society. As such, it has inspired the broad variety of policy choices in the Nordic nations that together ensure a single, predominant goal: independence, freedom, and opportunity for every member of society.

to push the modern values of freedom and independence even further, to provide the people with the logistical foundation for the most comprehensive form of individual liberty possible?

Nordic societies provide their citizens—all their citizens, and especially the middle class—with maximum autonomy from old-fashioned, traditional ties of dependency, which among other things ends up saving people a lot of money and heartache along with securing personal freedom.

The American family deserves better.

But when it comes to family policies and international competitiveness, it increasingly looks as if American politicians may just not be very well informed.

These two American trends—(1) poor children in the United States fare worse in school than wealthy ones, and (2) the United States has more poor children than all other rich countries—together make crystal clear that America lags far behind other advanced nations, and faces a fundamental challenge in trying to improve the performance of its students as a whole.

income inequality has grown considerably in Finland over the past few decades.

Thanks to global neoliberalism

In America family wealth helps students get ahead in many ways, and as America relies more and more on anachronistic ways of arranging its society, that’s only becoming more true.

Ultimately, if the goal is to educate a nation’s people, nothing is more important than equity of opportunity, and if the goal is to produce creative, confident, flexible, independent thinkers, nothing is more important than nurturing the autonomy of the individual.

Finland’s goal of equity has resulted in a system where each individual student, completely without regard to family background or wealth, gets the educational foundation he or she needs to succeed in today’s global economy.

America the state of education is breathtakingly sad: Educational choice and competition abound, yet in reality people’s options are so limited that the notion of a “land of opportunity”—what America is supposed to be all about—is increasingly a fiction.

The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care

Wasn’t the purpose of a business to make profits, not to arrange the medical treatment of its employees?

Meanwhile American citizens were dutifully paying their taxes—so wasn’t it the purpose of their government to provide essential social services in return for those taxes?

Patients in the Netherlands, Germany, and France, all of which have national health-care systems of one kind or another, have faster access to nonemergency and elective surgery than do patients in the United States.

As many as 91,000 fewer Americans would die prematurely if the United States could achieve the rate of the leading country, which was France—a nation with a strong national health-care system using a variation of the Bismarck model, with public and private providers and regulated, nonprofit insurance plans.

The quality of the medical care in the United States is, as we’ve seen, pretty much identical to, or in some areas slightly worse than, Nordic medical care. Yet Americans are paying, per person, two and a half times what citizens of Finland and Iceland pay. In fact the United States now spends more on health care than any other country in the world by a wide margin.

With for-profit hospitals loading their bills with “all the usual and customary overcharges,” as Steven Brill put it, what for-profit insurance companies do is first deny every claim they can, and then wait to see whether, and how much, you’re going to fight back. Let’s be frank: This sort of behavior has no place in a modern civilized nation, not when we’re talking about providing citizens with a service as essential as health care.

Health care in the United States has regressed to such a Wild West state of affairs that patients, who in most cases are already suffering from an illness or other health problem as it is, also must additionally endure frustration, anxiety, and anger as they are forced to spend vast amounts of time and energy just fighting for the basic right to have their care covered. No Nordic citizen has to put up with anything like this.

It’s ironic that Americans so often dislike the idea of public health care because they think government will force decisions on them. Yet, unlike the private sector, in a democracy it is government services that are the one area that must be transparent, and that can be openly examined, explained, and questioned.

Americans need to stop trusting for-proft private companies so much.

“Universal Laws of Health Care Systems.” They are as follows: “1. No matter how good the health care in a particular country, people will complain about it. 2. No matter how much money is spent on health care, the doctors and hospitals will argue that it is not enough. 3. The last reform always failed.”

there are three main reasons why the United States arranges most of its health care through employers and private insurance companies. First, doing so doesn’t require new taxes. Second, it allows people to choose for themselves the insurance plan and doctor they want. And third, many Americans assume that if you allow a number of profit-driven private insurance companies and private health-care providers to compete with one another, it’s good for the consumer.

when a buyer in any transaction is desperate—as most of us are when we need medical treatment—the seller has a huge unfair advantage, and this can distort an otherwise rational free market.

Today the people whom the American government is helping the most are members of the middle class. Why does the American middle class need so much help? Over the same twenty-eight years, the after-tax income of the highest-earning 1 percent of Americans grew 275 percent.The same figure for the middle class was only 37 percent. For the bottom 20 gains were even scantier at 18 percent.

This has gotten worse since 2007

despite this entrenched inequality, middle-class Americans, working people, and the poor are still told that America is an equal-opportunity society.

The American Dream is a lie

This sort of misunderstanding is pervasive in America. In a study Suzanne Mettler asked 1,400 Americans whether they had used a government social program. Fifty-seven percent said they had not. Then she asked if they had used one of twenty-one specific federal policies, including child-care tax credits, the Earned Income Tax Credit, employer-sponsored and thus tax-exempted health insurance, Medicare, Social Security, unemployment insurance, mortgage-interest deductions, and student loans. It turned out that 96 percent of those who had denied using government programs had in fact used at least one, and the average responder had used four. This clear disconnect between Americans’ perception of who benefits from government programs and the reality makes it easier to keep demonizing the “welfare state.”

This needs to be the centerpiece of thed democratic platform: government is good when you use it right. Most people use it and like what they use.

The Nordic countries demonstrate that building strong public services can create economic growth, and that pooling the risks everyone faces in life—sickness, unemployment, old age, the need to be educated to secure a decent living—into one system funded by everyone is more efficient, and more effective, than each person saving individually to ensure security and survive misfortune, especially in today’s age of global economic uncertainty and competition.

less big government, and more smart government, is something the United States desperately needs.

How could individuals achieve their full potential unless society played a role in providing them with a good start in life?”

the state could be more of a referee and benefactor, helping to ensure progress.

The American tax code perversely favors the wealthy, a trend that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever for any nation trying to remain competitive in the twenty-first century, and a trend that has actually gotten worse and worse over the past few decades.

Reagan

The United States has an unfair tax system and big government, while the Nordic countries have a fair tax system and smart government.

True

they set about reinventing their governments to nurture capitalism for the twenty-first century, making them less bloated, much more efficient, and more fiscally responsible. They did cut public spending and taxes, but they also invested in their people.

For starters, the Swedish government maintains a strict budget surplus—at least 1 percent—over an economic cycle, and sets limits on what the government can spend in a given year. The model is flexible and allows for increased spending during a downturn, but the rules are stringent: The lost ground must be made up during the next upswing.

When it comes to technology, science, entertainment, and creating businesses, Americans are the smartest folks in the room. When it comes to government, it has to be said that they are, for the time being at least, the last in the class.

What the United States needs is not bigger government but smarter government, government for the twenty-first century that is simpler and more transparent, that provides the basic social services and regulations that a government can best provide, and that then leaves the market free of all the targeted meddling that the United States is infamous for now.

The idea that the American economy would be destroyed if the wealthy were asked to pay their fair share of tax revenue has been refuted many times; when the Clinton administration raised taxes in the 1990s, an economic boom followed. The government could start taxing investment income at similar rates as wage income, as it used to do under Ronald Reagan,

in the United States, 40 percent of men who were born into the lowest income bracket stayed in it. In the Nordic countries, that figure was only 25 percent.

This is obvious if you payg attention

The reasons for the crumbling of the American dream have been debated, but the most obvious culprits are American inequalities in income, health care, education, and resources available to families.

This is everything

Affordable health care, day care, schools, and universities support equity of opportunities, but in the United States the availability of such services is not only severely limited, it has also been deteriorating in recent decades.

The means to restore the vitality of the American dream are well known and available. The OECD recommends three steps to counter the changes that have unsettled the labor market: investing in the workforce by offering easy access to education, health care, and day care; creating better jobs that pay more, especially on the lower rungs of the income ladder; and using a well-designed tax system to temper inequality and increase opportunity.

This should be the next DNC platform

Building this framework costs everyone a bit of money. And yes, those who do very well by it are asked to pay quite a bit more. That’s because the lives of the very rich are already fantastically good, and there’s an acknowledgement that additional wealth beyond a certain point has diminishing returns for personal satisfaction—something that should be obvious, but that is also increasingly supported by research.

The land of opportunity needs to bring the opportunity back.

This is all as it should be in a free-market, capitalist economy. But one thing is clear: Allowing employees to combine work and family, ensuring high-quality universal education, providing health care for all and day care for every child, and curbing income inequality have not destroyed the capacity for innovation, nor have they prevented Nordic individuals from building business empires, and in the process becoming wealthy, some enormously so.

Another study concluded that the United States could increase its productivity by offering all women fifteen weeks of paid maternity leave.

Make it so