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

by Anu Partanen

Maybe I was racked by anxiety because I was becoming an American.

what struck me was not that people felt they had a great deal of freedom, or could fully be individuals, or enjoyed a fair shake at success. Rather, in order to compete and to survive, the Americans I encountered and read about were being forced to depend more and more on one another,

United States, the more I began to think that what Nordic societies had figured out was how to take modernity even further—further than America had.

“the Swedish theory of love.” The core idea is that authentic love and friendship are possible only between individuals who are independent and equal.

All this creates relationships that are much freer of resentments, guilt, and baggage.

Critics sometimes argue that the Nordic countries have little to teach the rest of the world, because their success is specific to an isolated group of small, culturally uniform, ethnically homogeneous countries. But this misses the larger point. While the Nordic theory of love may have emerged as a set of cultural ideas specific to the region, the smart social policies that have resulted happen to dovetail perfectly with the universal challenges that all nations are facing as modernity inevitably advances.

Finland and its Nordic neighbors have found a way to expand personal liberty while also ensuring that the vast majority of individuals—not just the elite—have new ways to be stable and be able to prosper.

Daddy-only leaves have made a huge difference. Their introduction has encouraged Nordic fathers to take a much greater share of parental leaves than before, and the impact on families is profound. Studies in several countries show that when fathers as well as mothers take parental leaves, the family dynamic changes for the better, with men taking a more active role in raising children.

The Nordic example has shown that employers and coworkers much more willingly accept a man’s decision to stay home when they know that otherwise, his family would lose their right to that time and money.

While two decades ago a father might have been embarrassed to stay home, now Finnish fathers are more likely to be ashamed if they don’t take time off,

Family leave policies and affordable day care increase women’s participation in the labor force, help employers retain workers, and improve the health of women and children. Nations that have enacted such policies have not experienced harm to their businesses or their economies. In addition their long-term prospects for economic growth have improved, because fertility rates have risen.

Yet one of the most remarkable things that Sahlberg said passed practically unnoticed. “And,” he mentioned at one point, “there are no private schools in Finland.”

Instead the goal—a goal that makes perfect sense in terms of the Nordic theory of love—was equity.

The demand approach makes the child’s destiny almost utterly dependent on the desires and capabilities of his or her parents.

rather education is seen as a basic human right. This goal stands regardless of what individual parents would choose for their child, or what a family’s particular circumstances would allow

After that, prospective teachers must complete advanced studies that in the United States would be the equivalent of graduate-level training to earn a master’s degree.

Candidates for upper-grade teaching, meanwhile, must major in the subject they will be teaching, such as math or history, but they are also required to study education either in an integrated five-year program, or in a concentrated fifth year. Each candidate for a master’s degree

Several studies have found that even most of America’s university-based education schools have low graduation requirements and fail to prepare teachers for the realities of the classroom.

The data are pretty clear: The countries that perform best in the global PISA survey are those that tend to invest the most in their teachers.

Do Finland’s policy choices—the supply approach, universal day care, ambitious teacher education, lack of standardized tests, in-school tutoring, short schooldays, and cooperation—really explain Finland’s success?

Because of smart policies, Finland is able to spend less per student than do Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and the United States on all levels, with much better outcomes.

But how sad is it that one feels the need to leave one of the wealthiest and most exciting countries in the world simply because it’s such a hard place for your kids to get a decent education?

In the end it was the commitment to educational equity that resulted in excellence, not the other way around,

fundamentally the loss of health insurance destroyed my sense of personal security and well-being.

It sounded so, well, socialist. Wasn’t the purpose of a business to make profits, not to arrange the medical treatment of its employees?

I told my spouse that he’d better get a job that provided us both with health coverage.

change careers or become self-employed, nevertheless they’d agreed that he or she would stick with the job they had. The main reason, of course, was that the

As the New York Times has noted, many of the typical professions that soak up consumer dollars in the American health-care industry—medical coders, claims adjusters, and care navigators, to name a few—are unnecessary and unheard of in other countries.

Absurd as it might seem, in the United States it is nearly impossible for anyone—consumers and experts alike—to actually find out in advance what a medical test or procedure is going to cost.

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.

And what does it even mean to have the freedom to choose who provides your health care, and the freedom to choose how it’s provided? Does that freedom actually set you free?

wanted to know that the system would automatically take me in and give me excellent care without my having to exhaust myself with self-advocacy in my moment of weakness and need.

American health-care system often shackles people instead into relationships of dependency.

Just as Nordic societies believe that children should not be left at the complete mercy of their parents, they also believe that parents should not be left at the mercy of their children.

As a result Americans are being asked to spend a much bigger part of their wages on health care than just a decade ago. The system that is meant to benefit consumers is strangling them, often to within inches of their lives.

For individual Americans public health care would bring tremendous improvements in freedom, autonomy, and independence—freedom from employers, freedom from unhealthy dependencies within families, and freedom from countless hours spent arranging health care and figuring out how to pay for it.

That man had made his choice. Why should I have to bail him out? In Finland I had never felt that way. The current system in the United States, even though we may not notice it, isn’t just bad in terms of getting health care; it also literally tears apart the social fabric of the nation.

If the government were to raise taxes significantly to pay for health-care costs without improving care, people would be up in arms. But if a private insurance company raises its prices dramatically every year, people grumble but mostly can do nothing about it. And in America it happens all the time.

how much did I pay in taxes? The figure came to $18,973 in national and municipal taxes, or 30.6 percent. Before drawing a conclusion about that figure, keep in mind that I didn’t have much else to pay beyond that. For example, property taxes in Finland have a much smaller impact than in the United States. Here are some of the things that paying my Finnish taxes bought me: smoothly functioning and comprehensive health insurance, a full year of partially paid disability leave, nearly a full year of paid parental leave for each child and a smaller monthly benefit for an additional two years (should I or the father of my child choose to stay at home longer with our child), affordable high-quality day care, one of the world’s best K–12 education systems, free college, and free graduate school. My taxes in Finland were not used to hand out money to some lazy moochers living on welfare; instead they were used to pay for high-quality services for me. As far as I was concerned, it was a bargain.

While Americans tend to see their government and the services it provides as something separate from them, and often opposed to them, Nordic people see the government and its services as their own creation. The

In reality tax deductions, credits, and exemptions are government support for specific groups of people, in the form of tax dollars not collected, just as cash benefits are. However, many people don’t perceive or acknowledge that reality, and wrongly assume that they’re not benefiting from the government at all, even when they are. Taxes

But when the United States offers families with children the Earned Income Tax Credit—if they qualify—or the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit, many recipients fail to understand that they are receiving a direct cash benefit from the government.

The United States has an unfair tax system and big government, while the Nordic countries have a fair tax system and smart government. Another way to describe the difference is that the United States is stuck in the past and the Nordic countries are already living in the future.

Finally I realized that many of the people with an expensive lifestyle but a seemingly low-earning profession had family money supporting them.

As more and more citizens need high levels of education, and then go on to work as freelancers, entrepreneurs, or on short-term contracts and projects in today’s dynamic economies, Nordic-style government is the key to a nation’s success.

this spending is directed to high-quality early-childhood education, and to primary and secondary schooling accessible for all, it is likely to create much more equality of opportunity than if it were directed to high-quality private university-level education that is accessible to only a few.

And since healthy parental leave policies for both Kaarina and her husband had allowed her to keep working at the same time that they’d raised their kids, she had a solid freelance career to fall back on after he died.

Finland has a strong, straightforward work culture, with ambition and a drive for quality. The workdays are maybe shorter than in the United States, but I’d claim that what we lose in time, we win in efficiency. And I believe that better work-life balance, as Americans say, contributes to that efficiency.”

In the long term, what difference does one year make, if our goal is to work together for twenty years?”

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,