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

by Anu Partanen

Ed Miliband, the leader of the British Labour Party, was attending a conference on social mobility, where experts butted heads over the question of whether people around the world were achieving a better life than their parents. For decades, if not centuries, the country that had best secured a person’s opportunity for upward mobility had been the United States. No longer, said Miliband. “If you want the American dream,” Miliband quipped at the conference, “go to Finland.”

It was all part of a way of doing things in the United States that, as I would gradually realize, forced you to be constantly on guard, constantly worried that whatever amount of money you had or earned would never be enough, and constantly anxious about navigating the complex and mysterious fine print thrown at you from every direction by corporations that had somehow managed to evade even the bare minimum of sensible protections for consumers.

My spirits would fall even further whenever I read one of the many magazine or newspaper features profiling superachieving, high-earning Americans who rose at four in the morning to answer e-mail before heading to the gym at five and then hitting the office by six to get started on their ninety-hour workweeks. Mothers in America seemed capable of miracles—returning to work just a few weeks after giving birth, pumping milk between meetings, and working at home on the weekends by managing children with one hand and their BlackBerrys with the other. I was certain I could never function at that level. The logical conclusion that began to settle on me was that I could never make it in America.

I was not surprised that marriage was in retreat. Maybe this was because life in America was transforming the whole institution of wedlock between spouses into an unappealing morass of squandered careers, insane schedules, and lost personal liberty. When money and access to money predetermined every major decision affecting a family and a child’s future,

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

as a matter of course to everyone, as does nearly every other modern wealthy country on the planet.

Gradually it dawned on me how much people in America depended on their employers for all sorts of things that were unimaginable to me: medical care, health savings accounts, and pension contributions, to name the most obvious. The result was that employers ended up having far more power in the relationship than the employee. In America jeopardizing your relationship with your employer carried personal risks that extend far beyond the workplace, to a degree unthinkable where I came from.

here in America that businesses trying to manufacture products and make a buck had somehow gotten saddled with the nanny’s job of taking care of their employees’ health.

From a Nordic perspective, it seemed ludicrous to burden for-profit companies with the responsibility of providing employees with such a fundamental, complicated, and expensive social service.

authentic love and friendship are possible only between individuals who are independent and equal.

“the Nordic theory of love.” For the citizens of the Nordic countries, the most important values in life are individual self-sufficiency and independence in relation to other members of the community.

the moral logic of the Pippi Longstocking stories, “He who is in debt, who is beholden to others, or who requires the charity and kindness not only from strangers but also from his most intimate companions to get by, also becomes untrustworthy. . . . He becomes dishonest and inauthentic.”

Today the United States is at once a hypermodern society in its embrace of the contemporary free-market system, but an antiquarian society in leaving it to families and other community institutions to address the problems the system creates.

Throughout the entire Nordic region, the universal minimum amount of parental leave that new parents receive, regardless of where they work, is nine months. While on leave the parent who stays home also receives at least 70 percent of his or her pay for the entire duration of the leave.

From a Nordic perspective a failure to ensure sufficient parental leave is nothing short of a violation of fundamental human rights—specifically, of a child’s basic human right to be cared for, to be nurtured, and to have parents who are able and present to do the job and do it well.

However, I still thought of children’s well-being as everyone’s benefit, and their poverty or unhappiness as everyone’s problem.

The American fear that government assistance automatically weakens families, encourages single parenthood, and creates welfare queens is not borne out by the experience of the Nordic countries.

Nordic theory of love: that all individuals be self-sufficient, so that they can give more purely and generously of their affection and care.

United Nations that determines decent work standards for all workers around the globe; it’s called the ILO (International Labour Organization), and it has won a Nobel Peace Prize for its work. The ILO has concluded that today a reasonable and humane minimum for paid maternity leave is fourteen weeks, at a pay rate of at least two-thirds of previous earnings.

Other international organizations—the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the European Union (EU), the World Economic Forum—now encourage their member nations to guarantee their workers paid parental leaves and subsidized day care. They do so because it’s clear that these things are good for economic growth. Studies demonstrate the ways that family-friendly policies tailored to today’s realities benefit a country’s economy. Family leave policies and affordable day care increase women’s participation in the labor

Nations that have enacted such policies have not experienced harm to their businesses or their economies.

In what they call the “supply” approach, education is not seen as something that comes into play only when parents demand it; 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 them to afford.

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.

“In the Finnish language we don’t have the word accountability. It doesn’t exist,” he said. “In Finland we think that accountability is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted.”

“Real winners do not compete.”

But at school, gym classes are designed not to teach competition but rather to introduce children to different forms of exercise so that they can build a healthy lifestyle.

In municipalities where parents had fewer high-school diplomas, the schools would get more funding.

The national government allocates extra funds to municipalities with schools that face particular challenges.

As many Americans well know, the biggest problem with how schools are funded in the United States is the bizarrely old-fashioned custom of relying on local property taxes.

A United States federal commission of twenty-seven education experts chartered by Congress studied equity in education, and delivered a withering condemnation of America’s system of funding schools through property taxes, a system that is entirely unsuited to an advanced country in the twenty-first century. In its 2013 report the commission declared that disparities in school funding are the biggest contributor to inequality in American education today.

To a rather amazing degree, the American system of funding education actually achieves exactly the antithesis of the Nordic approach. Instead of freeing each child from the circumstances of his or her birth, the U.S. system of paying for education does the opposite: It firmly cements the dependency of almost every child, first and foremost, on his or her parents’ wealth—or lack of it.

The American health-care system occupies its own peculiar niche, because it’s a hodgepodge of all four models. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2014, 55 percent of Americans had employer-sponsored health insurance, 37 percent were covered by some form of government health-care program, 15 percent paid for private insurance themselves, and 10.4 percent (or 33 million people) had no health insurance at all.

According to its research, the United States as a whole does not actually outshine other countries in the quality of care. The United States has shorter life expectancy, higher infant mortality, and fewer physicians relative to the population than most other developed

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.

Nordic societies today have all decided that health care in a modern nation should be a fundamental human right,

the goal is not to subsidize certain people or groups, but to equalize the basic support structure across the broad expanse of society.

universal public health care, affordable day care, universal free education, generous sick pay, year-long paid parental leaves, pensions, and the like—can

In the Nordic countries it’s a no-brainer that the rich are expected to contribute proportionately more.

President Obama has noted that both his and Warren Buffett’s tax rates are lower than those of their secretaries.

The best way to quantify opportunity is to measure upward social mobility—the ability of people to raise their standards of living and

have their children do better than they did.

But survey after survey reveals that upward social mobility has declined in the United States, while it has increased in other places, especially in northern Europe and particularly in the Nordic region.

societies with less income inequality tend to have greater upward mobility for their citizens.

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.

Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren put it eloquently: “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there, good for you. But, I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory and hire someone to protect against this because

of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea. God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

As adults, what we’re all supposed to do in America is overcome limits, get out of the comfort zone, push the envelope, and reach for more, more, always more. While this approach has accelerated progress and contributed to the lives of everyone on earth today, being satisfied with what one has, by contrast, is often considered unambitious, even lazy. As I absorbed the daily diet of American superachieving going on around me, I noticed a change in the way I thought about work.

Work itself can be a source of happiness, and not just a means to pay for the things that make you happy.

The founder of the Huffington Post, Arianna Huffington, wrote in her recent book Thrive that Americans need a new definition of success.

It’s not that Americans don’t realize that they need to relax, as Arianna Huffington seems to think. It’s that they can’t afford to.