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Tarja Halonen,
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.”
Copenhagen’s Noma was gaining a reputation as one of the best restaurants
story about the attribute that we Finns seemed most to treasure and inspire in one another, something we called sisu—a quality perhaps best translated into English as “grit.”
I’d always had enough disposable income after taxes to eat out, travel, and enjoy myself, as well as a nice cushion to set aside in savings every year besides. I’d never had to pay extra for things like health insurance, and medical treatment of any kind had only ever cost me small sums, if anything. If I were ever to get seriously ill in Finland, not only would I be treated at no significant cost to me, I would also get up to a year of paid sick leave with job security, and more help after that if I needed it.
And like most Finns, every year I took four or even five weeks of paid summer vacation. Though our winters were dark and miserable, our summers were glorious, and when it came to summer vacation, our society, and our employers, considered it important to our health and productivity that we enjoy our time off.
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.
After a while it was no longer a mystery to me why I was endlessly panicked. Just as in the forests of Lapland, my brain was processing my interactions with my environment, and the message it brought back was clear: I was lost in a wilderness. And in the American wilderness, you’re on your own.
Just a few months after leaving Finland, I’d gone from being a successful and happy career woman to an anxious, wary, and self-doubting mess.
I was surprised to discover that many of them suffered from anxiety just as severe as mine—or worse. It seemed that nearly everyone was struggling to cope with the logistical challenges of daily life in America.
Maybe I wasn’t racked by anxiety because I came from a foreign country. Maybe I was racked by anxiety because I was becoming an American.
Since the dawn of the modern era, people have been lamenting the way modern life uproots the traditional support structures of society, most especially family and community, leaving insecurity and anxiety in their place.
Indeed, perhaps the biggest benefits of modernity were also some of the most cherished and fundamental principles of the United States: freedom, independence, and opportunity.
For it was exactly those key benefits of modernity—freedom, personal independence, and opportunity—that seemed, from my outsider’s perspective, in a thousand small ways to be surprisingly missing from American life today.
And in the process, individuals were becoming beholden to their spouses, parents, children, colleagues, and bosses in ways that constrained their own liberty.
Both my American and Finnish friends with children shuttled their kids to music lessons and soccer practice, bought them toys, read books with them, and posted pictures of them on Facebook.
I couldn’t shake a strange sensation that I had never quite had back in Finland: that somehow the children were taking over their parents’ lives.
Experts on childhood development were pointing to the dangers of “helicopter parenting,” noting the difficulties that young adults often encountered establishing themselves as individuals after their parents had cushioned them from failures and made decisions for them for two decades or more.
As I compared my friends in Finland and America, I realized that a simpler style of parenting—one that would let kids make mistakes and develop independence, that would let them find and pursue opportunity themselves—was a luxury that many American families simply felt they could not afford.
It was as if America, land of the Hollywood romance, was in practice mired in a premodern time when marriage was, first and foremost, not an expression of love, but rather a logistical and financial pact to help families survive by joining resources.
It seemed simple and structural. 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.
Which brings me to the third kind of relationship that confused me in America: the relationship between people and their employers.
were the cases of people taking a job they didn’t really want, simply because they needed the health insurance. Others hesitated to change jobs, or decided not to make an otherwise positive career move, because they’d have to give up their health coverage.
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.
simple: In the Nordic countries the basics of health care and other social benefits and essential services simply do not depend on one’s employment to the degree they do in the United States.
But after seeing for myself how American society forced people into situations that warped some of their most fundamental relationships—the relationships between parents and children, between spouses, and between workers and employers, especially—I could understand where the cliché was coming from.
the one between government and citizen.
at its core, around the idea that having too much government created a culture of dependency among its citizens, and that the result of this dependency was to ruin families and businesses.
From a Nordic perspective, America’s problem wasn’t too much modernity. It was too little.
One might even say that Nordic societies had succeeded in pushing past outdated forms of social dependency, and that they had taken modernity to its logical conclusion.
The Nordic nations had found an approach to government that deployed policies in a smarter way to create in individual citizens not a culture of dependency, but rather, a new culture of personal self-sufficiency that matched modern life. The result had been to put into daily practice the very ideals that many Americans could only fantasize about achieving in their personal lives: real freedom, real independence, and real opportunity.
Sanfrid Neander-Nilsson, and as far as he was concerned, the Swedish national character was ice cold, inward-turned, sad, depressed, and almost animal-like. It was a portrait of Swedes who yearned for solitude and feared other people—nothing like Pippi Longstocking.
the stereotypical Nordic person would probably also be thought of as someone who, although perhaps not particularly talkative, is sensitive to the needs of his or her fellow human beings, especially since we’re sometimes believed to have socialist tendencies. It follows that we ought to have a collective mind-set and some solidarity, not be extreme individualists.
however, a powerful strain of individualism is part of the bedrock of Nordic societies—so
Trägårdh helped explain why I’d been feeling so confused by American relationships, especially those between parents and children, between spouses, and between employees and their employers. It all came down to the Nordic way of thinking about love—perfectly exemplified by Pippi Longstocking.
The core idea is that authentic love and friendship are possible only between individuals who are independent and equal.
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.
A person who must depend on his or her fellow citizens is, like it or not, put in a position of being subservient and unequal.
But Pippi illustrates an ideal of unencumbered love, whose logic, in Nordic thinking, extends to most real-life adult relationships.
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 poor from charity, wives from husbands, adult children from parents, and elderly parents from their children. 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,
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“In the United States there is both a moral, and to some extent legal, expectation that parents provide for their children even after the children have come of age,” Trägårdh said. “But this expectation also means that parents have power over their children.”
policy choices in the Nordic nations that together ensure a single, predominant goal: independence, freedom, and opportunity for every member of society. Most of the major decisions the Nordic nations have made, whether related to family policies, education, or health care, have followed from, and are direct manifestations of, the Nordic theory of love.
How all this has worked, however, is widely misunderstood in America.
Every time I hear an American refer to Finland as a socialist country, however, I feel like I’ve been suddenly transported back to the 1950s.
when the Soviet Union threatened Finland’s independence two decades later, Finns beat back socialism both times, preserving Finnish freedom and independence—at great sacrifice.
Some 93,000 Finns perished out of a population of 3.7 million.
The idea that a contemporary Nordic society is anything like this sort of socialism is absurd. The notion that even a liberal American leader such as Barack Obama could be considered a socialist, as some of his conservative critics like to claim, seems to us downright comic.
what the experience of the Nordic nations actually suggests is that even the United States, with its already very impressive commitments to freedom, might actually be able to learn a few things from us about freedom and free-market capitalism.
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.
many Finns really have no idea how good they do have it, because they’ve never been on their own as a citizen of a place like the United States.
