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

by Anu Partanen

“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.”

exactly because she is totally self-sufficient, her friendship with the children next door, Tommy and Annika, is a great gift to them. That’s because they are absolutely assured that Pippi’s friendship is being given freely, no strings attached.

has not been to socialize the economy at all,

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, completely authentic, and driven purely by love.

Freed from such expectations, people in Nordic societies can raise their children primarily with the goal of helping them become independent and capable of handling life on their own.

Here’s how we in Finland understand socialism: The government controls production and bans ownership of property—no private factories, companies, or stores, and no free markets. No one is allowed to accumulate any personal riches. There is only one political party, few personal freedoms, and little or no freedom of speech. Socialism is one step away from communism, which Karl Marx defined as a situation in which the government,

The number of Finns who sacrificed their lives fighting socialism and communism in the twentieth century is roughly the same as the number of Americans who died in America’s two hot wars against communism—Korea and Vietnam—and that’s out of a population about one-sixtieth the size of America’s.

As wealthy, modern, industrialized nations, the Nordic countries have realized that the productivity of their workers and businesses, as well as the long-term health of their societies and economies, depends first and foremost on healthy relationships between children and their parents, between spouses, and between parents and their employers.

On the whole Finns tend to see the baby box as a delightful rite of passage, and a symbolic welcome from society at large. It says: We honor your choice to have children, and we support you in the adventure; you’re not alone.

American critics of the Nordic countries like to rant about the evils of top-down regulation and big-government “socialism,” but the reality is that the Finnish government has actually decentralized education and managed it with a light touch. Over the past few decades, the Ministry of Education has given more power to municipalities and to the communities that actually run the schools. While there is a national core curriculum, it has become much less prescriptive since my days in school.

The lack of standardized testing doesn’t mean that Finns are hostile to evaluating students. The goal of the Nordic theory of love is to empower individuals, and that means holding them to high standards. Finnish teachers are trained to assess children in the classroom during daily activities, as well as by using tests they create themselves.

“These things that we think of as frills are at the core of building an active, able mind that not only can enjoy other people and communicate and have artistic abilities but also can do the core subjects in more flexible ways.” Darling-Hammond called it “building the cognitive muscle.”

However, taken overall, Finnish parents trust their neighborhood schools. And it’s not just the structure of the basic education system that creates relatively peaceful parents and families. It’s also the accessibility of higher education after the compulsory education system ends. As a society Finland has set a goal for itself that every graduate of junior high school will have a spot in a school at the next level waiting for them, whether academic or vocational, and that all youths under the age of twenty-five will be meaningfully occupied in either studies or employment. And since most Finns do not need to worry about paying back huge student loans, they can choose a career with a lower salary without fearing personal bankruptcy. The system Finland has created allows parents like my friend Noora to trust that their children will do just fine. This affords everyone involved a tremendous amount of autonomy and freedom—the key values of the Nordic theory of love.

A few years ago an American journalist named T. R. Reid set out to catalog what the basic approaches to health care were around the globe. Reid identified four basic models that different societies use to manage health care for their citizens.

In the Nordic countries, citizens know much more clearly what it is they are paying their taxes for. That translates into a clearer notion of why they have a government in the first place, and what the government’s job is. In Finland when I went to the doctor at a public health-care center, I never felt I was receiving a benefit from the government that I hadn’t earned. On the contrary, I had paid for it in the course of filing my taxes, and I also knew that if I became seriously ill, I would have earned the right to be treated by the system at virtually no additional cost to me, because my taxes had chipped in to help pay for the care of others.

In other areas of life as well, Nordic policies are designed and executed for the explicit universal goal of creating a society of well-being for everyone.

In Finland the goal is not to subsidize certain people or groups, but to equalize the basic support structure across the broad expanse of society. By comparison, many of the most visible American programs as they exist today look surprisingly targeted, selective, and, in many cases, stigmatizing—Medicare for the elderly, for example, or food stamps, school lunches, and Medicaid for the poor (now including many in the former middle class). Meanwhile childless young people and the reasonably well-off get few advantages out of the bargain at all, and when they do, they fail to see it. And then the very rich get tons of advantages—namely all the loopholes the tax code provides them to avoid paying taxes.

With its strong foundation of basic services, the region has continued to generate highly educated workers, technologically advanced companies, and low barriers to trade, leaving the marketplace freer to focus on business. In international rankings of economic competitiveness or freedom, the Nordic countries remain consistently among the best, and even ahead of the United States.

This misconception is mostly based on the unique situation of Norway today, which recently became awash in valuable oil and gas reserves. Finland, by contrast, has no significant natural resources apart from its forests and some metals. For the most part the people of the Nordic countries have acquired the wealth they possess today by working for it. They were not rich when they started building their well-being states—even Norway’s oil was not discovered until the late 1960s.

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.

“How could you judge each individual on his merits when dunces went to Eton and geniuses were sent up chimneys? How could individuals achieve their full potential unless society played a role in providing them with a good start in life?” And: “Wasn’t a state that denied a poor man a decent education also restraining his potential happiness and freedom?”

In order for Britain to succeed better as a society, Webb advocated a new idea: A state must secure a “national minimum of civilized life,” including food and education for the young, care for the sick, income for the disabled and elderly, and living wages for workers. This idea would become a key element in Nordic thinking. (William Beveridge, who gave his name to the health-care model used in Britain and subsequently in the Nordic countries, was part of Webb’s group.)

It may seem hard to believe, considering how much more Nordic citizens get in exchange for their taxes, but average Finns pay income taxes and employee contributions at a rate only about 6 percentage points higher than the rate paid by average Americans, while average Swedes pay less than average Americans.

The Nordic country that Micklethwait and Wooldridge admire most is Sweden. 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.

Nordic societies have simply taken the job of government seriously.

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.

Income inequality has increased everywhere, but in the United States it’s particularly pronounced because taxes and government services do less to mitigate the effects of the changes in the marketplace than elsewhere in the modern developed world.

British Labour Party leader Ed Miliband to make his surprising statement in 2012: “If you want the American dream, go to Finland.” 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. It’s no mystery why this is the case: The United States has simply not committed to basic public policies that ensure equality of opportunity the way the Nordic countries have.

This is what it means to have deliberate social policies to support the autonomy of individuals, to secure the independence of children, and to ensure the development of children’s talents for the future. In America, if you’re lucky enough, you might have the private resources to keep you on track through life’s challenges. You might also end up haunted by the knowledge that you may have gotten unfair advantages over others who are suffering. This can have the debilitating effect of undercutting people’s sense that they are the master of their fate, that they’ve earned their own success.

The poor in the United States fare far worse. A family at the lowest fifth of the income distribution makes significantly less money than does a similar family in Canada, Sweden, Norway, Finland, or the Netherlands. Thirty-five years ago the reverse was true.

It’s a fact: A citizen of Finland, Norway, or Denmark is today much more likely to rise above his or her parents’ socioeconomic status than is a citizen of the United States.

“My experience is that every good, dramatic story comes from some kind of inner hunger or necessity to create it. If you talk to writers or directors, it has to do with some kind of misery. I don’t know any plain happy person who could create something interesting,” Sveistrup said. “What makes you have any kind of ambition, it’s grounded in your past, in your childhood, in your youth. You took a bite of the apple, or maybe you didn’t get the apple, or maybe you’re trying to get attention, or re-create something that you lost. That aspect has nothing to do with the welfare state. That’s the universal drive for a creative life. And if you’re just happy, you have absolutely nothing to write about.” I smiled

“Normally, I avoid clichés like the plague, wouldn’t touch them with a ten-foot pole, but here we are on a literal level playing field,” McCullough said, referring to the school’s football field, the venue for the event. “That matters. That says something. And your ceremonial costume—shapeless, uniform, one-size-fits-all. Whether male or female, tall or short, scholar or slacker, spray-tanned prom queen or intergalactic X-Box assassin, each of you is dressed, you’ll notice, exactly the same. And your diploma—but for your name, exactly the same. All of this is as it should be, because none of you is special.”

The positive side of all this belittling of one’s achievements or specialness is the worldview it conveys: one charmingly devoid of pomposity, and full of acknowledgment that we’re all just humans here, regardless of our possibly successful actions.

But here’s the thing: What makes Nordic people uncomfortable is when “uniqueness” or “being special” includes the suggestion that certain people are more valuable than others. Americans and Nordics may start from a similar point, and acknowledge each individual’s inherent value. But Americans tend to emphasize an individual’s capacity for extraordinary achievement, and then focus on celebrating those who fulfill this promise. This makes Americans comfortable with hierarchies based on income, title, or other indicators of status, because these hierarchies are perceived as being based on merit. By contrast Nordics tend to continue emphasizing the equal value of each individual regardless of his or her achievements, and thus Nordic people dislike such hierarchies and celebrations of success.

Today Americans still feel that by and large, every individual is responsible for constructing his or her own fate—the classic pursuit of happiness—and there is still much debate in the United States about the extent to which, if at all, an individual’s success or failure is also shaped by accidents of birth. Nordic people have long ago moved beyond this debate.

McCullough’s “You Are Not Special” speech had clearly hit a nerve in America, and many Americans themselves were wondering if all the cosseting, nudging, cajoling, wheedling, and fawning over every individual’s potential to achieve exceptional success, and all the attendant striving, were actually resulting in anyone achieving happiness.

Go to Italy or Spain, and the locals can’t stop telling you how great their own food, weather, scenery, or people are. Go to France, and you’ll hear all about its cuisine, history, and literary heritage. Come to America, and it’ll be made clear to you that the United States is the best country in the world. Go to Finland, and you’ll be asked why you bothered to come.

have conducted studies that ask test subjects in a variety of situations to engage in mental scenarios related to a goal. Women trying to lose weight, injured people hoping to heal, and students aiming to get good grades, a date, or a job were asked to imagine different outcomes for their quest. Later researchers checked back to see what had happened. The more optimistic each person had been about his or her outcomes, the worse the results. As Oettingen explains, positive thinking can fool our minds into perceiving that we’ve already attained our goal, which slackens our readiness to pursue it. And it can have other problematic effects. The best-selling author Barbara Ehrenreich, for one, has argued that the American gospel of positive thinking contributed to the recent financial crisis, by encouraging the poor to take on mortgages they couldn’t afford, and the rich to take risks that weren’t reasonable.

The harshness of American life helps explain the presence in the United States of a dubious, even predatory, wing of the self-help industry, which profits by selling unlikely promises to the unlucky. It’s telling that self-help gurus hardly exist in the Nordic countries. They’re not necessary.

to provide every individual with independence—results in freedom. And the sort of freedom I’m talking about here is freedom from investing energy in false hope. Wishful thinking can take a nation only so far. Ultimately hope has to be generated by the actual presence of opportunity. And if it’s really there, it doesn’t require constant psychological energy and enthusiasm, or a constant stream of heroic tales of survival against all the odds, to sustain.

“Social systems that do not promote or enable the pursuit of individual liberty are always going to be at a disadvantage. This used to be the great strength of the United States, social mobility and the American dream,” Trägårdh said. “But social mobility without social investments is simply not possible. So if you start to give up on public schools and a collective system for enabling individual social mobility, you’re going to end up with inequality, gated communities, collapse of trust, a dysfunctional political system. All these things you see now in the United States.”

Today nations that have progressed into the twenty-first century see freedom as something much richer. They see freedom as the assurance that all individuals get real opportunity, so they’re free to pursue the good life for themselves, and real protection from the lottery of bad luck, so they’re free from unnecessary fear and anxiety. And a lot of Americans today are desperate to have those freedoms.

All these achievements should not be overlooked, and nor should they be dismissed as products of unique Nordic circumstance and culture. Make no mistake: These achievements may have been inspired by the Nordic theory of love, but they are not achievements of culture, they are achievements of policy.