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

by Anu Partanen

Regardless of whether Finland was the “best” country in the world or not, most people in the United States, as well as many of my Nordic countrymen back home, did not fully realize that to leave Finland or any other Nordic country behind and settle in America at the beginning of the twenty-first century was to experience an extraordinary—and extraordinarily harsh—form of travel backward in time. As a Nordic immigrant to the United States, I noticed something else, too. Americans, and many others around the world, did not seem fully aware of how much better things could be.

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.

Back in the days when several generations lived together under one roof, sharing chores and domestic duties, surrounded by a tight-knit village where everyone knew one another and pitched in, a person could feel secure—at least when it came to the sorts of problems that family and neighbors could help you solve.

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.

Yet the American reality was that getting married was still understood as an act of financial commingling.

In America, if you were contemplating getting married and starting a family, you first needed to think very carefully about your finances.

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.

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.

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.

On the contrary, the Nordic experience suggested that when you took old-fashioned familial dependency out of the equation, children became more empowered, spouses more satisfied, and families more resilient—and even happy.

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.

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.

In this sense, then, the Nordic theory of love is an intimate philosophy for how empowered individuals can engage in personal relationships in the modern age. Liberated from many of the more onerous financial and logistical obligations of the old days, we can base our relationships with family, friends, and loved ones more on pure human connection. We are also freer to express our true feelings in our relationships with others.

It’s possible because freeing people from the shackles of financial and other sorts of dependency on one another enables them to be more caring toward each other, not less.

The ideal family is made up of adults who work and are not financially dependent on the other, and children who are encouraged to be as independent as early as possible. Rather than undermining ‘family values’ this could be interpreted as a modernization of the family as a social institution.”

So it is not that the elderly in Sweden don’t want to have relationships with their children. It’s that they don’t want to see them on terms and conditions where they are being reduced to a state of dependency in relation to their own children.”

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.

As much as possible, the theory is that parents should be able to focus on welcoming new life into the world and loving their newborn, rather than being overwhelmed by the logistical challenges involved.

Nordic nations have realized that it is in the best long-term interests of everyone, including businesses, to support families in raising children. After all, in the long run, happy family members are more productive, and businesses will have a wider pool of healthy, productive, well-adjusted workers to draw on in the future.

When both parents return to work, the Nordic theory of love comes into play in a new way. At this stage of a young child’s life, Nordic societies want to ensure that both parents are able to focus again on being fully engaged and productive employees, while at the same time also remaining good parents.

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.

In the Nordic view ensuring a child’s fundamental rights to be properly cared for is an investment in the future of the society.

The Nordic theory of love would hold that the relationship between parents and grown children ought to become one of equals, so that they can express love, affection, and support for one another as self-sufficient adults.

Protecting that freedom and opportunity is what the Nordic theory of love is all about. Marriage today should be a commitment by two individuals who want to give their love and care freely, as unencumbered and self-sufficient equals. That they choose to enter the relationship purely out of love is exactly what creates such a profound bond. The stoic, taciturn Nordics turn out to be some of the most genuine romantics on earth.

Married and cohabiting couples in Nordic countries, as well as single parents, all get more or less the same benefits for their children, and if a child has only one parent, society steps in to support that parent with his or her emotional, financial, and logistical hardships—not for the benefit of the parent, mind you, but in order to secure the best possible childhood for that child. The Nordic way is not to push single parents to find a new spouse; not being married itself isn’t the problem.

A family will not function well as a team unless it is first composed of strong, self-sufficient individuals.

The more educated the mother, it turns out, the longer she breast-feeds.

For starters, in the Nordic view long leaves for both parents are seen as crucial to allow the child to form strong bonds with both the mother and the father. The other rationale is that long leaves not just for mothers but for fathers allow both parents to get into the groove of sharing responsibilities at home and work equally, from the beginning. This, in turn, supports gender equality.

To encourage men to take advantage of their parental leaves, the Nordic countries have launched special paid leave that is “daddy-only” time off.

Is this a smart way for a society in the twenty-first century to allocate its precious human resources? All this creativity in figuring out child care uses up vast amounts of everyone’s energy and brainpower, and steals away many hours and days that could be better spent. It always seems to me a surprising waste of time and potential.

The Nordic theory of love has provided a vision: how independent individuals can actually create stronger and more resilient familial teams than spouses who are tied to each other in relationships that are unequal, or that involve financial and logistical dependencies.

Increasing paid leave for workers is part of a worldwide trend, heading in the direction that the Nordic countries have taken.

More and more countries are both extending the length of these leaves and increasing the amount of the benefits.

Everyone complains no matter how good they have it, even in Finland. But most of this is a matter of tweaking life, not of trying to secure the fundamentals.

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

“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.”

In his book Pasi Sahlberg quotes a line from a Finnish writer named Samuli Paronen: “Real winners do not compete.” It’s hard to think of a more un-American idea.

It also struck me as peculiarly un-American that private businesses would be saddled with such a profound social duty. It sounded so, well, socialist. 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? And wasn’t it completely twisted that when people lost their jobs, they lost their health insurance as well, right when they might need it the most?

From the perspective of any society that claims to value and support the autonomy of the individual, the fact that at least half of all Americans depend on their employer for what is perhaps life’s most essential social service makes no sense. It severely curtails one’s freedom.

The goal of the Nordic theory of love is to prevent this corrosion of relationships, and to do so by creating social arrangements that allow everyone to give love as freely as possible, without strings attached.

Everyone agrees that the United States is home to some of the world’s best medical schools, highest-skilled doctors, most productive research institutes, best-equipped hospitals, and most innovative treatments. If you have the money in the United States, you absolutely can get world-class care. But here’s the thing that somehow escapes American awareness in this discussion: Everyone else in all the other wealthy industrialized countries—absolutely including all the ones that have universal national health-care systems—is also getting world-class care. And they get it whether or not they have a fancy insurance plan and a huge reserve of personal wealth.

And here’s the secret of this system: This is the bargain that everyone in a Nordic country gets, so the system is clearly in everyone’s self-interest. Unlike in some bogeyman welfare state, participation in a well-being state does not require you to bow in submission before the altar of altruism, sacrificing your own advancement to help the unlucky. It supports your own personal freedom, your own autonomy, and each individual’s ability to determine his or her own fate, since we don’t need to depend on the financial largesse of parents, spouses, or employers for the fundamental services—health care, education, and aid during times of crisis—that each of us requires to fulfill our potential. On top of that there’s a less tangible benefit: the pride and satisfaction of participating in a society that truly enables equality of opportunity for all.

However, simply comparing tax rates tells you virtually nothing without also comparing what a person gets in return for those taxes. A family in Country X might pay 40 percent in taxes, while a family in Country Y might pay only 25 percent. But if the family in Country Y has to spend another 25 percent of its income to pay for health insurance and school tuition, and the family in Country X does not, then the family in Country X obviously comes out way ahead, assuming that the quality of the services is the same.

One of the reasons the Nordic countries have arrived in the future first is that after their 1990s financial crisis 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. In addition they added more choices to taxpayer-funded services, and created new systems to foster business.

I’d traveled the globe, and I’d lived in Finland, France, and Australia. Now in America I felt as if I’d arrived not in the land of Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King, but in that proverbial nineteenth-century banana republic of extremes—entrenched wealth, power, and privilege on the one hand and desperate poverty, homelessness, and misfortune on the other. A cliché, yes. But that makes the reality of it no less brutal. Never before had I seen such blatant inequality, not in any other nation in the modern industrialized world.

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.

Your business has to be in good-enough shape that it’s not going to crumble just because someone is taking care of their children. If your business can’t handle that, then you have a problem with either your business model or your management.”

Nordic workers often prefer to take time over money, because at a certain point, the secret Nordic people know is that time off buys you a better quality of life than more cash.

“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.”