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

by Anu Partanen

The fast-paced, stressful nature of modern life in a globalized world might be inevitable, but leaving people to muddle through it by falling back on old-fashioned family- and village-based support structures that no longer functioned the way they once did—that was by no means inevitable.

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,