The Secret to Finland's Success With Schools, Moms, Kids—and Everything

The Atlantic

 

The Secret to Finland's Success With Schools, Moms, Kids—and Everything

 

The country has cheaper medical care, smarter children, happier moms, better working conditions, less-anxious unemployed people, and lower student loan rates than we do. And that probably will never change. 

 

 

Olga Khazan Jul 11 2013, 8:58 AM ET

 

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A child in Finland being happy, as usual. (Kacper Pempel/Reuters)

It's hard not to get jealous when I talk to my extended family.

My cousin's husband gets 36 vacation days per year, not including holidays. If he wants, he can leave his job for a brief hiatus and come back to a guaranteed position months later.

Tuition at his daughter's university is free, though she took out a small loan for living expenses. Its interest rate is 1 percent.

My cousin is a recent immigrant, and while she was learning the language and training for jobs, the state gave her 700 euros a month to live on.

"Everyone should get a slice of the cake so that they have what they need to realize their life projects."

They had another kid six years ago, and though they both work, they'll collect 100 euros a month from the government until the day she turns 17.
They of course live in Finland, home to saunas, quirky metal bands, and people who have for decades opted for equality and security over keeping more of their paychecks.

Inarguably one of the world's most generous -- and successful -- welfare states, the country has a lower infant mortality rate, better school scores, and a far lower poverty rate than the United States, and it's the second-happiest country on earth (the U.S. doesn't break the top 10). According to the OECD, Finns on average give an 8.8 score to their overall life satisfaction. Americans are at 7.5.
Sometimes when I'm watching the web traffic for stories here at The Atlantic's global desk, I'll notice a surge in readership in one of a couple of archival stories we have about how fantastic Finland is -- usually thanks to Reddit or a link from another news site. One is about Finland's "baby boxes, " a sort of baby shower the Finnish government throws every mom. A package sent to expecting women contains all the essentials for newborns -- everything from diapers to a tiny sleeping bag. (Want to choose your own baby clothes? You can opt instead for the box's cash value, as my cousin did.)

The other popular story is about Finland's school system, which ranks as one of the world's best -- with no standardized testing or South Asian-style "cramming" but with lots of customization in the classroom. Oh, and students there also spend fewer hours physically in school than their counterparts in other Western countries.
As the U.S. raises student loan rates, considers cutting food stamps, guts long-term unemployment insurance, and strains to set up its first-ever universal healthcare system, it's easy to get sucked into articles about a country that has lapped America in certain international metrics but has also kept social protections in place. Like doting parents trying to spur an underperforming child, American liberals seem to periodically ask, "Why can't you be more like your brother?"


It's a good debate to have, and in some ways, it seems like there's no reason why the U.S. shouldn't borrow from Finland or any other Nordic country -- we're richer and just as committed to improving education and health, after all. Here's the difference: Finland's welfare system was hardwired into its economic development strategy, and it hasn't been seriously challenged by any major political group since. And just as Finland was ramping up its protections for workers, families, and the poor in the 1960s, Americans began to sour on the idea of "welfare" altogether. What's more, some economists argue that it's because of all that American capitalism contributes to the global economy that countries like Finland -- kinder, gentler, but still wealthy -- can afford to pamper their citizens. With actual Pampers, no less.

*** 

Let's start with mandatory maternity leave, a favorite topic among the having-it-all, Leaning-In crowd. The U.S is one of the last countries on earth without it, but the Finnish state mandates four months of paid maternity leave, and on top of that, the mother and father can share an additional six-month "parental leave" period, with pay. After that, kids can either continue staying home with their mothers until they reach school age, or parents can instead send them to a publicly subsidized child-care center, where the providers are all extensively trained. The cost is on a sliding scale based on family income, but the maximum comes out to about $4,000 a year, compared with $10,000 for comparable care in the U.S.

This is just one of the many reasons Finland is "the best place to be a mom," as the nonprofit Save the Children declared in May.

Can't get a job? Not to worry. Unemployment insurance in Finland lasts for 500 days, after which you can collect a means-tested Labor Market Subsidy for an essentially indefinite period of time. (The unemployment rate is a high-but-not-awful 8.2 percent).

At this point, if you've literally turned green with envy and need to see a doctor, you're in luck! In addition to dirt-cheap universal healthcare, Finland offers compensation for wages you might have lost while you were away from work, as well as a "Special Care Allowance" if you need to take some time off to take care of your sick kids.

All of this adds up to the stress equivalent of living in what is essentially a vast, reindeer-fur-lined yoga studio.

"It seems to me that people in Finland are more secure and less anxious than Americans because there is a threshold below which they won't fall," said Linda Cook, a political scientist at Brown University who has studied European welfare states. "Even if they face unemployment or illness, Finns will have some payments from the state, public health care and education."

*** 

Eero Järnefelt, Burning the Brushwood, 1893. (Wikimedia Commons)

The Finns didn't always have it this good. For much of the early 20th century, Finland was agrarian and underdeveloped, with a GDP per capita trailing other Nordic countries by 30 to 40 percent in 1900.

One advantage Finland did have, however, was enlightened policies towards gender. The country focused on beefing up child and maternal care in large part because women were at the core of Finland's independence and nation-building efforts at the turn of the 20th century. Finnish women were the second in the world to get the vote in 1906, and they were heavily represented in the country's first parliament.

Ellen Marakowitz, a lecturer at Columbia University who studies Finland, argues that because women helped form modern Finland, things like maternity leave and child benefits naturally shaped its welfare structure decades later.
"You have a state system that was built on issues concerning Finnish citizens, both men and women, rather than women's rights," she said. "Government was created in this equal footing for men and women."

 

 

BBC

 

Finland's strong trade unions pioneered its initial worker protections, but the state soon took those functions over. Today, roughly 75 to 80 percent of Finns are union members (it's about 11 percent in the U.S.), and the groups dictate the salaries and working conditions for large swaths of the population.
And as the country worked to industrialize in the 1960s, its economic policymakers took on a mentality similar to that of CEOs at tech companies with awesome employee perks like free string cheese and massages.

"The thinking was, 'for a country of 5 million, we don't have many resources to waste. If people are happy, they'll maximize their work ethic, and we can develop,'" says Andrew Nestingen, a professor who leads the Finnish studies program at the University of Washington. The theory of the welfare state was that "everyone should get a slice of the cake so that they have what they need to realize their life projects."

The country's unemployment and disability system was in place by 1940, and subsequent decades saw the expansion of child benefits and health insurance.
Meanwhile, thanks to the country's strong agrarian tradition, the party that represents the rural part of Finland pushed through subsidies for stay-at-home (or stay-on-farm, in their case) mothers -- thus the current smorgasbord of inexpensive child-care options.

Over time, Finland was able to create its "cake" -- and give everyone a slice -- in large part because its investments in human capital and education paid off. In a sense, welfare worked for Finland, and they've never looked back.
"In the Finnish case, this has really been a part of our success story when it comes to economic growth and prosperity," said Susanna Fellman, a Finn who is now a professor of economic history at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. "The free daycare and health-care has made it possible for two breadwinners -- women can make careers even if they have children. This is also something that promotes growth."

With this setup, Finns have incredible equality and very little poverty -- but they don't get to buy as much stuff. The OECD gives the U.S. a 10 when it comes to household income, the highest score, while Finland gets a measly 3.5.

How Unchecked Capitalism Has Brought the World to the Brink of Apocalypse -- and What We Must Do Now

  Visions  

AlterNet / By Robert Jensen

How Unchecked Capitalism Has Brought the World to the Brink of Apocalypse -- and What We Must Do Now

We have both a moral obligation and practical reasons to work for justice and sustainability. 

 

 

 

July 9, 2013  |  

 

The following is an excerpt from We Are All Apocalyptic Now: On the Responsibilities of Teaching, Preaching, Reporting, Writing, and Speaking Out , in print at Amazon.com and on Kindle (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013):

 

The first step in dealing with a difficult situation is to muster the courage to face it honestly, to assess the actual depth and severity of a problem and identify the systems from which the problem emerges. The existing social, economic, and political systems produce a distribution of wealth and well-being that is inconsistent with moral principles, as the ecological capital of the planet is drawn down faster than it can regenerate. The systems that structure almost all human societies produce profoundly unjust and fundamentally unsustainable results. We have both a moral obligation and practical reasons to work for justice and sustainability. 

 

We need first to imagine, and then begin to create, alternative systems that will reduce inequality and slow, and we hope eventually reverse, the human assault on the ecosphere. To work toward those goals, individuals can (and should) make changes in their personal lives to consume less; corporations can (and should) be subject to greater regulation; and the most corrupt political leaders can (and should) be turned out of office. But those limited efforts, while noble and important in the short term, are inadequate to address the problems if no systemic and structural changes are made. 

 

That sounds difficult because it will be, and glib slogans can’t change that fact. A longstanding cliché of progressive politics -- organizers’ task is to “make it easy for people to do the right thing” -- is inadequate in these circumstances. Given the depth of the dysfunction, it will not be easy to do the right thing. It will, in fact, be very hard, and there’s no sense pretending otherwise. At this point in history, anything that is easy and can be achieved quickly is almost certainly insufficient and likely irrelevant in the long run. Attempting to persuade people that large-scale social change will come easily is not only insulting to their intelligence but is guaranteed to fail. If organizers can persuade people to join a movement based on promises of victories that won’t disrupt privileged lives -- victories that cannot be achieved -- the backlash is likely worse than the status quo. 

 

There’s one simple reason that serious change cannot be easy: We are the first species in the history of the planet that is going to have to will itself to practice restraint across the board, especially in our use of energy. Like other carbon-based creatures, we evolved to pursue energy-rich carbon, not constrain ourselves. Going against that basic fact of nature will not be easy.

 

Modern humans -- animals like us, with our brain capacity -- have been on the planet about 200,000 years, which means that we’ve lived within the hierarchical systems launched by agriculture for only about 5 percent of human history. We are living today in a world defined by systems in which we did not evolve as a species and to which we are still struggling to adapt. What today we take to be normal ways of organizing human societies -- nation-states with capitalist economies -- are recent developments, radically different than how we lived for 95 percent of our evolutionary history. We evolved in small gatherer-hunter groups, band-level societies that were basically egalitarian. Research on human social networks suggest that there is a limit on the “natural” size of a human social group of about 150 members, which is determined by our cognitive capacity. This has been called “Dunbar’s number” (after anthropologist Robin Dunbar) -- the number of individuals with whom any one of us can maintain stable relationships. In that world, we pursed that energy-rich carbon without the knowledge or technology that makes that same pursuit so dangerous today. 

 

So we are, as Wes Jackson puts it, “a species out of context.” We are living in a world that is in many ways dramatically out of sync with the kind of animals we are. If we are to create systems and structures that will make possible an ongoing human presence on the planet, we have to understand our evolutionary history and adapt our institutions to reflect our essentially local existence -- people live, after all, not on “the planet” but in a specific place, as part of an ecosystem -- on a scale and with a scope that we are capable of managing. But we also have to acknowledge that we are inextricably connected to others around the world because of more recent history. As a result of the centuries of imperialism that have advantaged some and disadvantaged others, we are all morally connected, as well as literally connected by modern transportation and communication technology. The task is not to go backward to some imagined Eden, but to understand our history to create a more just and sustainable future. 

 

This means we have to recognize that the biological processes that govern the larger living world, along with our own evolutionary history, impose limits on human societies. Either we start shaping our world to reflect those limits so that we can control to some degree the dramatic changes coming, or we will be reacting to changes that can’t be controlled. That isn’t an easy task; as James Howard Kunstler points out, “the only thing that complex societies have not been able to do is contract, to become smaller and less complex, and to do it in a programmatic way that reduces the pain of transition.” Though history suggests that “people do what they can until they can’t,” it’s still imperative that we face the challenge: 

Our longer-term destination is a society run at much lower levels of available energy, with much lower populations, and a time-out from the kinds of progressive innovation that so many have taken for granted their whole lives. It was an illusory result of a certain sequencing in the exploitation of resources in the planet earth that we have now pretty much run through. We have an awful lot to contend with in this reset of human activities.

 

If there is to be a decent future, we have to give up on the imperial fantasy of endless power, the capitalist fantasy of endless growth, the technological fantasy of endless comfort. Those systems have long been celebrated as the engines of unprecedented wealth, albeit for a limited segment of the world’s population. Instead of celebrating, we should mourn the world that these systems have created and search for something better. Systems that celebrate domination are death cults, not the basis for societies striving for justice and sustainability. 

 

Our task can be stated simply: We seek justice, the simple plea for decent lives for all, and sustainability, a balance in which human social systems can thrive within the larger living world. Justice and sustainability have a common economics, politics, ethics, and theology behind them -- rooted in a rejection of concentrated power and hierarchy -- but there is no cookbook we can pull off the shelf with a recipe for success. We can articulate principles, identify rough guidelines, and search for specific solutions to immediate problems. 

 

On justice: Our philosophical and theological systems all acknowledge the inherent dignity of all human beings. We say that we believe that all people are equal, though we accept conditions in the world in which all people cannot live with dignity, where any claim of equality is a farce. In that case we understand the principles but do not live accordingly.

 

On sustainability: There is less consensus on the philosophy and theology on which we ground a concern for sustainability. Is it purely pragmatic? Do we need to conserve the world to sustain ourselves? Should we have some more expansive concern about the non-human living world? Do other living things have a claim on us? There are no simple or obvious answers. We may have some general reverence for all life, but most of us value the lives of our children, our friends, and other humans more than we value the lives of other animals. But even with a lack of clarity about how to value various forms of life, we have to understand that we are part of that larger living world and that we should be careful about how we carve it up into categories. 

 

For example, we should be careful not to value the pristine and ignore the human-built. We should not value the part of a forest that is untouched by human hands more than the part that has been cleared for human shelter. It is seductive to label wilderness as sacred and development as profane. Instead we should learn to see all the world -- the last stands of old-growth redwoods in northern California and the most burned-out block of the South Bronx -- as sacred ground. Until we do that, we have little hope of saving the former from destruction or restoring the latter to health. At its core, sustainability is about the acknowledgment of interdependence: the interdependence of people on each other, of people and other animals, of all living species and the non-living earth. We must see the interdependence of the redwoods and the South Bronx.

 

Again, no one has a blueprint for creating a just and sustainable society, but here is a list of a few basic assumptions and assertions that make justice and sustainability imaginable: (1) nature is not something humans have a right, divine or natural, to subdue and exploit; (2) for most of human beings’ evolutionary history, our social systems encouraged the solidarity and cooperation required for survival, and our social systems today should foster those same values, (3) systems that place profit above other values inevitably cause problems they cannot solve; (4) solutions must be holistic, linking the always interdependent parts of a system, such as producers and consumers; (5) technology is not automatically beneficial and must be scrutinized before being used; and, perhaps most importantly, (6) humans have the moral and intellectual capacity to make choices that will preserve rather than destroy the larger living world.

 

That human capacity to choose wisely does not guarantee we always will. The ease with which intellectuals can be co-opted is a reminder of that.

Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center. His latest book is 'All My Bones Shake: Radical Politics in the Prophetic Voice' (Soft Skull Press). He is also the author of 'Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity' (South End Press).

Abolish Human Rentals ~ Support Worker Cooperatives

Abolish Human Rentals

Support Worker Cooperatives

 

 

What is a human rental?

Human rentals describes how most people earn a living, they rent themselves in exchange for a salary or wage. The self rental typically describes the state of being employed by a firm. Human rentals involves two key features.

The first aspect is the agreement to follow orders within terms of the rental. For example some standard orders would be: produce this, provide this service, design this, or manage these people. The employee generally concedes authority over how the work is performed and under what conditions. The main issue is the delegation of positive governing control. The employer has the ability to command the worker to perform certain actions: work faster, work harder, produce higher quality parts, etc. Or more commonly today, dump these toxins, deny these medical claims, issues these predatory loans, or manage public relations so we can continue doing these things. The rented person must obey, or risk being fired.

The second aspect of a human rental is the transfer of responsibility for the actions of the person while at work. The most obvious is the transfer of responsibility for any profit or loss that results from the worker’s actions. That responsibility is shifted to the owners of the business.

It is important to note that both the alienation of governing control at work and the transfer of responsibility cannot in fact take place. A person can not alienate their authority to a state or firm without a say in the governance, at least if one believes in inalienable rights and democratic theory. At best a person can choose to cooperate, which the legal system then pretends is an actual alienation of authority and fulfillment of the rental contract. This is precisely what our judicial system does with regard to human rentals today.

The transfer of responsibility for personal actions is clearly inalienable as illustrated by the commission of a crime. The judicial system correctly traces criminal responsibility back to all persons involved. It matters little if a person is “hired” to commit a crime. Being contracted to provide services in a crime does not shift responsibility and get a hired criminal off the hook. However, responsibility cannot be transferred in the positive case either, that of productive labor. In this case the legal system closes its eyes and pretends that the employment contract actually transfers responsibility between parties. It thus allows the transfer of profit resulting from labor to be appropriated by another party not responsible for its creation.

 

© 2013 - Abolish Human Rentals Worker Cooperatives Worker Cooperatives are democratically run, worker-owned businesses. They are the alternative to the an alienating employment system, involving collaborative self-employment by groups of individuals.  Governance of a worker cooperative is based on one member, one vote. People that provide labor are required to become members (after a trial period) so their rights to governance and profit appropriation are protected. Here is a map of worker cooperatives in the United States. More information on worker cooperatives can be found here.          © 2013 - Abolish Human Rentals   Marxism as a Capitalist Tool David Ellerman Abstract Just as the two sides in the Cold War agreed that Western Capitalism and Soviet Communism were “the” two alternatives, so the two sides in the intellectual Great Debate agreed on a common framing of questions with the defenders of capitalism taking one side and Marxists taking the other side of the questions. From the viewpoint of economic democracy (e.g., a labor managed market economy), this late Great Debate between capitalism and socialism was as misframed as would be an antebellum ‘Great Debate’ between the private or public ownership of slaves. Even though the Great Debate between capitalism and socialism is now in the dustbin of intellectual history, Marxism still plays an important role in sustaining the misframing of the questions so that the defenders of the present employment system do not have to face the real questions that separate that system from a system of economic democracy. In that sense, Marxism has become the ultimate capitalist tool.