The Nordic Theory of Everything

Anu Partanen

"In Finland, in the decade-plus of my working life as a newspaper and magazine writer and editor, I’d lived a comfortable middle-class existence, as had all my friends. 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. [..]

Among the less privileged, meanwhile, American marriage appeared to be in a state of full-blown crisis. A much-discussed study had found that among white people in their thirties and forties, less than half of those with only a high-school education were tying the knot. Critics debated the causes of this reality, but what was remarkable to me was that this discussion, too, ultimately circled around the financial axis [..] In America, if you were contemplating getting married and starting a family, you first needed to think very carefully about your finances. How much debt did you have in student loans? Could you afford health insurance? For that matter, how much would it cost just to give birth? The maternity benefits of different health-insurance plans varied dramatically. I was stunned when I learned of a young couple who had health insurance, and nevertheless had ended up owing the hospital twenty thousand dollars for the birth of their baby. [..]

One of the most heartbreaking episodes I witnessed after moving to the United States involved an American acquaintance who was battling cancer. To make matters even worse, it was clear that the person’s domestic relationship was fraying at the same time. The peculiarly American twist on the story was this: If the couple split up, the young cancer patient, with many months of expensive treatment ahead, would be left without health insurance, since it was being provided through the domestic partner’s employer. The unhappy relationship seemed to last much longer than it should have, hurting everyone involved far more than necessary. The trauma of the situation had been vastly multiplied simply because of the total dependency of everyone in the equation on the employer. [..]

Far less tragic than the story of my friend with cancer [..] 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. Less obvious than the matter of health care, but also insidious, was the hesitancy of practically every American I met to take their full allotment of vacation time, as allowed by their employer, no matter how paltry. Never mind actually leaving work every day at five.

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 [..]

Americans have a reputation for changing jobs often, but as a result of their dependence on employer-provided benefits, my American acquaintances all seem far more beholden to their bosses than the Nordics I know. Americans hardly take any parental leave, and clearly feel obligated to work extremely long hours, with little say over how these hours are arranged. By contrast, I had worked a number of high-pressure jobs as a journalist in Finland [..] it wasn’t even in the realm of possibility that all my health care could be compromised by anything to do with my job.

By now I was used to hearing the Nordic countries dismissed as “socialist nanny states.” But ironically it was here in America that businesses trying to manufacture products and make a buck had somehow gotten saddled with the nanny’s job of taking care of their employees’ health. Surely, I thought, Milton Friedman, the great free-market economist, must be turning in his grave! From a Nordic perspective, it seemed ludicrous to burden for-profit companies with the responsibility of providing employees with such a fundamental, complicated, and expensive social service.

People in the United States were aware of this contradiction, of course, and in discussions of the American business landscape, experts often pointed to the burdens that health-care obligations placed on companies, especially on small businesses. But no one seemed to be talking about the other side of the coin: the unhealthy dependence on employers that this creates among employees receiving, or hoping to receive, these benefits. It was an old-fashioned and oppressive sort of dependence, it seemed to me, completely at odds with the modern era of individual liberty and opportunity.

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 more I experienced life in the United States, the more I began to think that what Nordic societies [..] had succeeded in pushing past outdated forms of social dependency, and that they had taken modernity to its logical conclusion.

References

[1] Video