Matt Yglesias

Where Is Scandinavia

Freshly returned from a great trip to Scandinavia, I can’t help but enjoy the FuckYeahScandinavia tumblr that I was first shown this morning. That said, no fan of northern Europe can avoid observing that several of the countries the tumblr covers aren’t technically “Scandinavian.” Americans often find this a bit confusing but Scandinavia, strictly speaking, only refers to Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. If you want to add in Iceland and Finland and miscellaneous extra territories (Åland, Faeroe Islands, Greenland) the word you’re looking for is “Nordic.”

I don’t totally understand why the distinction has been drawn this way—but roughly the point is that Finnish is a very different language from the others and that Iceland is clearly a geographically distinct phenomenon from the rest.

The larger point, however, is that the giant phone in this Robyn video is totally awesome. I also like that in Sweden health care is “under democratic control and financed on the basis of solidarity.”

Morning Joe Crew Can’t Name a Single Successful Unionized Firm

You can tell MSNBC is liberal, because their daily 3 hour program hosted by a former Republican congressman is in the morning rather than in prime time. And here they are claiming that it’s impossible to name a single successful company that’s unionized:

Jamison Foser observes that General Electric, where they work, employs many union workers and seems to be quite successful. They also name UPS. It’s worth noting as well that all of Americans’ major professional sports teams are unionized, that the entertainment industry is very heavily unionized, much of the telecom sector is unionized, Safeway where I buy my groceries is unionized, etc.

But stepping back, the larger issue here is that you tended to see firms becoming unionized back when the legal climate was friendly to unionization. That was in the 1930s and 1940s. Since that time, it’s been exceedingly difficult to organize new union workplaces in the private sector. It’s been over fifty years since Taft-Hartley and the beginning of the anti-union backlash. Obviously, it should come as no surprise that many of the economic sectors that were huge in the 30s and 40s are smaller now. That’s because we have whole new economic sectors that didn’t exist back in the day. And when a sector has arisen—as the whole suite of things around computers and technology largely has—in the era in which the law tilts heavily against union organizing, you wind up with a sector with little in the way of unions. To take this history and read it as a story about unions causing sectors to fail is backwards. What’s happened is that unions have been locked out of huge swathes of the economy, denying workers their chance at securing a decent share of the value created in those areas.

In a country like, say, Finland where union density is in the seventies, there are obviously going to be tons of successful unionized firms. The difference is just that Finland made it easier to form unions. And it hasn’t crippled their economy—median living standard are pretty clearly higher over there than here.

The Horrors of Nordic Socialism Exposed

The Daily Show did a nice segment the other day exposing the horrors of socialism as practiced in Sweden. Basically, most people are better off than most Americans, but rich Swedish people aren’t nearly as rich as rich Americans:

My sense of things is that, all joking aside, Sweden really has gone too far and if I were Swedish I’d be looking to recalibrate to something more like the model of social democracy on display in Denmark or Finland or the Netherlands which all, like Sweden, are ahead of us in the Human Development Index and would be regarded by Glenn Beck as little better than life in a gulag.

School Lunch Or; How to Make Government Work

One of the craziest stories I heard while I was in Finland was the shocking tale of the 1999 school lunch reform. The way this worked is that in 1999, parliament passed some legislation guaranteeing a nutritionally balanced school lunch. So the National Nutrition Council wrote some guidelines dictating that a properly balanced lunch would feature fresh or cooked vegetables covering half the plate, a starch (potatoes, rice, or pasta) covering a quarter of the plate, and meat or fish or a vegetarian protein alternative covering the remaining quarter. A desert of berries or fruit is served “if the nutrient content of the main course is not adequately diverse or if it contains little energy” along with skimmed or semi-skimmed milk and bread.

It was a crazy story not because the nutritional guidelines are crazy. Nor because the nutritional guidelines are perfect. This still actually leaves a lot of variance depending on exactly what’s served. But what’s crazy about it is the way it happened. Parliament felt children should eat a well-balanced meal, and so guidelines were written by a government agency and then implemented. Like magic!

It’s very hard to imagine anything like that happening in the United States, where something as basic as the food pyramid winds up being a locus for interest-group politics. Michael Pollan talks to Mother Jones about the way of the world:

MJ: Does WIC still specify that you buy dairy?

MP: Yes. We had a huge fight to get a little more produce in the WIC basket, which is heavy on cheese and milk because the dairy lobby is very powerful. So they fought and they fought and they fought, and they got a bunch of carrots in there. [Laughs.]

MJ: Specifically? Who knew: the carrot lobby?

MP: Specifically carrots. The next big lobby. But there is also money in this farm bill for fresh produce in school lunch. The price of getting the subsidies was getting the California delegation on board, and their price was $2 billon for what are called specialty crops—fresh fruit and produce grown largely in California.

Or watch this video:

Democracy is democracy, politics is politics, and life is what it is. But still, it seems to me that Americans have a deplorable tendency to take pride in the dysfunctional nature of our political system, and actually revel in it. It makes, after all, for a fascinating game in a way that a simple outsourcing of nutritional guidelines to apolitical experts wouldn’t. But I think there’s a big challenge for progressives here. And not just with regard to school lunch, but with regard to the whole thing. There are certain ends that can only be accomplished by state action. But state action is only really tolerable if you can actually make the government work well and an awful lot of our basic institutions just don’t work very well. At the same time, the medium-term policy frontiers increasingly focus on questions of public health and environmental security that have a hefty technical element. A lot of the argument for universal health care hinges on the fact that, in principle, comprehensive reform could deliver a much more efficient system. But will it actually deliver such a system, or will it just deliver whatever happens to get lobbied for? Care that benefits patients, or care that benefits health care providers of various kinds? Those ultimately aren’t questions about the design of any particular plan; instead, they’re questions of whether or not progressive governance can manage to somehow deliver better overall governance.

UPDATE: On a related note, Ezra Klein observes:

CBO occupies a weird space in Washington. They decide what legislation costs. They may get it right or they may get it wrong, but the number they settle on is the number legislators agree to use. And so this morning’s hearings featured powerful senators begging a small, bearded budget geek for favorable judgments as if he were the Oracle at Delphi.

And the thing of it is that while the CBO’s methods aren’t perfect and its conclusions aren’t incontestable, it really does do a pretty good job—good enough that it can continue to be widely respected. And having an expert agency be widely respected and do a pretty good job, thus providing a convergence point for congressional consideration of legislation, is much better than having our legislative debates just proceed with everyone inventing their own cost estimates.

Home Alone

Funny movie concept, not-so-hot social policy concept:

In the Prince George’s County community of Riverdale Park, town officials have noted a distressing sign of the national economic downturn: more children left home alone to fend for themselves by working parents too strapped to afford child care.

The problem was discovered by code enforcement officers who inspect apartments in the town of 7,000. They used to come across such cases once every couple of years. Then, six months ago, they found one child left alone, followed by another and another.

Have I mentioned that in Finland there’s a commitment to making high-quality child care services universally available and universally affordable?

Beware Finland

The future of the Finnish military looks pretty badass. Just saying. Everyone needs to stay on notice — they’re a small country, yes, but a fierce one.

More Serious Friday Nordic Blogging

Writing in Newsweek, Obama education adviser Linda Darling-Hammond talks about lessons from Finland and she wasn’t even on my recent education policy junket to Finland. Dana Goldstein was on said junket and also writes about education policy lessons from Finland for The American Prospect.

For my own part, visiting Finland mostly confirms things that I think we already knew about education. But what’s interesting about visiting a prosperous, egalitarian social democracy with a high level of education is less that it teaches us things we didn’t know, but that it shows that certain kind of theoretical constructs we all understand can be realized in practice. I think if you asked just about anyone “would our school achievement be better if the child poverty rate were dramatically lower?” they would say that it would. Similarly, if you ask if school achievement would be more even if school funding were even, they would say that it would. And if you asked if providing higher-quality early childhood education more broadly would enhance achievement, everyone would say yes. And if you asked what would happen if we drastically increased the number of people who want to be teachers, such that slots in teacher training programs were highly competitive, people would tell you that student achievement would improve. And if you asked people whether higher levels of educational attainment would boost prosperity, people would tell you yes. And if you asked whether more equal education outcomes would lead to a more even distribution of income, they would tell you it would. And if you asked whether a more even distribution of income would lead to more even education outcomes, people would tell you it would.

But even though I don’t think anyone would really dispute any of that, we don’t just do that stuff. Instead, we’re trapped in a frustrating circle of passive acceptance of the idea that we just have to live in a country where public services are ill-funded and poorly delivered. And it’s not just that conservatives block reforms — progressives have let their horizons slip incredibly low. A country that once built transcontinental railroads and sent people to the moon has decided that for some reason it’d just be impossible to solve our current social problems. And when you point out to people that there are countries where the political system has taken decisive action to tackle these challenges, people kind of shrug and observe that the United States is very big. Which is true. But the country was also big years ago when we were building the world’s first mass literacy society. Indeed, it used to be considered advantageous to the United States that we were so big and people used to wonder whether small countries weren’t just inherently stuck in poverty.

The truth of the matter, however, isn’t that our problems couldn’t be solved it’s that we’re not seriously trying. And we’ve developed a political culture in which that’s considered okay.

Early Childhood Education in Finland

Earlier this year, the Reason Foundation’s Shikha Dalmia and Lisa Snell cited Finland as evidence for their view that universal preschool is a bad idea:

Early education in general is not so crucial to the long-term intellectual growth of children. Finland offers strong evidence for this view. Its kids consistently outperform their global peers in reading, math and science on international assessments even though they don’t begin formal education until they are 7.

For one thing, Dalmia and Snell are just wrong about this — Finland starts voluntary preschool at 6 and over ninety percent of children enroll. Compulsory education begins at 7. But more to the point, this is a situation where actually visiting Finland is informative. Children under 6 in Finland have an “unconditional right” to places in heavily subsidized centers. When speaking English, Finns call these centers “day care” centers and not “preschool.” But I went to three of them and spoke to teachers who teach there and administrators who run them, and they looked like preschool to me. Of course I’m not an expert. But Sara Mead is an expert and she says it “meets most of the standards for what we in the United States would call preschool.” In particular, you have college educated teachers, you have national curriculum guidelines, and while you don’t have much formal instruction you do see an enormous amount of emphasis placed on children’s intellectual development.

Beyond what Sara says, I would also observe that there are quite deliberate efforts to use early childhood education to help narrow achievement gaps. Finland has a relatively low poverty rate and relatively few immigrants compared to the United States, but the people we spoke to there talked about deliberate efforts to do outreach to immigrant families — even ones with unemployed parents — to help them learn Finnish. They also have a lot of special ed preschool teachers to specifically target kids with problems. Far from being an example of a country achieving educational success without early childhood preparation, I would say that excellent preschooling is one of the three main pillars (along with low levels of child poverty and high levels of competition to become a teacher) of Finland’s educational success.

This is What Equality Looks Like

Not that this will come as shocking news to anyone, but income in Finland is distributed much more equally than in the United States:

The difference is especially pronounced at the very top and at the bottom. The richest ten percent of Americans take a much larger share of income than do the richest ten percent of Finns. Meanwhile, the bottom twenty percent of Finns get a much larger share of income than do the bottom twenty percent of Americans. But of course everyone knows that the rich need money more than the poor, so the American system is fairer. Plus our way is worse for the middle sixty percent, too, but pointing that out would be class warfare and your populism would be sneered at by media celebrities whose incomes are all in the top twenty.

Meanwhile, note that an egalitarian social and economic environment actually hits the rich coming and going. Not only are Finland’s rich poorer than their American compatriots, but the relatively non-desperate state of the Finnish poor means that prices are higher than in the US for the sort of labor-intensive personal services that are primarily consumed by the prosperous. A tourist will note that restaurants are relatively expensive, but the same principle would carry over to maids and nannies and so forth.

Outback Bar and Grill

One Helsinki restaurant I didn’t sample:

The concept of an “outback bar and grill” in this context suggests to be that somebody went to an Outback Steakhouse in the USA and didn’t quite understand the concept. I’m no Texan, but I’m pretty sure there’s no outback there.

The Inequality Cycle

Achievement gaps in the US education system are an important cause of economic inequality, which is especially unfortunate when you consider that economic inequality is also a leading cause of achievement gaps in the US education system. Chad Alderman writes about the latest TIMSS results:

Despite this progress, the biggest difference in the scores of US students is not between countries, but rather remains within our own. In fourth grade math, the effect size of US students attending high-income versus low-income schools is 1.4 times as large as the difference between US students and the highest performing country. In science, the effect size by income is three times what it is between the US and the leading nation. Income gaps continue to persist at levels higher than all others, and that should be the real story out of these results.

In Finland, by contrast, they’ve happily gotten themselves onto the good equilibrium. Relatively low levels of background inequality and poverty make it relatively easy to deliver fairly egalitarian educational outcomes. Add to that a determination to target in-need students with a degree of extra resources, and this becomes even more the case. And those relatively egalitarian educational outcomes help maintain a relatively egalitarian distribution of wealth and income. Lather, rinse, and repeat. The United States, by contrast, is becoming more-and-more of a class-bound society in which parental SES dominates other factors in determining economic opportunities, helping to reinscribe patterns of inequality over and over again.

Teacher Education in Finland

I think the American education policy debate is probably going to start focusing more and more on how we train and credential teachers. And yesterday, I learned about how this is done in Finland. For background, the Finnish equivalent of high-school (”upper secondary school”) teachers students who are 17, 18, and 19. So obtaining a Bachelor’s degree from a Finnish university typically only takes three years. A master’s degree takes five. To qualify as a “kindergarten teacher” you need a bachelor’s degree, but that doesn’t actually mean you teach kindergartens. Rather, you’re qualified to staff certain positions in Finland’s municipally administered daycare centers.

Primary and secondary school teachers, by contrast, need master’s degrees. But within this group, there are two different kinds of degrees. There are “class teachers” for younger kids and “subject teachers” who are mostly for older kids. A class teacher has a class of children, all of whom are basically the same age, and teachers diverse subjects. A subject teacher teaches one subject to kids of different ages. To become a class teacher, you apply to a university’s Department of the Practical Science of Education and spend five years doing a mix of classes on education theory and pedagogy (in general terms like what we do in US education schools) and “practice teaching” on actual students in actual schools. To become a subject teacher, by contrast, you first need to get into the regular department in that subject and do coursework there, and then on top of that apply to the Education Department for admission to a brief course of pedagogical instruction.

One important difference between how this works and how equivalent systems work in the United States is that the education programs are highly competitive. Only 10-20 percent of applicants are accepted, and the applicants typically come from the top half of upper secondary schools which themselves only basically the top half of Finnish primary school graduates (the rest go to vocational schools). Along the same lines, it’s generally quite common for Finns to foot-drag there way through university, since the price is actually negative (free tuition, plus a stipend, plus subsidized loans) but we’re told that teachers usually do the five year course in five years because the job market for graduates of teacher programs are strong.

It’s a bit hard to say what accounts for the strong level of interest in a teaching career in Finland. Finnish teacher compensation seems about average for the US (which is to say considerably more generous than some states, considerably less generous than others). The relative salary is higher because other professionals such as lawyers and doctors earn less in Finland than do their US equivalents. And the subjective quality of the job experience seems better in Finland since the kids have many fewer discipline issues.

But at the same time, there seems to be a somewhat circular phenomenon at work. Teaching is held in high regard not just in the abstract, but in practice as a profession a lot of people want to get into. Consequently, the teaching programs are quite selective. And the selectivity itself makes teaching prestigious since everyone knows teachers are graduates of selective programs. Which helps make going into teaching seem appealing to a lot of people. And so on and so forth in an interesting way. It seems to me that it’s easy to see how it’s socially beneficial to increase the number of talented people who want to be teachers; by contrast, it’s difficult for me to see what kind of social benefits from from increasing the number of talented people who want to be lawyers. Finland and the United States seem to be on different spots on the teacher/lawyer curve, and I don’t think it’s difficult to say which is the better spot.

Finnish Testing

Barack Obama’s team is thought to be torn between two camps on education policy thinking, one led by Linda Darling-Hammond that’s more friendly to teacher’s unions, and another of self-described reformers who are less so. One difference, as explained by Thomas Toch, has to do with testing and Finland specifically comes up:

Darling-Hammond points approvingly to a “growing emphasis” in high-performing countries on “project-based, inquiry-oriented learning” that has led “to an increasing prominence for school-based tasks, which include research projects, science investigations, development of products and reports or presentations about these efforts”–so-called performance tests. The bulk of the article (written with co-author Laura McClosky) describes approvingly locally administered peformance assessment in countries ranging from Finland to Australia, Hong Kong, Sweden, and the UK. [...]

But it’s clear that Darling-Hammond is ambivalent about using performance testing to hold educators accountable for student achievment. She notes that the countries she has studied “do not use their examination systems to rank or punish schools or to deny diplomas to students.” Finland, she writes, “has no external standardized tests to rank students or schools.” Instead, she writes approvingly, the testing systems in Finland and other countries are closely linked to efforts to develop teachers’ ability to teach higher-level skills to their students; they are part of the countries’ human capital strategies.

What Finland does, testing-wise, is that the national government draws up lots of tests. Tests of different kinds of subject matter that are appropriate for children of different ages. But it doesn’t require any nationwide assessment testing. Instead, what’s done on a national basis is that there’s a matriculation exam after ninth grade and there’s also non-publicized testing done on a statistical sample basis so that the government can keep track of what’s happening.

So what are all the tests for? Well, the local governments who actually run schools can — and typically do — order tests administered from time to time in order to check up on what’s happening. So while there isn’t a formal system of test-based accountability, in practice something similar is happening. For example, there was a test in Helsinki of Finnish language ability among I think sixth graders last year. The results weren’t publicized, but they were shared with the principals of Helsinki schools. We visited a school that got poor results on this test, and so the principal and his staff responded by drawing up an action plan to turn things around.

This is simultaneously very different from No Child Left Behind’s accountability system and on another level quite similar. The basic idea that the best way to tell how a school is doing is to administer tests, and then when a school does poorly on tests you know things need to be changed, is held in common. What’s very different are the details of implementation. Finland’s system is much less of a “system” — it’s less formal and less systematic. The Finnish government takes for granted that municipalities will want rigorous assessments of their schools’ performances. The US congress assumes that school districts don’t want such assessments and need to be forced to do them. The Finnish government also takes for granted that the staff and administration of a low-performing school will be alarmed by bad test results and start taking action to change things. The US congress assumes that the staff and administration of a low-performing school won’t act unless they’re made to act.

I don’t think one can seriously dispute that the Finnish system is “better” — it’s more cooperative, more responsive, etc. But at the same time, the underlying belief behind NCLB — that low-performing US schools won’t change unless they’re forced to change — strikes me as a factually accurate claim about conditions in the United States. What we do strikes me as a direction in which the Finnish system might evolve if it starts to break down over time, whereas what Finland does strikes me as a direction in which we might evolve after we see substantial structural reform in the minority of school districts that are truly dysfunctional. After all, it’s not as if the United States has had our current testing and accountability system since time immemorial and we’re clinging to it out of reflexive habit. On the contrary, it was put into place out of a sense that many schools and school districts had been persistently unresponsive to data about performance problems.

The Cucumber Factor

Ta-Nehisi Coates is getting ready to foreswear the smear against white people that we eat cucumber. And yet just yesterday here in Finland where the white people are twice as white as back home (Nordic ancestry + subarctic winter = pale), I was in fact served a sandwich of cucumbers and cheese on a croissant.

The Health Maw

Obviously, you don’t build a Finnish level of educational performance without the foundation provided by the egalitarian Nordic social/political/economic model. And you don’t build a Nordic welfare state without some taxes. But there are things besides tax rates that make it possible to afford to Finland’s relatively generous social provision. One such thing — lower defense expenditures. But another is lower health care expenditures:

If you can’t read that chart, click over here. It shows that the Finnish system is so much cheaper on a systemic basis than the American system, that public expenditures on health care actually comprise a slightly smaller share of Finnish GDP than they do of American GDP. This even though Finland’s public expenditures on health care are done in a far more egalitarian manner and cover far more comprehensive service.

And of course when private expenditures are factored it, Finland spends dramatically less on health care. And yet, we get little-to-nothing in terms of better health outcomes in exchange for our additional health care spending. The total gap — including both public and private expenditures — frees up almost 8 percent of Finnish GDP for productive investment in education, infrastructure, etc. in a way that allows reasonable robust growth to coexist with relatively high taxes and levels of social provision.

There would be nothing wrong with America spending a huge amount on health care if there were some evidence that it was making us an unusually healthy people, but there isn’t.

24 Hour Day Care People

Another place we visited yesterday was one of Helsinki’s 10 — nine public, one private — 24 hour day care centers. Of course it’s not really “day” care if it’s provided at night. But the basic philosophy here is that some people have to work at night — shift workers at hospitals, people working in public services doing transportation or police work, people working at the airport, etc. — and some of those people have kids, too. The exact details of how the center works were a bit complicated and not terribly interesting, but it’s a great example of Finnish public policy’s strong commitment to meeting family policy needs.

The Basics

Early childhood policy in Finland in a nutshell:

Mothers are entitled to five weeks maternity leave. After that, there’s a parental leave period of ten additional months that can be taken by either mother or father or divided between the two. After that, children have an “unconditional right to day care.” That can be provided either at municipal-run institutions or else at private ones. There are fees day care charged on a sliding scale according to income that max out at 233 euros per month. That’s far less than the cost of care, which, clearly, is heavily subsidized. A family that prefers to have a parent stay home and take care of the children can do so and receives a home care subsidy. Thus, the system is neutral between traditional and working-mother models. About 30 percent of Helsinki children are in the home care / allowance system.

Private daycare facilities are eligible for the same level of public subsidy as municipally run ones. This isn’t really a profitable line of work and so there aren’t many providers — just five percent of Helsinki children are enrolled in a private center.

That leaves the other 65 percent of Helsinki kids in the municipal centers. Centers have two kinds of staff members — “kindergarden teachers” who have bachelor’s degrees and “practical nurses” who have less education. For every four children under the age of three you need one staff member. For every seven children between the ages of 3-6 you need one staff member. And for every two practical nurses you need one kindergarden teacher. So a section of 21 older kids would be taught by one kindergarden teacher assisted by two practical nurses.

Immigration and Early Education

I’m going to do a bunch of posts about Finland over the course of this trip that won’t necessarily be conclusion-driven. The basic spirit is that (a) it’ll be content, (b) it’ll be a useful exercise for me to just try to summarize things I’m learning, (c) someone might find it interesting, and (d) there’ll be time to reach meaningful conclusions later.

Yesterday’s visits in Finland were focused on their early education system. One important new challenge to that system, as to many dimensions of European social policy, relates to dealing with immigrants. Finland’s immigrant population is still relatively small, but in the city of Helsinki it’s pretty big, and immigrants are disproportionately fecund so it’s a big deal for the education system especially in the city.

The early education system is, in principle, a huge opportunity in terms of hopes of building a successful system of integration and assimilation. Kids come in to Finnish early education at very young ages — sometimes just one or two years old — at a time when their linguistic capabilities are developing rapidly and at a point where foreign language acquisition is relatively easy. Thus, this is a great opportunity to teach Finnish to foreign-born children or to the children of foreign-born (most often Russian or Somali) parents. One interesting element to this is that Finnish center-based early childhood services are universally available but by no means mandatory. Many children are taken care of at home or by relatives. And since unemployment is higher among immigrant communities and immigrants also tend to come from families with more traditional gender/family ideas the objective need for child care services in the immigrant community isn’t necessarily enormous.

In the United States, many if not most local governments would take a look at the reduced budgetary costs associated with immigrant families choosing to keep their kids at home and conclude that it’s all good. But the Finns regret the missed opportunity to ensure that immigrant kids learn Finnish and are able to hit the ground running once “real” school starts at age seven. So they make special efforts to try to do outreach and encourage immigrant families to send their kids to early childhood education centers even if they’re unemployed and capable of taking care of them at home. It’s an interesting peek at the difference between social services that are grudgingly provided (as is typical in the US) and a mentality that looks upon them more positively as things that are being offered because it would be good for them to be used.

A related aspect of this is, of course, that it’s easier for immigrant children to learn Finnish if their playmates in school are predominantly Finnish. And this is a point where educators observed that the success of their mission winds up depending on policies made by totally different branches of government. In particular, for the schools to be integrated enough to do language education with maximal success, you need housing policy to put an adequate mix of units of different types and affordability levels in different neighborhoods. The Helsinki authorities reportedly do accomplish this to some extent, with public housing scattered somewhat around the city rather than in a concentrated ghetto. But there seem to be some real limits to the scope of this policy — one school we visited was a bit over 50 percent immigrant, which makes their task difficult.

On a related note, a teacher at that school observed that since that school — with a relatively high number of immigrants, a high number of low-income families (both native and foreign born) and a high number of kids from single-parent families — had a relatively more challenging task than other preschools in Helsinki, it really ought to get more funding on a per capita basis. That seems correct to me — the flat distribution of funds they have in Finland isn’t really appropriate. On the other hand, it’s about a million times more appropriate than the American system which generally allocates the least funding to the communities most in need.

Blogitecture in Helsinki

Kids — I’m off today for a week-long trip to Helsinki, Finland where I and some other DC-based policy thinkers and writers are going to be guests of the Finnish government to learn about their education system. Finland is a world leader in PISA scores and other measures of educational success, so as the United States tries to reverse the current disturbing trend toward declining educational attainment, it seems that perhaps we have something to learn not only from how Finnish schools function, but from the larger social and economic policy context in which children learn.

In general, I think the United States has a lot to learn from the social models prevailing in northern Europeans countries such as Finland. Finland’s per capita GDP is roughly the same as America’s, but Finland’s gini coefficient is far lower, suggesting that typical Finns enjoy higher material living standards than do Americans. Add to that longer life expectancy, lower crime rates, and lots of modernist design and architecture and it seems like a nice place. On the other hand, they have worse weather. I once spent an extremely long layover in Helsinki Airport where I was surprisingly well treated by Finnair rather than given the usual “we’ve stranded you here and it’s all our fault but we refuse to apologize or take responsibility” schtick one usually gets form airlines, so I’ve long felt a deep appreciation for the Finnish way and I’m very eager to see some non-airport portions of the country (the view from the terminal looked nice).

At any rate, you know the drill — blogging will continue, but on a reduced and somewhat sporadic schedule. Of course you should expect some commentary on Helsinki’s public transportation (metro, tram, and commuter rail — a veritable trainapolooza) system.