Partanen is a Finnish journalist who met an American man and moved to the USA to be with him. She loved many aspects of life in America, but she also found much of what she experienced puzzling.  While people believe in the idea that there should be social mobility, the structure of society is set up to make it more difficult to rise up from one’s economic class to become more financially secure or well off. Life in the Scandinavian countries gives its citizens more opportunities to pursue their dreams and live how they want. Partanen traces back to what she calls the Nordic Theory of Love, which she attributes to Lars Tragardh and Henrik Berggren, set out in their 2006 book “Is the Swede a Human Being?”. This emphasizes the individualism of Scandinavian thought, contrary to the frequent claim that they subjugate the individual for the needs of society.  Partanen explains that “authentic love and friendship are possible only between individuals who are independent and equal.” Her point is that if adults are reliant on other individuals or are dependent on their jobs in ways that leave them stuck, then they lack autonomy — the ability to control their own lives.

So Partanen compared life in the US and Nordic countries through her own experience and that of friends and family. We are familiar with comparisons of the welfare states of northern Europe and their supposedly high taxes with situation in the USA where supposedly citizens get to keep more of their own hard-earned money.  As Partenen points out, the contrast is not so stark, especially when you take into account what people in the USA have to pay for health care insurance and expenses.   Partanen explains how coming to America affected her with craziness of the US system, which leaves people vulnerable to massive expenses , ridiculous bureaucracy, and Kafka-esque scenarios where no one can tell you how much a procedure will cost before it is done. Partanen is constrained in her criticisms of the US healthcare system, but she does spell out how badly it compares to the system in most other western countries and especially that in Scandinavian countries.  She explains how her European friends think that everything has changed with Obamacare but in fact the improvement has been only marginal, and some people are indeed worse off under the new health care exchanges.

Other chapters address childcare, the educational system, and the job situation. In each case, Partanen explains in some detail, with copious notes, how the US has a lot to learn from the rest of the world. Partanen is not saying that everything about the US is terrible: she has chosen to immigrate and the epilogue describes her naturalization ceremony when she became a US citizen. Living in NYC, she finds that her life in her new country has a great deal to offer.  Her personal story about her marriage, her life in Finland before she came to the US, and the people she knows makes the book more interesting than a more abstract one that simply compares different countries in abstract terms.

Having recently not only lost my own job and facing uncertainty about health care coverage, but also knowing many colleagues in the same situation, I found The Nordic Theory of Everything particularly striking. It is amazing to those who are familiar with the health care systems of other countries that there is not more outrage about the terrible inefficiencies of the US system that costs so much for so little overall benefit, and the way in which people get stuck in jobs because they are scared of losing the health insurance that comes with the job.  Partanen’s case that citizens are much more free and independent when the state provides basic health care, guarantees parental leave when a baby is born, and supplies child care so people can afford to go to work are convincing.  She also makes a plausible case that much of the education of children needs to be reformed.

There’s nothing fundamentally new here in advocacy for the welfare system of the Nordic countries, but the case needs to be made again and again, so Partenen’s book is a welcome addition to the literature on this topic.

© 2016 Christian Perring

Christian Perring is currently an adjunct professor of philosophy in New York City, and that’s OK for now.