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

Americans, and many others around the world, did not seem fully aware of how much better things could be.

“If you want the American dream,” Miliband quipped at the conference, “go to Finland.”

measured national well-being—education, health, quality of life, economic competitiveness, and political environment—and compared a hundred nations on these metrics. The result came as something of an unpleasant surprise to the United States and other major powers that might have expected to be at the top. Newsweek declared that for a person starti

the complex and mysterious fine print thrown at you from every direction by corporations that had somehow managed to evade even the bare minimum of sensible protections for consumers. Things didn’t improve when it came time to file my first tax return for Uncle Sam. I tried to research my tax situation on the Internal Revenue Service Web site, and

Meanwhile, there was one global ranking in which Finland came in dead last: the Failed States Index. According to the Fund for Peace, Finland was the least fragile nation in the world.

It was all part of a way of doing things in the United States that, as I would gradually realize, forced you to be constantly on guard, constantly worried that whatever amount of money you had or earned would never be enough,

Near Finland in the rankings were usually some of Finland’s neighbors: Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and on some measures Iceland—a group of countries

I sat on my couch back in the United States and read about the advantages of Finland I’d chosen to forsake. While my fellow-American inhabitants and I were increasingly stressed out, overworked, unhealthy, underpaid, insecure, and uncertain whether our children’s lives would be any better, back home in Finland the middle-class friends I’d left behi

Newsweek had published the results of a survey it had conducted of nations around the globe. The magazine had set out to answer a question that, in its own words, was “at once simple and incredibly complex—if you were born today, which country would provide you the very best opportunity to live a healthy, safe, reasonably prosperous, and upwardly m