Finntopia

What We Can Learn From the World's Happiest Country

Danny Dorling, Annika Koljonen

• Publisher: Agenda Publishing
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781788212168, 9781788212151
• eBook ISBN: 9781788213479
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Political Economy
• Index: Economics

The 2020 World Happiness Report ranked Finland, for the third year running, as the world's happiest country.

The "Nordic Model" has long been touted as the aspiration for social and public policy in Europe and North America, but what is it about Finland that makes the country so successful and seemingly such a great place to live?

Is it simply the level of government spending on health, education and welfare? Is it that Finland has one of the lowest rates of social inequality and childhood poverty, and highest levels of literacy and education?

Finland clearly has problems of its own – for example, a high level of gun ownership and high rates of suicide – which can make Finns sceptical of their ranking, but its consistently high performance across a range of well-being indicators does raise fascinating questions.

In the quest for the best of all possible societies, Danny Dorling and Annika Koljonen explore what we might learn from Finnish success.

PART I

The context

1

Geography and climate

“I’m considering applying for a scholarship to study in Finland. My only hesitation is the six months of darkness. I wonder how that would affect my ability to study, because I tend to think and work better in the early morning when I can watch the sun rise. Given the number of reasons I have to live in Finland, I’m quite surprised at my reaction to the idea of lack of light when it comes to the practicality of living there.”

American woman living in New York City, July 2019

“Honestly, I don’t find New York City winters that different from ours. The period from October to December is usually very agreeable: sauna, mulled wine, hot chocolate, woolly socks, Christmassy fairy lights, pre-Christmas parties and gift-wrapping. The only taxing bit is January, which is also almost always the coldest month, too. In February the sun begins to shine again, at least for a few hours per day, and reflects off the white snow. In March we start to realize that it’s time to wash the windows again and we start looking forward to spring. If you decide to come here, I will buy you a light therapy lamp for a welcoming present; I haven’t needed one myself, but many people who find the darkness too dense consider it a useful delight.”

Reply from her friend in Helsinki, August 2019

A long way from anywhere

Finland is far away. Unless you are in Finland, in which case it is – very probably – home. Everywhere is a long way from most places. And everywhere is home to someone.

To the east of Finland lies Russia, endless Russia, Russia as far as the mind can imagine and as far as a car or a train can travel in a day, or two, or three (Figure 1.1). It feels as if it has always been Russia over there.

To the south is the rest of Europe, country after country, sea after sea, peoples and languages, so many languages all just needing to be learned and used in the places just waiting to be visited. And no more meaningful borders. Finland is in the European Union and the eurozone. With a voter turnout of 74 per cent, 56.9 per cent of Finns voted for EU membership in an advisory referendum held in 1994 (Ministry for Foreign Affairs 2019a).

To the west are Sweden and Norway, and then Iceland and Greenland, and even further west are Canada and the United States – all places to escape to when times are too hard. Places where so many of the siblings of the Finns’ forefathers started their new lives and from where they never returned.

To the north is Lapland, and the Sámi, and the beautiful county of Finnmarc (a part of Norway), and then sea, ice and the top of the world. North are the lights that dance in the sky, north is Svalbard, the pole, the East Siberian Sea, and then, along the same meridian, the Siberian wilderness. Keep travelling on that great arc and to your right is idyllic Sapporo in Japan, and lonely Wake Island lies next to your left. You pass over the Solomon Sea, and past island atolls now slowly sinking under the Pacific. You swoop past the Gold Coast of Australia, over the Tasman Sea, and to your left glimpse New Zealand before flying over the Antarctic, hitting land at Port Elizabeth, travelling across most of Africa and then all of Europe before you are home again.

So why is the nearest thing to Utopia found here, in the cold extremes of northern Europe; when there are so many other places it could have been built?

Finns and the cold

What comes to mind when you think of Finland? Many people’s first thought is of the cold, and the dark, inhospitable winters. Somehow Finland has become a successful, equitable, sustainable, innovative country, despite its famously harsh climate. It is true that Finns have been able to adapt to extremes of temperature, and even to exploit them. But it is also very easy to overstate the negative impact of cold weather, the lack of light in winter, the geographical isolation, and the snow.

Figure 1.1: A Finland-centred map

Source: Finland and its surrounds on an Azimuth map projection, made using the website http://fldx.org/site/azimuth-map.php and redrawn by Ailsa Allen. The sea monsters are taken from a map of Iceland that appeared in the atlas Theatrvm Orbis Terrarvm [Theatre of the World], drawn by Abraham Ortelius and published in 1592. Many of the mythical creatures were derived from actual sightings. The Ziphius, described as “a horrible sea monster that swallows a black seal in one bite” was probably an Orca.

For the illustrations see: https://www.canadiangeographic.ca/article/toronto-exhibition-celebrates-maps-works-art.

It is often suggested that the rigours of the climate have shaped the Finnish character. Because of the weather and rugged landscape, it is said, Finns became industrious, and developed great tenacity and resilience. This way of thinking is called “environmental determinism” and is wrong. It is wrong because what happens to peoples in the world is almost always largely due to what happens to other peoples. Western Europe did not become rich after 1492 because of its rivers and mountains and climate, but because of its boats landing in the Americas and bringing lethal diseases with them. The inhabitants of so many Pacific Islands are not poor because they live on those islands, but because of how those islands now fit into a world economy.

So if it is not the harsh climate and rugged landscape that has contributed to the success of Finland as a nation, we will have to think again about what did. Today Finland is a far more hospitable place to live than it once was, thanks to central heating and triple-glazing in almost every Finnish building. Environmental determinism is not the secret of Finnish success, because many countries have climates and environments just as harsh as Finland’s – just as cold, or instead very hot – and yet they do not rank number one in so many measures of happiness, innovation, equitable prosperity and education. Now that we know that the secret to Finland’s success isn’t the cold, it’s still worth considering why so many people, including our American friend from New York City, worry about its long dark winters.

The long winter

The long winter does have some advantages: “In Finland, officials sometimes visit parks just after a snowfall to see where they should place new paths – the paths people have made through the newly fallen snow are then incorporated into park planning” – Tweet posted by the BBC television show QI, 6 October 2019 (BBC 2019a).

Finland’s seasonal variations have captured the imagination of countless writers. Generations of travellers, traders and sailors from western Europe wrote vivid accounts of the wonders and harshness of the Finnish winter. The Winter War of 1939–40 between Finland and the Soviet Union became famous as much for the physical conditions in which the battles took place as for the military engagements themselves. During this particularly harsh winter, the Finns turned the stark conditions to their advantage – for instance, using white camouflage to blend into the snow-covered countryside (Mead & Smeds 1967).

Winter in Finland starts in November, with the first snowfall usually coming in December. January tends to be the darkest, bleakest month: inhabitants of the far north of Finland spend up to eight weeks without any daylight, although in the south of the country the sun can be seen briefly even in mid-winter. However, it is November that Finns complain about the most – a depressing, dark and rainy month after their lovely summers with the longest (together with Iceland) sunny days in the world.

On crystal clear days and moonlit nights, winter in Finland can be beautiful. Although the sun doesn’t rise over the horizon, “its presence is reflected in a sunset glow that burns on the horizon” for several hours (Nickels 1965). The darkness is tempered by the whiteness of the snow, and the sudden, frequent appearances of the Northern Lights, known in Finnish as revontulet, or “fires of the fox”. In Lapland, there can be as many as 200 displays of the Northern Lights a year (Norum & Proctor 2010).

Days begin to lengthen in February, and by March in the south (and April in the north) there are 11–14 hours of daylight each day. The thaw starts in April, and by the end of May the snow has gone. Spring’s “glorious delicate greenness takes on a special significance after the long, white winter” (Nickels 1965: 59). Although those words were written over half a century ago, as yet global warming has not had too large an effect on Finland’s seasons; but better living standards have had a huge effect on Finns’ experience of them. What does worry people is that southern Finland has been experiencing significantly less snow in recent years. This affects peoples’ hobbies, and the lack of snow makes winters even darker – possibly contributing to seasonal affective disorder.

Declining influence of the seasons

Over the course of the twentieth century, life in Finland was affected less and less by the changing seasons. Rising affluence and technological improvements have made it easier for Finns to adapt to winter conditions. Despite widely fluctuating temperatures outside, homes and industrial buildings maintain a constant temperature throughout the year. Furthermore, the cold makes highly efficient heating and insulation a cost-effective necessity.

In the 1960s – a time when central heating was seen as something of a luxury in countries such as Britain – it had long been accepted as essential in Finland. What’s more, the Finns’ superior insulation and triple-glazing has meant that, for the past several decades, less energy is consumed during the coldest parts of the Finnish winter than in the coldest spells in other affluent countries (Hatzfield-Rea 1969).

In the past, travel and trade were often disrupted for weeks during the winter, with negative impacts on the Finnish economy. For centuries, the freezing of the Baltic Sea brought the seasonal closure of ports and the interruption of trade. These patterns were altered for the better thanks to the technological advancements of the twentieth century, including icebreakers and other steel-plated ships, as well as telegraphic and radio communications that facilitated the rapid and accurate forecasting of ice and weather conditions (Mead & Smeds 1967).

In tandem with Canada, Finland also led innovation in a number of aspects of aviation technology in the early twentieth century, including float-and ski-modified aircraft, and short take-off and landing (STOL) technology. Often by modifying German designs, Junkers F 13 and G 24 in particular, Finns designed and built aircraft that could land on frozen lakes, on ice, and on snow and water, in order to distribute medicine and supplies, mail and trade goods.

Today, Finland keeps all 78,000km of its public roads open throughout the year by municipal snow ploughs that operate from early morning (5am in the city of Tampere). By law, winter tyres must be used between November and April. Traditional methods such as the use of salt and sand are still deployed, but the system works so well because Finnish (state provided) road-maintenance lorries can simultaneously plough, scrape and add salt or sand to road surfaces (Rankola 1997). Compressed air is used to thaw ice so that inland ferries can navigate lakes in winter, and the under-runway heating at Helsinki Airport has been there for a very long time (Mead & Smeds 1967).

Winter used to be a period of under-and unemployment for many Finns, particularly for the many people who worked in farming and forestry. The growth of manufacturing has led to fewer seasonal variations in labour requirements, and thus also in local patterns of both consumption and output. It has become more common for building construction to continue throughout the winter, thanks in large part to innovations such as cement that hardens quickly even at very low temperatures, and the use of insulating cocoons of plastic around buildings under construction. Many construction workers are now employed in factories during the winter making prefabricated “flat-pack” houses for assembly in the summer. Half of all new homes in Scandinavia are built this way, and they are also gaining in popularity abroad (Scandinavian Homes 2019).

In the past, food shortages were commonplace at the end of the Finnish winter, at a time of year when demand for energy from people and anim...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface – Onnen maa (The land of happiness)
• List of tables and figures
• Part I: The Context
• Part II: Social Policy
• Part III: The Future
• Appendix: Finland among the best in the world
• References
• Index