Finland has been the happiest country in the world for the last seven years straight, according to the World Happiness Index. New Zealand is 10th. Photo / Getty Images
Finland has been the happiest country in the world for the last seven years straight, according to the World Happiness Index. New Zealand is 10th. Photo / Getty Images
The life expectancy for men in both countries is 81; for women in NZ it’s 84 and for Swedish women it’s 85
Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues, with a focus on Auckland. He joined the Herald in 2018.
OPINION
Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Finland and Sweden occupy positions 1, 2, 3, 5 and 10 on theUN’s inequality-adjusted Human Development Index. New Zealand is a mere 17th. Those same countries also hold five of the top seven places on the World Happiness Index. They’re doing pretty well.
Whereas Scandinavia, more properly called the Nordic countries when all five of them are included, has a lot to offer. Here are seven things we could copy.
Good schools: Finland
Finnish students score very highly in PISA and other academic rankings where New Zealand has been falling behind. For several years Finnish schools have rated best at teaching students about misinformation. And the entire education system is widely praised for the way it fosters emotional and social maturity.
The World Economic Forum has taken a good look at what makes Finland’s schools so successful. To start with, it found they believe strongly in the basics.
But this is how they define them. Education is viewed as an instrument to balance out social inequality, so it follows that all students receive free school meals, have easy access to healthcare and psychological counselling, and receive individualised guidance throughout their school life.
There’s no standardised testing. That eliminates the problems of “teaching to the test” and assessment that measures only how well students have crammed for the test.
Teacher training programmes are “the most rigorous and selective professional schools in the entire country”. Teachers are paid well and aren’t graded. They all have a master’s degree, at least, and it’s the principal’s job to manage them.
Schools are small and teachers often stay with a cohort of students for many years. Competition among schools is not encouraged and there are no lists of “best schools”.
Children don’t start school until age 7. The school day starts later, ends earlier, has longer breaks and mini-breaks, and might have only two sessions.
There’s not much homework, because the reality of homework is often that it’s made-up work to comfort parents with the idea their kids have to work hard.
Finnish students score very highly in PISA and other academic rankings where New Zealand has been falling behind. Photo / 123RF
Good prisons: Norway
There are 27 million people in the Nordic countries and 17,000 of them are in prison: that’s an incarceration rate of about 1:1600.
In New Zealand, we have 8600 prisoners and rising. That’s an incarceration rate of 1:580, three times the Nordic model.
In Norway, many prisoners take themselves out to work during the day. Prisons tend to be in the middle of towns and cities, which makes both day-release and prison visits easy. Many receive quite good wages for the work they do, although they also have to pay rent.
Three guiding principles apply. One is normality: prisoners wear their own clothes and have access to the same mental health and other services they would outside.
Another is reintegration: a focus from day one on what will happen when they leave prison. And a third principle is known as “relational security”. This means the corrections officers are trained as guides and educators.
Anders Breivik, who murdered 77 people in Norway in 2011, is still in prison and won’t be getting out in the foreseeable. The system isn’t soft on prisoners like him. But for most, the focus is on helping them re-establish their lives.
The result? A recidivism rate of around 20%. In New Zealand, where politicians are often rewarded for being “tough on crime”, it’s 57%.
Good roads: Sweden
A 2+1 road is a highway on which two lanes run in one direction, and one the other, alternating every few kilometres and usually separated by a cable barrier. Sweden built the first one in 1990, and they’re now found in Germany, Portugal, Estonia, Finland and other parts of Europe.
They’re a relatively cheap and quick way to allow passing while also making roads safer.
Actually, they’re the only kind of open road that can promise both those things. New Zealand’s own system of passing lanes could easily be upgraded to achieve both goals.
The Nordic model
Throughout the Nordic countries, governments, unions and employers have a relatively common understanding of society’s basic values. As economist Jeffrey Sachs puts it, the Nordic model is “proof that modern capitalism can be combined with decency, fairness, trust, honesty, and environmental sustainability”.
Market economies are underpinned by comprehensive welfare, with a mix of private enterprise and state-run entities.
Denmark has an official 37-hour work week and many employees leave work at 4pm to pick up the kids. Only 2% of employees work very long hours, compared to the OECD average of 11%.
It’s not just that they get a better work-life balance: productivity is high. Danes are the second-most productive workers in Europe (after Ireland) and are more productive than workers in the US, Canada, Japan and Australia.
The Nordic labour market is flexible: it’s not hard for employers to hire and shed workers or introduce labour-saving technology. But workers are protected by generous social welfare, job retraining and relocation services.
Two related factors underpin all this. The first is a highly unionised workforce: 91% in Iceland, mostly in the 60s elsewhere.
The second is a partnership commitment among governments, national unions and employer groups. It’s called tripartite wage bargaining and it sets pay and conditions. In Sweden, Finland and Iceland this covers around 90% of the workforce.
Good cycleways: Denmark
In Copenhagen, 64% of commuters travel by bicycle. Even though it snows in winter.
Everyone, or maybe almost everyone, is happy on a bike in Copenhagen. Photo / Getty Images
It wasn’t always like that. Until the 1970s, Copenhagen was full of cars. But when the oil crisis hit in the 1970s, crisis became opportunity. They introduced car-free Sundays and cycling started to become popular again.
City authorities responded slowly, but 20 years of protest over the safety of cyclists saw more bike lanes and an ever-increasing number of people using them. Copenhagen now aspires to have 90% of people say they feel safe riding in traffic.
Also, totting up all the costs and benefits, they’ve estimated that cycling has a plus value of about 18 cents/km, compared to a loss of about 10 cents/km for car travel.
Higher taxes
Finland has very steep progressive income taxes: 0-67%. Norway and Iceland are similar but not as steep, with 0 to 46%.
Sweden and Denmark have flatter income taxes but they’re still high: 32-52% and 40-52% respectively, although the first parts of earners’ income are exempt.
Capital gains taxes are common and range from 22% in Norway and Iceland to 42% in Denmark. Corporate taxes are in the low 20s (ours is 28%), while sales taxes are at 24-25% (compared to our 15% GST).
The upshot: Nordic countries tax wealthier citizens at higher rates than we do and have a higher tax take overall. It’s mainly in the low-to-mid-forties as a percentage of GDP, compared to our 34%, which is also the OECD average.
Finnish mental health experts say their compatriots like getting into nature, they tell each other how they feel (“Fine,” is not the right answer to a routine “How are you?”), trust each other and like to learn new things. There’s the good work-life balance and apparently they’re happy being satisfied, rather than yearning for a deeper happiness.
It’s not all good: Finland has the worst record for drug-related deaths among young people in Europe.
But, impressively, the country has also halved its suicide rate. From 1512 deaths by suspected suicide in 1990, it’s down to 740 now. A “national suicide prevention project” made a big difference, with better medication, earlier detection of mental health issues and best-practice therapy guidelines.
Still, these things are not unique to Finland. And while the population is about the same as ours, the suicide numbers remain higher (565 here last year). But Finland’s rate of improvement is remarkable and the big reason seems clear enough: they resourced their mental health services to work well.
Funding public services to do their job. Who’d have thought.
And despite what you might think about the influence of long, cold winters, the worst time for suicide in Finland is the same as it is all over the world: spring.
It’s not all fun in the sauna
Nordic countries, like us, emit carbon excessively and are living far beyond the sustainable limits of the planet. And Norway is the world’s 13th largest oil producer, with two million barrels a day.
They do have a plan to create a circular economy that will make them “the most sustainable and integrated region in the world by 2030″. But a 2022 report was damning: participating companies had siloed the work from the rest of their operations and did not grasp the core purpose. Greenwash, in other words.
Like us, they have much to do.
And yet there’s much more that’s good. A waste-to-energy plant in Copenhagen has a skifield on top. Near Oslo there’s a luxury-apartment tower block made of wood. Scandi noir television. Persuasive incentives for EVs. Do we need more trolls? Shall we produce produce the next Abba? Or Bjork?
Also, Vikings. Almost as good at navigating as early Polynesians.
