Letter From Finland

I received a nice letter from a person in Finland, Topi, who wanted to respond to my post about "What Can Finland Teach Us?":

Dear Michael,

I read your pieces on Finland with great interest. I do disagree with you in that Finland has nothing to teach you. In a sense I understand what you mean since I'm a pro-American Finn but I wouldn't want Finland to be like the United States.

Still, in the globalizing economy all successful countries like Finland and the United States have many things to learn from one another and from other countries. The whole attitude that there's nothing to learn from other cultures and other economic systems (although I'm sure you would think America had something to learn from Finland if it were not for the fact that Finland is a welfare state) is basically promoting ignorance.

Welfare statism, just as liberal markets, are relative phenomena in each individual country. I find both beliefs, "let the state take care of everything" and "let the markets take care of everything" incredibly naive. Here in Finland we discuss quite a lot the pros and cons of liberalizing a certain market in each individual case.

Is it really true that the Finnish welfare state works because Finland is ethnically homogenous but a similar state wouldn't work in America because the country is ethnically diverse? I don't really buy that. At least I don't think this has anything to do with ethnicity. Certainly there is the myth of the Protestant country which is very intriguing. But that is religion, not ethnicity. Last weekend I visited Zurich, a traditionally protestant city in Switzerland and from what I could observe many of the myths aboutthe local people coincided with myths about Finns. Two societies can be culturally very similar, the myths behind the peoples' successes can be similar yet the economies and levels of taxation may differ. Now I'm no Switzerland expert yet I think making all these comparisons between different countries helps and learning from other countries is really the key behind any nation's success - there's no reason to copy everything, countries can maintain incredibly diverse economies even with globalization but any economy's capability to adapt to new circumstances is very important. There many things are to be learned by observing other countries.

I certainly wasn't offended by your remarks because I'm a nationalist - I'm Atlanticist & pro-European more than anything - I would like those things that work with the welfare state even if none of them would be Finnish. Just like it was a pleasant experience as a tourist in Zurich to see that everything works incredibly well and even railway station officials are extremely polite (they're not very service oriented in Helsinki, not to us Finns at any rate, maybe everyone is a bit more polite toward tourists, who knows). The people make the markets and the states work. Ideologies are important but they do not explain everything like they tend to do in most economists' models.

Sincerely,
Topi (from Helsinki)

I would say that I am dubious about the Protestant vs. Catholic angle. I know that most Catholic countries are rather poor (Latin America and Africa bring down the average). But Switzerland is split between Protestants and Catholics and the German part of Switzerland is predominately Catholic. I travelled all over Switzerland and could not detect any difference between the Protestant and Catholic regions. They all seemed very prosperous.

Switzerland is not egalitarian, or at least, it didn't appear that way to me. There is no proverty there but there are some very wealthy people. Switzerland is a very nice country, (although I met some rude waiters there).