Anu Partanen > Quotes

“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, and constantly anxious about navigating 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.”
― Anu Partanen, The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life

“And people should be able to make choices related to their employment without worrying whether they will still be able to receive, say, treatment for cancer.”
― Anu Partanen, The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life

“Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren put it eloquently: “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there, good for you. But, I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory and hire someone to protect against this because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea. God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”
― Anu Partanen, The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life

“Education became Finland’s best hope for preparing its population for a new economy based not on agriculture or manufacturing, but on knowledge.”
― Anu Partanen, The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life

“A family will not function well as a team unless it is first composed of strong, self-sufficient individuals.”
― Anu Partanen, The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life

“Americans often view maternity leave as a time for a mother to recover from giving birth, and anything longer as an entitlement that unfairly gives women benefits that men and their childless colleagues don’t get. Nordic societies see this question differently. For starters, in the Nordic view long leaves for both parents are seen as crucial to allow the child to form strong bonds with both the mother and the father.”
― Anu Partanen, The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life

“Henrik Berggren—put together their observations on individualism and formulated something they called “the Swedish theory of love.” The core idea is that authentic love and friendship are possible only between individuals who are independent and equal.”
― Anu Partanen, The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life

“It’s an unfortunate fact that the United States remains astonishingly backward compared to almost all other advanced Western countries when it comes to education, because in America, what predicts how well a child will do in school is not a child’s aptitude or hard work, but the status of the child’s parents—which is to say, their own levels of education and wealth.”
― Anu Partanen, The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life

“In most other modern industrialized societies, including Finland, health care is considered a basic human right.”
― Anu Partanen, The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life

“Mothers in America seemed capable of miracles—returning to work just a few weeks after giving birth, pumping milk between meetings, and working at home on the weekends by managing children with one hand and their BlackBerrys with the other. I was certain I could never function at that level.”
― Anu Partanen, The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life

“Yes, Finland and the United States are different. But consider the fact that most American education is managed by the states. Finland’s population of 5.5 million is easily comparable to many an American state. In fact, more than half of America’s states—thirty of them—have populations smaller than Finland’s. Solely on the question of size, there’s no reason any number of states in the United States couldn’t implement a system just like Finland’s.”
― Anu Partanen, The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life

“Gradually it dawned on me how much people in America depended on their employers for all sorts of things that were unimaginable to me: medical care, health savings accounts, and pension contributions, to name the most obvious. The result was that employers ended up having far more power in the relationship than the employee. In America jeopardizing your relationship with your employer carried personal risks that extend far beyond the workplace, to a degree unthinkable where I came from.”
― Anu Partanen, The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life

“According to a UN report from 2014 surveying 185 countries and territories, only two did not guarantee any paid maternity leave; Papua New Guinea and the United States. The United States is also one of only a handful of countries that don’t guarantee their workers any paid time off for illness—others include Angola, India, and Liberia.”
― Anu Partanen, The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life

“The law on basic education in Finland specifically states that after school and homework, students should still be allowed time for hobbies and rest.”
― Anu Partanen, The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life

“Other international organizations—the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the European Union (EU), the World Economic Forum—now encourage their member nations to guarantee their workers paid parental leaves and subsidized day care. They do so because it’s clear that these things are good for economic growth. Studies demonstrate the ways that family-friendly policies tailored to today’s realities benefit a country’s economy. Family leave policies and affordable day care increase women’s participation in the labor force, help employers retain workers, and improve the health of women and children.”
― Anu Partanen, The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life

“As I’d worked at my job and traveled and read and lived my life, I’d also decided that a woman is meant to be more than a caretaker for her man and children. She ought to have her own purpose, her own will, her own career,”
― Anu Partanen, The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life

“Your business has to be in good-enough shape that it’s not going to crumble just because someone is taking care of their children. If your business can’t handle that, then you have a problem with either your business model or your management.”
― Anu Partanen, The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life

“For the citizens of the Nordic countries, the most important values in life are individual self-sufficiency and independence in relation to other members of the community.”
― Anu Partanen, The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life

“you have the money in the United States, you absolutely can get world-class care. But here’s the thing that somehow escapes American awareness in this discussion: Everyone else in all the other wealthy industrialized countries—absolutely including all the ones that have universal national health-care systems—”
― Anu Partanen, The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life

“If you employ an incredibly talented person, it would be a real shame to ruin that relationship because they want to take a leave of one year at some point to see their child grow. In the long term, what difference does one year make, if our goal is to work together for twenty years?”
― Anu Partanen, The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life

“Nordic societies believe that helping children develop a healthy independence from the random lottery of their parents’ resources, connections, and skills is arguably even more important when children begin to transition toward adulthood.”
― Anu Partanen, The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life

“They can study whatever they want, and they don’t have to risk their financial future to do so.”
― Anu Partanen, The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life

“Probably the world’s most popular mobile video game, Angry Birds, was the brainchild of programmers in Finland.”
― Anu Partanen, The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life

“Rather the goal has been to free the individual from all forms of dependency within the family and in civil society: the poor from charity, wives from husbands, adult children from parents, and elderly parents from their children. The express purpose of this freedom is to allow all those human relationships to be unencumbered by ulterior motives and needs, and thus to be entirely free, completely authentic, and driven purely by love.”
― Anu Partanen, The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life

“I think as a writer or just as an entrepreneur I have more possibilities in Denmark than I would have in other countries. I’m very grateful for that. I think public funding can help artists do something that they would not have done if they were by themselves.”
― Anu Partanen, The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life

“In the United States there is both a moral, and to some extent legal, expectation that parents provide for their children even after the children have come of age,” Trägårdh said. “But this expectation also means that parents have power over their children.”
― Anu Partanen, The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life

“the Scandinavians—that is, the Swedes, Danes, and Norwegians—even have a literary phrase to describe this tendency. The phrase is “the Law of Jante,” and it is shorthand for a list of ten commandments created by the Danish-Norwegian writer Aksel Sandemose in his 1933 novel A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks. Sandemose’s ten commandments referred to the mentality of a fictional town called Jante, but the rules were immediately understood to capture the larger disposition of Scandinavians in general. The commandments are: 1. You are not to think you are anything special. 2. You are not to think you are as good as we are. 3. You are not to think you are smarter than we are. 4. You are not to convince yourself that you are better than we are. 5. You are not to think you know more than we do. 6. You are not to think you are more important than we are. 7. You are not to think you are good at anything. 8. You are not to laugh at us. 9. You are not to think anyone cares about you. 10. You are not to think you can teach us anything.”
― Anu Partanen, The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life

“Brooks paints a picture of an America that allows “the ambitious and the gifted to surf through amazing possibilities,” but where the people who lack these skills fall further behind.”
― Anu Partanen, The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life

“Under American law, companies with fewer than fifty employees weren’t required to grant any parental leave at all; if you were a woman who wanted to care for a newborn, you might actually have to quit your job.”
― Anu Partanen, The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life

“What Lars Trägårdh came to understand during his years in the United States was that the overarching ambition of Nordic societies during the course of the twentieth century, and into the twenty-first, has not been to socialize the economy at all, as is often mistakenly assumed. Rather the goal has been to free the individual from all forms of dependency within the family and in civil society: the poor from charity, wives from husbands, adult children from parents, and elderly parents from their children. The express purpose of this freedom is to allow all those human relationships to be unencumbered by ulterior motives and needs, and thus to be entirely free, completely authentic, and driven purely by love.”
― Anu Partanen, The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life