It sometimes seems as if there’s nothing new that can possibly be said about World War II, but over the weekend I read Henrik Lunde’s Finland’s War Of Choice: The Troubled German-Finnish Alliance in World War II, and while it’s not the most gripping war narrative you’ll ever read, it certainly does advance some new ideas.

The German-Finnish alliance is a bit of a historical curiosity. Only one democratic country — Finland — allied itself with Nazi Germany. This is anomalous to the point that the official line out of Finland is that it didn’t happen. The official story, as I understand it, is that Finland coincidentally fought a war with the Soviet Union (the “Continuation War”) that happened to be taking place at the same time as the Germany invasion of the U.S.S.R. and that also happened to involve German troops operating on Finnish soil. This was not how Western policymakers understood events at the time, which in turn led to the similarly anomalous fact that Finland spent the Cold War essentially inside the Soviet sphere of influence.

Lunde argues that the alliance really was quite strange and in ways that mattered. He argues that the Finns blundered into what they meant to be a limited war for limited territorial objectives without recognizing that by signing up for Hitler’s war of aggression, they’d committed themselves to a situation in which only the complete destruction of the Soviet Union could produce a Finnish victory. The Germans, meanwhile, likewise blundered by ignoring the Finnish front. Initially Hitler was far too conservative about defending Norway from the phantom menace of a British amphibious assault, and then the Germans simply failed to nail down real Finnish commitment to the war effort. Consequently, Finland achieved its limited territorial ambitions and then just kind of stopped rather than pushing east to seize and cut the railroad to Murmansk during Operation Barbarossa. Lunde mostly focused on micro-level description of what was happening on the Finnish front, but he makes a digression aimed at persuading us that the entry of Lend-Lease aid via the Murmansk route was critical to keeping the Soviet Union in the war. The theory, in other words, is that a well-managed alliance between Finland and Germany could have produced victory on the Eastern Front.

It’s a fascinating argument, but Lunde arguably donwplays the possibility that Finnish policy was in fact optimal. It’s almost never the case that it’s a smart idea to lose a war you’ve launched, but it’s actually difficult to see how a German victory would have served Finnish interests better than the actual outcome. Finland could have attempted to stay neutral, but a great many neutral countries found themselves invaded anyway so there’s no guarantee here. Lunde argues that there was a lost opportunity for Finland to (re-)enter into a political union with Sweden, but this would clearly have done a worse job of preserving Finnish independence than their actual policy. Between Finland’s smaller population and its large Swedish-speaking minority, this would basically be Swedish conquest of Finland. Long story short, being geographically located between the Wehrmacht and the Red Army was bad news for everyone involved during the years in question. If you read Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin , it’s hard to miss the fact that Finland’s population suffered dramatically less than that of anyone else in that position.

Some people have expressed surprise that the Great Recession hasn’t proven to be a boon to left-wing political movement. I think the expectation that something like that would be the result of a financial collapse is based on an over-generalization of FDR and the New Deal. If you look at the 1930s in a global context, the predominant trend was the rise of far-right nationalist parties, not just in Germany and Japan but across a huge swathe of Europe. And today’s lesser recession is prompting a small version of the same thing:

The surge for the True Finns is the latest in a series of breakthroughs by populist and far-right parties in Europe, fuelled by economic discontent and concern about immigration. In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy’s centre-right UMP party suffered a drubbing in regional polls last month amid a strong showing by the far-right National Front. Nationalist parties have also made gains in Sweden, the Netherlands and Belgium over the past year.

US politics has a different dynamic, but there’s been a definite increase in the influence of the faction of the Republican Party that’s decided retroactively that George W Bush was insufficiently rightwing.

I don’t agree with everything in Time’s take on Finland’s education policy successes but I think this correctly grasps the most important thing:

In 2008, the latest year for which figures are available, 1,258 undergrads applied for training to become elementary-school teachers. Only 123, or 9.8%, were accepted into the five-year teaching program. That’s typical. There’s another thing: in Finland, every teacher is required to have a master’s degree. (The Finns call this a master’s in kasvatus, which is the same word they use for a mother bringing up her child.) Annual salaries range from about $40,000 to $60,000, and teachers work 190 days a year.

“It’s very expensive to educate all of our teachers in five-year programs, but it helps make our teachers highly respected and appreciated,” says Jari Lavonen, head of the department of teacher education at the University of Helsinki.

I don’t think there’s a ton of evidence that the existence of a five-year program, per se, is doing much work here. Many American teachers have master’s degrees and there’s very little evidence that they do any better than our BA-wielding teachers. The key point as far as I can tell is simply that these programs are very selective. Lots of people want to be teachers, so it’s hard to get into the programs, so getting into the program makes you seem prestigious, which makes applying to be a teacher desirable, etc., etc., etc. It’s a self-sustaining cycle. Teach For America has some of this quality where people apply because it’s prestigious and it’s prestigious because it’s selective and it’s selective because a lot of people apply, and one’s generally hears that this can’t be scaled up. But in Finland it more or less is.

Annie Lowrey’s article on Angry Birds ends with an interesting factoid about Nokia’s decreasing centrality to the Finnish economy:

There is one place, though, where the love for Angry Birds is slightly more complicated: Finland itself. The country boasts a highly educated populous, generous government support for innovation, and a big tech sector. But for years, a single company dominated the field. Mobile giant Nokia once made up some 3.5 percent of Finnish GDP—in the United States, that would mean as much as McDonald’s, Wal-Mart, and Citigroup combined. It now makes up just 1.6 percent. And Angry Birds found fame on the iPhone, one of the competitors responsible for sapping Nokia’s market share. Nevertheless, Finns—big consumers of the game, to be sure—are hoping Rovio’s success creates a boomlet in startups. And Rovio itself is thinking sky-high.

Good for Finland.

To think a bit about a broader question, our “Econ 101″ textbooks seem to implicitly assume that we’re dealing with an economy full of Nokias. Full of device manufacturers, that is, where production cost curves slope upward at some point. But for firms like Rovio, that’s not the case. And in general, developed economies are shifting in the direction of less Nokia and more Rovio. But I’m far from certain we’ve thought the implications of this through properly.

Kevin Drum and Bob Somerby are annoyed that journalists talk about the strong performance of Finland’s school system but don’t mention its highly efficient health care system. Specifically, the US spends $7,285 per year to Finland’s $2,900:

Finland’s test scores let a bunch of know-nothing journos push a preferred press corps narrative: Our public schools are a mess! (Maybe we need to privatize! It’s all the fault of the unions!) Finland faces none of the daunting educational challenges we face, of course. But so what! All pundits on deck!

By way of contrast, the press corps’ deference to corporate interests seems to make it shy from the topic of health care spending. Does Finland achieve good health care at a very low price? This topic can’t be discussed!

I dunno, when I went to Finland to learn about their school system I came away writing, among other things, about their highly cost-effective health care system and their health-enhancing school lunch initiatives. To be honest, in my experience something like 97% of commentary on Finnish education involves taking note of their generous and effective Nordic welfare state, so I feel like Drum and Somerby are mostly being cranky here.

But rather than counter-crank, let’s ask the question why is it that Finland is able to keep its health care spending so low? As best I can tell, it’s all pretty standard stuff. One huge factor is that their doctors make way less money $3,177 per month to $8,189 per month in the United States. They have pharmaceutical price controls. And according to a Harvard Business School analysis (PDF) “Within the municipal health care system, patients have had very limited freedom to choose their health care providers or physicians.” Specifically “There is great variability across municipalities in terms of patients’ ability to choose their primary care physicians” and for specialists:

A referral from a licensed physician is needed to access municipal specialized care (i.e. hospitals), and patients cannot usually choose their hospital or specialists. Instead, health centres have guidelines listing the providers to which patients with certain symptoms and diagnoses should be referred. Normally, patients are treated in a hospital within their hospital district of residence, and their freedom to choose their physicians within the hospital depends on factors including the organization of departments and the number of specialists.

This all seems to me to work well-enough. At a minium, it’s cheap! But who here thinks that running on a platform of drastic cuts in medical professionals’ salaries combined with restricted provider choice and large-scale government rationing is going to be a big winner? There’s more than “corporate interests” at issue here. Among other things, as long as doctors are about a million times more trusted by the population than are politicians, it’s going to be extremely difficult for politicians to ever enact measures that reduce doctors’ incomes. But it’s extremely difficult to imagine how a more efficient health care system could avoid reducing doctors’ incomes.

Turku Cathedral, Finland

I was sort of looking forward to not writing about this anymore, but insofar as Michael Oren has an NYT op-ed demanding that Palestinians specifically recognize Israel as a “Jewish state” I may as well say something.

I really think the beginning of wisdom on this and any other point is simply to note that any government that has any sense of urgency about achieving a diplomatic breakthrough on any topic just doesn’t put preconditions like this forward. The point, from an Israeli point of view, of a comprehensive final status agreement would be to secure internationally recognized borders for a sovereign state of Israel. Such a state would, like Finland or Morocco or anyplace else, determine its own policies with regard to language, migration, religion, and citizenship. I don’t believe anyone has ever recognized Finland as a “Finnish state” but the schools teach Finnish as the primary language of instruction except to members of the officially recognized Sami and Swedish minorities, people of Finnish ancestry are given preference in immigration, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland gets state support, etc. And Finland has from time to time revisited various aspects of this and is free to do so again in the future.

The point is that bringing up this sort of demand to a foreign audience is the sort of thing you do when you’re not really interested in having talks move forward but are looking to avoid the blame for breaking them off. People looking to make a deal work talk principles rather than positions. Bibi says “I want security self-determination for the Jewish people” and Abbas says “I want justice for Palestinian refugees and their descendants” and then we talk about how to do that. But if not you can always dream up an infinite number of hoops to make people jump through—who will recognize the blue hen as the state bird of Delaware?—as a reason not to sit down.

Just so you know that improving teacher quality isn’t all about things labor unions should hate, McKinsey has a report out (PDF) on “Closing the Talent Gap” which observes that teaching is a relatively higher-paid occupation in other countries:

Some people, I suppose, have the idea that if we just fired some more teachers that they’d be magically replaced with different better teachers and all our problems would be solved. But for my part when I talk about differentiated compensation for teachers, this is what I have in mind. Yes, reduce barriers to getting rid of teachers who do much worse than average. But also offer the best performers substantially more money than teachers currently get. That means the best teachers will keep teaching and also that a wider range of people will consider teaching as a possible career choice.

They do it differently in Finland (my photo available under cc license)

Dana Goldstein writes about the need to put K-12 school performance in a broader context:

But in general, I agree with Gabriella that parents (and communities) are often missing from the dialogue around school reform. In the new education documentary “Waiting for Superman,” we hear a lot about how the Finnish education system is the best in the world, but nothing about how much easier it is to be a parent in Finland, because the government provides universal low-cost daycare, nursery school, and health care.

Why don’t we talk about parenting more? Because we American optimists want to believe that kids can overcome the deficits they bring from home without having to wait for the United States to become a social democracy (as if). There’s also a long and disturbing history of affluent white people judging the parenting skills of everyone else. But I do think there is a limit to how much transformational education reform we can do in the United States without looking seriously at why raising kids is do damn difficult in our winners-take-all society.

If Waiting for Superman really talks about Finnish kids’ test scores without noting the radically different social context then that sounds like a pretty unforgivable sin. Finland is a very different place lacking a lot of the problems that poorly performing American schools are failing to overcome.

That said, this kind of thing can be taken too far. There’s a newish library branch in my neighborhood that’s quite nice looking. I don’t think anyone expects its existence to transform the radically transform the educational experience of children living in the area. And I bet reasonable people could disagree as to whether or not it made any real sense to build the library in the first place. But the library is there nonetheless, and the city is running it. So given that the city is running the library, we should try to run the library well. From the little things to the big things to the things that are core to the library’s function (deciding which books to stock) to the things that are peripheral (cleaning the floors in the bathroom) it all makes some kind of difference. And for any given quantity of resources allocated to the library, we should be doing our best to ensure that those resources are well spent. Whether or not there are other problems in the community that it’s beyond the capacity of the library to overcome, the public is still well within its rights to demand that the library be the best library it can be.

And that’s the real issue here. It’s great for skeptics about this or that proposed reform to how public schools operate to challenge the ideas on the merits. But the idea that it’s somehow unfair to be pressing for a more optimal allocation of resources is the flipside of destructive libertarian nihilism about the possibility of better-managed public agencies. And it actually makes less sense. If you want to argue (as I think liberals do) that it’s worth investing money in public schools, then you have to accept the corollary that the quality of the schools is important independently from other social issues.