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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Rounding out the top ten are Sweden, Australia, Luxembourg, Norway, Canada, the Netherlands, Japan, and Denmark. The United States comes in at #11 but since Luxembourg is hardly a country I think we should grant ourselves top ten status. At any rate, you obviously shouldn’t take this kind of exercise too seriously. But what you see across a wide range of methodological approaches to quality of life is usually that the Anglophone and “small northern european” blocs of countries come out the best. And I do think there’s something telling in that about the success of broadly speaking “liberal” policies of both the higher and lower tax varieties as opposed to the more corporatist approaches you see on the continent.

Freshly returned from a great trip to Scandinavia, I can’t help but enjoy the FuckYeahScandinavia tumblr that I was first shown this morning. That said, no fan of northern Europe can avoid observing that several of the countries the tumblr covers aren’t technically “Scandinavian.” Americans often find this a bit confusing but Scandinavia, strictly speaking, only refers to Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. If you want to add in Iceland and Finland and miscellaneous extra territories (Åland, Faeroe Islands, Greenland) the word you’re looking for is “Nordic.”

I don’t totally understand why the distinction has been drawn this way—but roughly the point is that Finnish is a very different language from the others and that Iceland is clearly a geographically distinct phenomenon from the rest.

The larger point, however, is that the giant phone in this Robyn video is totally awesome. I also like that in Sweden health care is “under democratic control and financed on the basis of solidarity.”

Jamison Foser observes that General Electric, where they work, employs many union workers and seems to be quite successful. They also name UPS. It’s worth noting as well that all of Americans’ major professional sports teams are unionized, that the entertainment industry is very heavily unionized, much of the telecom sector is unionized, Safeway where I buy my groceries is unionized, etc.

But stepping back, the larger issue here is that you tended to see firms becoming unionized back when the legal climate was friendly to unionization. That was in the 1930s and 1940s. Since that time, it’s been exceedingly difficult to organize new union workplaces in the private sector. It’s been over fifty years since Taft-Hartley and the beginning of the anti-union backlash. Obviously, it should come as no surprise that many of the economic sectors that were huge in the 30s and 40s are smaller now. That’s because we have whole new economic sectors that didn’t exist back in the day. And when a sector has arisen—as the whole suite of things around computers and technology largely has—in the era in which the law tilts heavily against union organizing, you wind up with a sector with little in the way of unions. To take this history and read it as a story about unions causing sectors to fail is backwards. What’s happened is that unions have been locked out of huge swathes of the economy, denying workers their chance at securing a decent share of the value created in those areas.

In a country like, say, Finland where union density is in the seventies, there are obviously going to be tons of successful unionized firms. The difference is just that Finland made it easier to form unions. And it hasn’t crippled their economy—median living standard are pretty clearly higher over there than here.

My sense of things is that, all joking aside, Sweden really has gone too far and if I were Swedish I’d be looking to recalibrate to something more like the model of social democracy on display in Denmark or Finland or the Netherlands which all, like Sweden, are ahead of us in the Human Development Index and would be regarded by Glenn Beck as little better than life in a gulag.

One of the craziest stories I heard while I was in Finland was the shocking tale of the 1999 school lunch reform. The way this worked is that in 1999, parliament passed some legislation guaranteeing a nutritionally balanced school lunch. So the National Nutrition Council wrote some guidelines dictating that a properly balanced lunch would feature fresh or cooked vegetables covering half the plate, a starch (potatoes, rice, or pasta) covering a quarter of the plate, and meat or fish or a vegetarian protein alternative covering the remaining quarter. A desert of berries or fruit is served “if the nutrient content of the main course is not adequately diverse or if it contains little energy” along with skimmed or semi-skimmed milk and bread.

It was a crazy story not because the nutritional guidelines are crazy. Nor because the nutritional guidelines are perfect. This still actually leaves a lot of variance depending on exactly what’s served. But what’s crazy about it is the way it happened. Parliament felt children should eat a well-balanced meal, and so guidelines were written by a government agency and then implemented. Like magic!

It’s very hard to imagine anything like that happening in the United States, where something as basic as the food pyramid winds up being a locus for interest-group politics. Michael Pollan talks to Mother Jones about the way of the world:

MJ: Does WIC still specify that you buy dairy?

MP: Yes. We had a huge fight to get a little more produce in the WIC basket, which is heavy on cheese and milk because the dairy lobby is very powerful. So they fought and they fought and they fought, and they got a bunch of carrots in there. [Laughs.]

MJ: Specifically? Who knew: the carrot lobby?

MP: Specifically carrots. The next big lobby. But there is also money in this farm bill for fresh produce in school lunch. The price of getting the subsidies was getting the California delegation on board, and their price was $2 billon for what are called specialty crops—fresh fruit and produce grown largely in California.

Or watch this video:

Democracy is democracy, politics is politics, and life is what it is. But still, it seems to me that Americans have a deplorable tendency to take pride in the dysfunctional nature of our political system, and actually revel in it. It makes, after all, for a fascinating game in a way that a simple outsourcing of nutritional guidelines to apolitical experts wouldn’t. But I think there’s a big challenge for progressives here. And not just with regard to school lunch, but with regard to the whole thing. There are certain ends that can only be accomplished by state action. But state action is only really tolerable if you can actually make the government work well and an awful lot of our basic institutions just don’t work very well. At the same time, the medium-term policy frontiers increasingly focus on questions of public health and environmental security that have a hefty technical element. A lot of the argument for universal health care hinges on the fact that, in principle, comprehensive reform could deliver a much more efficient system. But will it actually deliver such a system, or will it just deliver whatever happens to get lobbied for? Care that benefits patients, or care that benefits health care providers of various kinds? Those ultimately aren’t questions about the design of any particular plan; instead, they’re questions of whether or not progressive governance can manage to somehow deliver better overall governance.

UPDATE: On a related note, Ezra Klein observes:

CBO occupies a weird space in Washington. They decide what legislation costs. They may get it right or they may get it wrong, but the number they settle on is the number legislators agree to use. And so this morning’s hearings featured powerful senators begging a small, bearded budget geek for favorable judgments as if he were the Oracle at Delphi.

And the thing of it is that while the CBO’s methods aren’t perfect and its conclusions aren’t incontestable, it really does do a pretty good job—good enough that it can continue to be widely respected. And having an expert agency be widely respected and do a pretty good job, thus providing a convergence point for congressional consideration of legislation, is much better than having our legislative debates just proceed with everyone inventing their own cost estimates.

In the Prince George’s County community of Riverdale Park, town officials have noted a distressing sign of the national economic downturn: more children left home alone to fend for themselves by working parents too strapped to afford child care.

The problem was discovered by code enforcement officers who inspect apartments in the town of 7,000. They used to come across such cases once every couple of years. Then, six months ago, they found one child left alone, followed by another and another.

Have I mentioned that in Finland there’s a commitment to making high-quality child care services universally available and universally affordable?

Writing in Newsweek, Obama education adviser Linda Darling-Hammond talks about lessons from Finland and she wasn’t even on my recent education policy junket to Finland. Dana Goldstein was on said junket and also writes about education policy lessons from Finland for The American Prospect.

For my own part, visiting Finland mostly confirms things that I think we already knew about education. But what’s interesting about visiting a prosperous, egalitarian social democracy with a high level of education is less that it teaches us things we didn’t know, but that it shows that certain kind of theoretical constructs we all understand can be realized in practice. I think if you asked just about anyone “would our school achievement be better if the child poverty rate were dramatically lower?” they would say that it would. Similarly, if you ask if school achievement would be more even if school funding were even, they would say that it would. And if you asked if providing higher-quality early childhood education more broadly would enhance achievement, everyone would say yes. And if you asked what would happen if we drastically increased the number of people who want to be teachers, such that slots in teacher training programs were highly competitive, people would tell you that student achievement would improve. And if you asked people whether higher levels of educational attainment would boost prosperity, people would tell you yes. And if you asked whether more equal education outcomes would lead to a more even distribution of income, they would tell you it would. And if you asked whether a more even distribution of income would lead to more even education outcomes, people would tell you it would.

But even though I don’t think anyone would really dispute any of that, we don’t just do that stuff. Instead, we’re trapped in a frustrating circle of passive acceptance of the idea that we just have to live in a country where public services are ill-funded and poorly delivered. And it’s not just that conservatives block reforms — progressives have let their horizons slip incredibly low. A country that once built transcontinental railroads and sent people to the moon has decided that for some reason it’d just be impossible to solve our current social problems. And when you point out to people that there are countries where the political system has taken decisive action to tackle these challenges, people kind of shrug and observe that the United States is very big. Which is true. But the country was also big years ago when we were building the world’s first mass literacy society. Indeed, it used to be considered advantageous to the United States that we were so big and people used to wonder whether small countries weren’t just inherently stuck in poverty.

The truth of the matter, however, isn’t that our problems couldn’t be solved it’s that we’re not seriously trying. And we’ve developed a political culture in which that’s considered okay.

Early education in general is not so crucial to the long-term intellectual growth of children. Finland offers strong evidence for this view. Its kids consistently outperform their global peers in reading, math and science on international assessments even though they don’t begin formal education until they are 7.

For one thing, Dalmia and Snell are just wrong about this — Finland starts voluntary preschool at 6 and over ninety percent of children enroll. Compulsory education begins at 7. But more to the point, this is a situation where actually visiting Finland is informative. Children under 6 in Finland have an “unconditional right” to places in heavily subsidized centers. When speaking English, Finns call these centers “day care” centers and not “preschool.” But I went to three of them and spoke to teachers who teach there and administrators who run them, and they looked like preschool to me. Of course I’m not an expert. But Sara Mead is an expert and she says it “meets most of the standards for what we in the United States would call preschool.” In particular, you have college educated teachers, you have national curriculum guidelines, and while you don’t have much formal instruction you do see an enormous amount of emphasis placed on children’s intellectual development.

Beyond what Sara says, I would also observe that there are quite deliberate efforts to use early childhood education to help narrow achievement gaps. Finland has a relatively low poverty rate and relatively few immigrants compared to the United States, but the people we spoke to there talked about deliberate efforts to do outreach to immigrant families — even ones with unemployed parents — to help them learn Finnish. They also have a lot of special ed preschool teachers to specifically target kids with problems. Far from being an example of a country achieving educational success without early childhood preparation, I would say that excellent preschooling is one of the three main pillars (along with low levels of child poverty and high levels of competition to become a teacher) of Finland’s educational success.

The difference is especially pronounced at the very top and at the bottom. The richest ten percent of Americans take a much larger share of income than do the richest ten percent of Finns. Meanwhile, the bottom twenty percent of Finns get a much larger share of income than do the bottom twenty percent of Americans. But of course everyone knows that the rich need money more than the poor, so the American system is fairer. Plus our way is worse for the middle sixty percent, too, but pointing that out would be class warfare and your populism would be sneered at by media celebrities whose incomes are all in the top twenty.

Meanwhile, note that an egalitarian social and economic environment actually hits the rich coming and going. Not only are Finland’s rich poorer than their American compatriots, but the relatively non-desperate state of the Finnish poor means that prices are higher than in the US for the sort of labor-intensive personal services that are primarily consumed by the prosperous. A tourist will note that restaurants are relatively expensive, but the same principle would carry over to maids and nannies and so forth.

The concept of an “outback bar and grill” in this context suggests to be that somebody went to an Outback Steakhouse in the USA and didn’t quite understand the concept. I’m no Texan, but I’m pretty sure there’s no outback there.

Despite this progress, the biggest difference in the scores of US students is not between countries, but rather remains within our own. In fourth grade math, the effect size of US students attending high-income versus low-income schools is 1.4 times as large as the difference between US students and the highest performing country. In science, the effect size by income is three times what it is between the US and the leading nation. Income gaps continue to persist at levels higher than all others, and that should be the real story out of these results.

In Finland, by contrast, they’ve happily gotten themselves onto the good equilibrium. Relatively low levels of background inequality and poverty make it relatively easy to deliver fairly egalitarian educational outcomes. Add to that a determination to target in-need students with a degree of extra resources, and this becomes even more the case. And those relatively egalitarian educational outcomes help maintain a relatively egalitarian distribution of wealth and income. Lather, rinse, and repeat. The United States, by contrast, is becoming more-and-more of a class-bound society in which parental SES dominates other factors in determining economic opportunities, helping to reinscribe patterns of inequality over and over again.