The 2020 World Happiness Report ranked Finland, for the third year running, as the world’s happiest country. The "Nordic Model" has long been touted as the aspiration for social and public policy in Europe and North America, but what is it about Finland that makes the country so successful and seemingly such a great place to live? Is it simply the level of government spending on health, education and welfare? Is it that Finland has one of the lowest rates of social inequality and childhood poverty, and highest levels of literacy and education? Finland clearly has problems of its own – for example, a high level of gun ownership and high rates of suicide – which can make Finns sceptical of their ranking, but its consistently high performance across a range of well-being indicators does raise fascinating questions. In the quest for the best of all possible societies, Danny Dorling and Annika Koljonen explore what we might learn from Finnish success.
Author
Danny Dorling is a British social geographer researching inequality and human geography. He is the Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography of the School of Geography and the Environment of the University of Oxford. Danny Dorling has lived all his life in England. To try to counter his myopic world view, in 2006, Danny started working with a group of researchers on a project to remap the world (www.worldmapper.org). He has published with many colleagues more than a dozen books on issues related to social inequalities in Britain and several hundred journal papers. Much of this work is available open access and will be added to this website soon. His work concerns issues of housing, health, employment, education and poverty. Danny was employed as a play-worker in children’s summer play-schemes. He learnt the ethos of pre-school education where the underlying rationale was that playing is learning for living. He tries not to forget this. He is an Academician of the Academy of the Learned Societies in the Social Sciences, Honorary President of the Society of Cartographers and a patron of Roadpeace, the national charity for road crash victims.
