[W]hen author Anu Partanen moved to the United States in 2008, she knew she would encounter some social policies that differed from those of her native Finland. But she didn’t anticipate the anxiety that would come next.
“That was a surprise to me,” she told Mark Johnson at a VTDigger News & Brews event. “I just started feeling like I can’t handle anything: these mobile phone contracts, or credit card companies, or health insurance.” Eventually, she realized, “everyone around me was anxious too.”
Partanen’s recent book, “The Nordic Theory of Everything,” has some suggestions for how the U.S. might learn from countries like Finland. She acknowledges the argument that Nordic countries’ expansive social services can make citizens “dependent” on their government. But, she argues, relying on government for certain services, like health care and higher education, actually frees citizens from the bureaucratic tasks that go along with them.
On this week’s podcast, recorded live at the Kellogg-Hubbard Library in Montpelier, Partanen and Johnson discuss her experience moving between two very different social systems.
