Anu Partanen: Quotes about people

Anu Partanen is journalist. Explore interesting quotes on people.

Anu Partanen: 24 quotes0 likes

“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.”

Source: The Nordic Theory of Everything, Chapter 1

“Because of smart policies, Finland is able to spend less per student than do Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and the United States on all levels, with much better outcomes. The good news for America, though, is that for precisely this reason, Finland is an encouraging example for any country that is facing diminished budgets. […] One area in which Finns excel is cutting administrative costs. It turns out that Finns did not invent most of the education policies they are currently using. Americans did. Child-centered education, problem solving-based learning, educating people for democratic life—these are all ideas introduced by American thinkers. […] It doesn’t seem, then, like much of a stretch to suggest that the United States could borrow smart ideas about education from Finland.”

Source: The Nordic Theory of Everything, Chapter 4

“All told, thanks to these various forms of freedom from the old-fashioned logistical dependence on one’s parents, children in Nordic countries have an easier time successfully managing the transition to adulthood. What a disaster, an American might think, that young people could end up on welfare straight out of school.”

Source: The Nordic Theory of Everything, Chapter 3

“Trägårdh and his collaborator—a well-known Swedish historian and journalist named Henrik Berggre—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. This notion represents exactly the values that I grew up with and that I feel are most dear to Finns as well as people from the other Nordic nations, not just Swedes, so I like to call it “the Nordic theory of love.” 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.”

Prologue
The Nordic Theory of Everything