北欧向左，美国向右？
最新书摘：
-
Lucia2018-03-04When the reporters interviewed low-income residents of Chicago County in Minnesota, many interviewees said they were angry. Why? Because the government was wasting money and giving it to people who didn’t deserve it. Even though these were many of the same people who were actually getting the money through programs such as Medicare, Social Security, and free school lunches for their children.What is the real problem for the residents of Chicago? Americans have the idea that government benefits are only for the poor and the lazy.In the self-portrait that America paints, society is perceived as fair and just, and a failure to make it on your own is shameful, but in reality the cards are stacked against the poor and the middle class. The result is a system everyone hates.A lot of money is...
-
Lucia2018-02-26When I mentioned my new lack of health coverage to American acquaintances, several explained that they themselves had lived without health insurance for years—some because they couldn’t afford it, but others just because they didn’t think it was necessary. What tends to happen in practice is that Americans who lack insurance forgo some of the most important medical visits a person can make, like screenings for diseases such as breast cancer or prostate cancer. When sick they also tend to put off going to the doctor unless they experience unbearable pain, at which point illness may have progressed so far that they’re already in serious trouble and require far more invasive and expensive treatment. Yet many Americans, including politicians who should know better, continue to repeat the rea...
-
Lucia2018-02-26Tellingly, when Amenda Ripley interviewed Kim, an American teenager studying for a year in Finland, Kim reported that what she loved most about there experience in Finland was the independence and autonomy she was given. Kim explained how Finnish teenagers were expected to manage their own schedules and workload without parental or teacher oversight, which she felt was entirely different from the expectations back at her school in Oklahoma. She was amazed to see eight-year-olds walking home from school alone—perfectly normal in Finland—and ten-year-olds hanging out without supervision, even in the big city of Helsinki. Kim concluded that in Finland teenagers are treated like adults.
-
Lucia2018-02-26In what may come as a another surprise to Americans, Finnish schools have no sports teams. Physical education is included in the curriculum, but if students want to compete in sports, they do so on their own time. An extensive network of sports organisations, both privately and publicly funded, exist to facilitate youth sports teams. But at school, gym classes are designed not to teach competition but rather to introduce children to different forms of exercise so that they can build a healthy life-style. While living in the United States, I came to appreciate the way team sports at American schools foster community spirit, teach teamwork, allow poor kids to participate in expensive sports, and give students opportunities to shine in fields orbiter than academics. At the same time I wonder...
-
Lucia2018-02-26Banerjee and Duflo discovererd that experts who are tasked with solving a country’s problems basically tend to think about education in one of two ways. The first, the “demand” approach, sees education as an investment like any other. Parents will pay for their children to go to school because it’s an investment that will result in future earnings. Only when the benefit of education are understood to be high enough will parents either pay to send their children to private schools or, alternatively, demand that public education be improved. In this way of thinking, competition is the key to ensuring that parents get the level of quality of education they want for their children. Change will be driven by demand, not supply.This view of education is widely accepted around the world and is po...
-
Lucia2018-02-22But supermoms are not the whole story. In the US, it’also perfectly acceptable, and quite common, for one parent to drop out of the workforce entirerly and never return--or not for many, many year. In the vast majority of cases, the parent who drops out of the workforce in the US is the mother. And it seems that this trend has actually been increasing. Among American mothers with children under the age of 18, nearly a third of them have become stay-at-home mother, the highest level in two decades, according to 2012 statistics from the Pew Research Center. In the Nordic countries, by contrast, for either parent to abandon work entirely for parenting is seldome seen as necessary, or even desirable.
-
Lucia2018-02-22Even when employers do offer paternity leave, American fathers still have a hard time taking advantage of it, for fear of being marked as less committed to the company, and thus hurting their changces for promotion, or worse. Part of the whole point of Nordic daddy-only leaves ins that these policies are implemented at the national level, making fathering aneequally legitimate pursuit for all men. The Nordic example has shown that employers and coworkers much more willingly accept a man’s decision to stay home when they know that otherwise, his family would lose their right to that time and money.While two decades ago a father might have been embarrassed to stay home, now Finnish fathers are more likely to be ashamed if they don’t take time off. Participating in one’s share of toilet trai...
-
Lucia2018-02-22One of the beautiful things about the Nordic approach also turned out to be that when you pushed modernity all the way, and freed people up so they had true personal independence, they didn’t lose their connections to family community, and one another after all. On the contrary, the Nordic experience suggested that when you took old-fashioned familial dependency out of the equation, children became more empowered, spouses more satisfied, and families more resilient--and even happy.The ambition of Nordic societies has not been to socialize the economy at all, as is often mistakenly assumed. Rather the goal has been to free the individual from all forms of dependendy within the family and in civil society: the poor from charity, wives from husbands, adult children from parents, and elderly ...
-
Lucia2018-02-22I was surprised by how frequently I heard even grown adults in the US say that their parents were their best friends. This level of dependencyamong older chilren on their parents was almost unheard of back in Nordic countries.And then came the kicker.In America, after children grew into adults with their own children and responsibilities, the co-dependent child-parent relationship seemed to flip 180 degrees. I met middle-aged adults overwhelmed by the enormously time-consuming and expensive burden of micromanaging the lives of their elderly parents. They were strung out by the tasks of coordinating medical care and treatment, and handling the logistics, and often the costs, of bills and insurance, on top of trying to juggle their own careers and parenting their own kids.In Finland this ...
-
Linnaeus2024-12-21“北欧经验也证实，如果一个假期仅限男性使用而父亲选择不用时，整个家庭就会失去那段假期和津贴的话，雇主和同事也能更加理解和接受男性想要照顾家庭的决定。”
-
等急春天老霸王2024-06-06当一家公司或者一个国家运转良好，创造出可用于分配的多余财富时，劳动者可以获得他们的分红——更多的钱或是更多的自由时间。而比起钱，北欧的劳动者往往更愿意选择时间，因为北欧人民懂得一项幸福的秘诀，那就是当物质积累到某一节点后，更多的休息时间能比更多的现金给人带去更高的生活质量。每年夏天，北欧人民可以享受四周至五周无比美妙的带薪休假，而实际上对于雇主来说，他们一年也只需要付十一个月的工资。
-
等急春天老霸王2024-06-03与之相反，芬兰的大学则持续贯彻政府对于全社会的承诺，保障机会均等。全芬兰的大学都是公立且免学费的。赫尔辛基大学每年对每位学生收取的总费用在110美元左右，这笔钱也仅仅用来支付学生会的会费。与此同时，每一位大学生每月会收到一笔约600美元的津贴，他们可以用这笔钱来付房租或购买日用品，并逐渐过渡成为一个自主的成年人。部分的津贴是要缴税的，而且如果有学生边读书边工作，其挣得的工资超过定限度后，津贴则会相应减少。除了这种情况以外，对于津贴的发放没有任何考核机制，因为北欧的体制旨在帮助每一个个体获得独立，不鼓励任何人在经济上依赖家庭。
-
等急春天老霸王2024-06-02那么，为何北欧父母似乎一点也不急于让孩子“赢在起跑线”上？答案出奇简单：童年就应该是童年。芬兰的日托中心对于教多少字母、数字或者词汇不设任何具体目标，它们注重发掘每个孩子的兴趣点，鼓励孩子培养社交技能和好奇心，从而为之后的自主学习打下良好基础。多数情况下，日托的运作遵循一句广为人知的芬兰谚语——孩子的工作就是玩耍。在芬兰的日托中心里，除静修、游戏、午睡和手工以外，每天的典型项目不仅包括课间休息，还有长达数小时的户外活动（不论天气如何）。老师们会带孩子出门，去森林、体育馆、剧院、动物园等地进行参观旅行，还会带孩子参加一些日常活动，比如游泳或烘焙。所有北欧人都笃信新鲜空气与运动的价值，在孩子还很小的时候，人们就会推着婴儿车出门，即便在寒冬，也任由孩子在户外打吨……当然，他们还是会记得把孩子裹得暖暖的。
-
等急春天老霸王2024-06-02几十年前，当芬兰的学校系统急需改革之时，芬兰为改革方案所制定的目标其实并非“卓越”，即使它在今天呈现出了卓越的成果。实际上，当时确定的目标——从“爱的北欧理念”出发去看，这一目标完全合乎逻辑——是“平等”。
-
等急春天老霸王2024-06-01几十年乃至几百年来，美国都毫无争议是全世界最具有向上流动可能性的国家。“而现在，情况变了。”米利班德表示。“如果你想寻求美国梦，”他在会上调侃道，“就去芬兰吧。”
-
贝塔伽马Omega2024-05-15面向全体国民的高质量公立教育可以增加体的自主权，不论其出生时幸运与否、家庭背景和经济状况如何，这项制度都能使其接受一个良好的教育。如果教育机会均等，每一个人所取得的成就完全源于自身的天资与努力，那么所有人都会受益——不论是个体还是整个社会。确保所有人——而非只是一小部分人——可以享受到高质量的教育，对于建立起一个“由独立自主的人所组成的社会”至关重要。在这样一个社会中，由于每个人都是独立的且自给自足，所以人们不太可能与他者建立起不健康的依从关系……需要指出的是，这种依从的对象也包括国家。
-
贝塔伽马Omega2024-05-16即要确保组成家庭的个人是强大且独立的，他们能作为团队良好地协作；确保劳动者是健康、受过良好教育的，并且不会过度依赖于自身的雇主；确保基建是一流的，机构是透明的；确保司法体系为公共利益服务，腐败维持在较低水平；确保科技在社会的各个角落发挥力量；确保贸易自由，管制合理。
-
贝塔伽马Omega2024-05-14北欧社会的首要目标是要将个体从一切形式的依赖性里解放出来，不论是家庭内部还是整个公民社会中。换而言之，就是要让穷人不再依赖施舍，让妻子不再依赖丈夫，让成年子女不再依赖父母，让老年父母不再依赖他们的孩子。这—“解放”最显见的目的，就是要让所有的人际关系不再受累于外在动机和需求，而能变得彻底真实、自由，并且完全由爱驱动。
-
乐儿2024-03-30拉斯·特拉加德在美国居住期间逐渐意识到，自20世纪起，一直到步入21世纪，北欧社会的首要目标从来都不是要使经济“社会主义化”（人们经常误认为是这样），而是要将个体从一切形式的依赖性里解放出来，不论是在家庭内部，还是在整个公民社会之中。换而言之，就是要让穷人不再依赖施舍，让妻子不再依赖丈夫，让成年子女不再依赖父母，让老年父母不再依赖他们的孩子。这一“解放”最显见的目的，就是要让所有的人际关系不再受累于外在动机和需求，而能变得彻底真实、自由，并且完全由爱驱动。