Cafe in Oulu, Finland. Pixabay/tpsdave. Public domain.Once heralded for balancing a womb-to-tomb welfare state with a competitive economy, Finland hasn’t had it easy of late. The small Nordic country with a population of just over 5 million has struggled with four years of policy stagnation and a bickering coalition government, which has been mired in three years of economic recession. Multinational nails were hammered into the Finnish national confidence when, in 2013, Nokia’s mobile phone business was bought over by Microsoft Mobile, the new subsidiary of the software giant Microsoft. Today, Finland needs to make some far-reaching changes if it is to retain the best parts of its former economic glory. The 2015 national election results may exacerbate existing problems rather than provide solutions.
Those who ignore sound solutions to the problems that are happening around them can be compared to the ostrich, a flightless bird of the genus Struthio, which is known to bury its head in the sand. An ‘ostrich nation’ is a place where a near majority of people and the politicians who they voted for behave like they are ignoring the reality with which they are faced. Invective populist rhetoric intoxicates cohorts of the voting public and acts as a barrier to alleviating economic ills. In this article I want to explain how Finland has come to uncomfortably fit the definition of an ‘ostrich nation’ and why some of its voters and politicians need to take their heads out of the sand to deal with what has been happening in their country over the last few years.
It would be odd for any country in an economic recession to do well in the World Economic Forum’s 2014 Global Competitiveness Index, but somehow Finland managed to place 4th out of 144 economies! The more astute amongst you will wonder under which local conditions these statistics were collected and how they have been used to create the illusion of national wellbeing and to feed the so-called ‘positive psychology industry’, which is undergirded by a plethora of fluffy happiness indexes.
