It's good to see tax money spent on such a comforting program. I think it lends to a sense of national pride when policies like this lead to good feelings in the citizenry.

That said, I think articles like this contribute to science illiteracy and innumeracy.

A layman could easily come to the conclusion that the baby box caused the drop in infant mortality after reading this article, but infant mortality has been dropping everywhere over the the same time period, regardless of policy.[0]

While the article does briefly mention the Finnish government's broader support for new families, like the free health checks early in pregnancy that is actually incentivized by the box, it doesn't include the overarching worldwide, postwar technological and economic trends that have been driving infant mortality down everywhere.

The whole piece reads like a very literal endorsement of the nanny state, rather than a celebration of human flourishing that it could have been if written in the proper context of broader trends.

Edit: Almost all the replies (and I suspect the downvotes) to my comment are making my point. I wasn't disparaging the box or Finnland's broader policies to combat infant mortality. I'm disparaging the article's failure to paint Finnland's progress in the context of a wider trend of lowering infant mortality AND Finnland's broader efforts to do so. That failure leads to overly simplistic conclusions that contribute to scientific illiteracy and innumeracy, exactly like the conclusions below.

Does anyone believe Finnland could provide these services without the broader technological and economic progress?

[0]https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality