I remember reading that a big goal initially was to reduce child mortality rate. One only gets the box if you visit a doctor during pregnancy for consultations which often wasn’t the case back then. But I don’t have source at hand writing on the phone, so might be wrong on that.
Finland is one of the wealthiest countries today because of policies like this. The government has helped lift Finland's poorest out of poverty over the past 80 years, and made it feel like a country where raising a baby is essentially the same regardless of your income.
Making sure every baby's parents have the resources it needs to grow up healthy and well-educated is how you build a society where everyone wants to contribute to it improving.
The baby box definitely has practical value for families. Even though Finland is a rich country overall, poor Finnish people exist and the price level for necessities is high. For poor families, this box is a lifesaver. And even for those who could afford everything in the box, it's still a great way to make sure that the baby gets all the basics they need without having to rely on parents remembering and spending time shopping. Ask any Finnish parent, pretty much all of them would disagree that it's just a symbolic thing.
In reality, in the early 1900s, Finland was poorer than Western Europe and some British colonies, but richer than just about any other place in the world. Richer than Japan, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Poland - and about as rich as Austria or Italy.
Fast-forward to 2021 - Finland is poorer than Western Europe and some British colonies, but richer than just about any other place in the world. Not much of a change, really. This is an unfortunate, but repeated finding of development economics - policy, unless intentionally malevolent, matters very little to the long-run wealth
Macroeconomics is so difficult to grasp for me and feels so far away from anything that is remotely related to my life that just talking about it feels silly.
The amount of capital in the US or even my state feels like completely divorced from whether I feel comfortable having children and raising a family (I don't at all).
"How would you feel living in country X" and "how does a person in a similiar position as myself feel living in country X" is quite personal question and probably quite detached from macroeconomics unless comparing countries with wildly different GDP:s.
I don't think many Norwegians would say they feel like they're the richest people on Earth though.
EDIT: According to Wikipedia the wealth fund is worth 2.3 trillion now. That's for a country with a population of 5 million people.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/palashghosh/2021/04/07/norways-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_sovereign...