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Comment by TomOfTTB | Hacker News Reader

I could see how that line would tempt people to check-out of the article (and I can't blame you). But I think there's a reality to it we should pay attention to.

In a previous HN thread regarding this topic I asked why countries like Finland haven't overtaken the U.S. as far as success. Given their education system has been touted as dramatically better than ours for at least 20 years.

One of the replies I got was that these countries generate more well-rounded individuals and that's why these countries tend to do better on happiness surveys and such. And maybe that's true.

Maybe it's time to accept the reality that not all people want the same thing. That Americans have been taught to strive for excellence and that inevitably leaves others behind. While Finland values equality over all and is willing to sacrifice a certain amount of societal wealth so as to not have kids who think they need to work day and night to succeed.

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Finland's entire population is 5.36 million, close to the population of Minnesota and a bit more than half of Los Angeles county's population of 9.86 million.

Finland does have a lot of inventions and technology they export.

For example, the majority of web servers in existence in the world, underlying the entire world economy run an operating system originally created by a Finn.

Nokia was also a major player and innovator in cell phone and one of the first truly widespread portable information managers.

Minnesota has 3M corporation of course.

Comparing Finland to the US is not a reasonable comparison. Comparing Finland to Minnesota might be justifiable though.

Would it be almost fair to compare the EU to the United States?

That's a more reasonable comparison, sure. I'm not finding exact numbers on aggregate european population but seems to be between 731 and 857 million, about 2.5-3 times that of the US.

That doesn't make it a fair comparison though, given the massive differences in economics of European countries (to mention one thing).

You discredit your point with your examples. It doesn't take a huge population to create most of the world's success. The U.S. population is dwarfed by that of China yet very few people would argue China is more innovative than the U.S.

Don't get me wrong, Linus Trovalds and Nokia are great examples. But they aren't enough to make Finland a bed of innovation.

> The U.S. population is dwarfed by that of China yet very few people would argue China is more innovative than the U.S.

Not yet.

Apparently the province of Shanghai has already surpassed the Finnish educational success with their 23 million inhabitants. I have no doubt the Chinese are not trying to replicate that system as much as they can.

Though I would still prefer the Finnish system with 5-6h school days for my children, there is no reason to believe bigger systems would not be scalable for improvement.

And as far as I know, the US system used to be way more competitive back in the day. And we also have to think whether the educational depression is a state or a trend... (http://youtu.be/NXIR9ve0JU0)

> Don't get me wrong, Linus Trovalds and Nokia are great examples. But they aren't enough to make Finland a bed of innovation.

Not yet.

The entire country pretty much started industrializing a generation ago. A few big corporations in forestry and some high-tech is what brought us from the stone-age. But such establishments tend to shackle a fair amount of brain in such a small economy.

Given the record, I'm fairly optimistic of what will happen with all the brain freeing up from Nokia. It was a valued company hiring around as much people only in Finland (pop. 5m) than companies like Google hold globally. (pop. 7b)

The entire country pretty much started industrializing a generation ago.

Not to mention that the bilateral trade with Soviet Union (that employed much of the country until late 80s) didn't really promote innovation.

I'd say that his examples did a per capita output of significant innovations was perfectly respectable per capita, unless you can list a comparatively impressive list of achievements for Minnesota, which certainly benefits more from national network effects like a large domestic market than Finland.

China being less innovative than the US over the last 20 years might owe much to their population starting the era in absolute poverty, and is largely irrelevant to whether a linguistically isolated small country ought to be leading the world in more fields of R&D other than telephony.

A little further research suggests that Finland also invented IRC and one of the first graphical web browsers. If you were going to draw any conclusions about the impact on educational emphasis on equality on Finnish inventiveness it would surely be that their software engineers weren't as focused on monetising as their US counterparts.

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