Good news, bad news

I am not bragging, kidding or marveling anything when I say that Finns are - generally speaking - the smartest people I've come across, at least in Europe. (But then again, I've never been outside Europe.) If you want to hear an insular preassumption which in my case has only strengthened through travelling and education, then tick that one. It results in relative lack of everyday stupidity in Finland and, as such, is a nice thing if you live there.

Yep, it's that PISA triennale again. I personally think that for instance honesty, sisu and most other Finnish myths are, well, just myths, but if mankind still is to draw some lesson from my people it could do much worse than preventing everyday stupidity and going to a Finnish primary school for a week or two. Ditto, I tend to be quite skeptical towards most cross-country mumbojumbo rankings, yet wouldn't seriusly mind if PISA results were to draw even more attention than they usually are. That's because the quality of education as an evaluand is something quite measurable, but also because no one can't really explain and analyse why some peer countries are doing so much better than some others. It's a very complex issue, and if you're to learn from it you should treat it as such - i.e. without any kitchen sociology or petty policising. (McKinsey tried to explain and analyse it this autumn, and, as far as I remember got as far as concluding that in order to have good schools you must have good teachers and in order to have good teachers you must have bright young people willing to become teachers...but that's when it all gets blurred again. There seem to so different, yet equally successful, approaches that you can't trace it to one single underlying factor. Here's the PDF, and here's a brief article about it, if you fancy further reading.)

For instance, my student union has traditionally bred idiots who have publically interpreted "the world's best primary education" as "the world's best education system" and on such grounds argued that Finnish tertiary education system shouldn't be reformed - which of course means that they are either lying bastards or suffering from serious cerebral laziness, or just that Finnish tertiary education is counterproductive. Another rather typical hobby horse is that our kids score so well because they are to taught to such a large extent in their mother tongue, suggesting that the small number of foreigners might explain it. However, science-savvy and relatively multiethnic societies like Canada, Australia and Netherlands prove it clearly a wrong assumption.

So, anyway, my most humble observations have indeed confirmed that Finnish youngsters generally know more than their brothers and sisters elsewhere - or, to put it other way, young people in e.g. Italy, Britain or Lithuania generally have not known as much as I would have expected them to know at their age. Which makes perfect sense, of course, since why would you bother about your education system if it made no difference at the end of the day?

This year's PISA theme was science and one of the questions, apparently, whether one can contract a) AIDS, b) diarrhea or c) diabetes by drinking contaminated water. British kids obviously did pretty well at this time, ranking as the 16th overall, and those who did not probably didn't comprehend the questions in the first place - one field where they score badly is literacy, and to get a grasp of that problem you just have to buy an ordinary tabloid newspaper. The Sun and Daily Mail are read by approx ten million readers in total on daily basis, and I'm not exaggerating at all if I say that they are targeted at people who can't read properly - that is, readers who have problems processing information in written form and in order to do so need pictures, catchy headlines and regular concrete examples among abstractness. Their closest Finnish equivalents - Seiska, Katso (always popular among Italian Erasmus students), Hymy etc. - may well be equally bad, but take into consideration that those are neither newspapers nor published daily, whereas The Sun is the primary source of news for its average reader. Bear that in mind: if British news coverage is sometimes sensational, tasteless and of low quality it's not, primarily, because the journalists responsible for it are like that, but simply because they are writing for a deterministically stupid audience. That is scary.

Well, well. I was actually going to relate to this topic to supply and demand in the context of Italian television, but then realised that such would make me come across either as homesick or a wanker (of which I could only subscribe to the latter - no matter how hard I sometimes pine for Keskisuomalainen's unmatchably factual, even-handed and in-depth EU coverage, or the sparking intellect of Finnish talkshows) so it was good that I spotted also this piece of news.

Finland will meet the objectives of the Stability and Growth Pact both in terms of the balance in public finances and with regard to the debt ratio in the medium term. However, a sustainability analysis that includes the forthcoming demographic changes indicates that overall general government finances are not sustainable in the long term. Based on Eurostat's 2004 population projection, a surplus of 4% of GDP would be required to secure sustainability in general government finances. Under the current Stability Programme, the surplus would amount to 2½ of GDP by the end of the government term, which means there would be a sustainability gap of about 1½% of GDP. If the latest national population forecast were to be used for the computations, the sustainability figure would be even bleaker than this.

Here is the same piece in Finnish, for my people to go and test their world-class reading skills.

Did you read it? If you did, did you understand it? If you did, did you try to relate its content to your opinions on politics, democracy and social justice? And if you did, how did you feel about it?

This is a theme that has haunted my readership ever since I kicked off this blog and I quite feel obliged to spell it out on regular intervals. Seriously, do you people have any clue of what that text above means? It means that the government, the same that is accused of saving too much today, is spending far too much - which, correspondingly, means that the ones tomorrow will have to save and squeeze even more. No ifs and no buts, really. I promise that it is this simple.

I'm sometimes scared to braindeath when I - from a safe distance, nowadays - am following the political discourse in contemporary in Finland. It's a discourse between people whose mentality is lagging a couple of decades behind the reality and who will be in agonising trouble when they in most foreseeable future have to come to terms with the fact that politics isn't about what it used to be. Politics has always been about trade-offs, yet in future those trade-offs will be twice as painful. So if you lean to right, you might well stop childishly flattering yourself that you can both have and eat your cake, i.e. cry for tax cuts and oppose welfare reforms at the same time - whereas the lefties just have to strangle their dearest brainchild, and learn to live without the idea that you can banish any possible evil just by valiantly covering it with tax money. It surely hurts, but there's nothing you can do about it, whatever your political inclination is. Just change your mentality sooner rather than later, and you won't be so stressed when times get truly confusing.

Think about it. A surplus of 2.5% is very solid by pan-European standards, but even still it's quite far from enough. That is scary, too.