The “APMC Act” remains among the most widely commented upon and most deeply misunderstood laws governing Indian economic life. APMCs - Agricultural Produce Marketing Committees, more commonly known as mandis - are notified, physical primary markets designated as the main and, in some cases, the only state-sanctioned sites for the regulation of the critical “first transaction” between the primary producer and the buyer of his or her agricultural produce. The APMC is not the regulated market itself, but the local body constituted to oversee its regulation, and this is only one of many conceptual and practical confusions generated under the diverse state-specific agricultural marketing acts, which have been implemented with even greater diversity across varied agro-ecological, political-economic, and administrative contexts. Drawing on long-term archival and ethnographic research in a mandi and market town in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, this chapter sketches out the regulatory biography of an agricultural market, the diverse narratives and experiences of legislative amendment and yard-level market “reform,” and illustrates the empirical and analytical purchase of embedded exchange and contested jurisdiction of markets on the ground.

Under colonial rule, the Nattukottai Chettiar or Nakarattar caste organized themselves into a complex, segmentary network of interdependent family merchant-banking firms. Each firm traded individually in commodities trading, money lending, domestic and overseas banking operations, or industrial investment. But beyond this - making possible every other commercial venture in which it engaged - each family firm operated as a commercial bank: taking money on deposit and drafting hundis and other financial instruments for use in the transfer of loanable capital to branch offices and to other banks. As a result, every Nakarattar firm was tied together with all of the others to form a unified banking system, playing a major role in the credit markets of South Asia and the Indian Ocean rim.

This chapter examines the way small manufacturing firms in western India began to use advertisement in the print media to develop markets for their goods during the early twentieth century.The chapter suggests that advertising gave small producers an opportunity to create the cultural meanings of commodities far away from the point of production.In many cases, they sought to usurp the role of local mercantile actors in fashioning product meanings; that is, they attempted to disembed the process of meaning construction from their local contexts.The chapter explores how advertisements became central to the operations of three firms involved in making indigenous medicines: Amritdhara, Jadibuti, and Dhootapapeshwa.Though the efforts of small manufacturers to undercut the role of local agents were only partially successful and often led to new forms of embedment, advertising was crucial to the creation of a “vernacular capitalism” that has largely been ignored by scholars.

This chapter focuses on lotteries in the Indian state of Punjab to examine how regulation can shape markets in India. The legal market for lotteries in Punjab is subject to the varying regulatory practices of several Indian states, the central government, a consortium of lottery corporations, and police. The increasing regulation of the lottery market in India since the late 1960s is not a straightforward modernization story of the incorporation of unregulated economic activities into regulated arrangements. In Punjab, efforts to increase the regulation of lotteries fostered the growth of new, less regulated activities, including outright illegal ones. The market for lotteries in Punjab shows how regulation can significantly format even activities that escape one or another component of its regulatory apparatus. The chapter argues that some markets are more insightfully analyzed in terms of degrees of regulation rather than the conceptual binaries of formal/informal or legal/illegal.

Introduction: improving upon the best

According to the economist and Nobel laureate James Heckman, investment in children produces a high return, benefiting not only the immediate family and child, but society as a whole (Center for High Impact Philanthropy 2015). In 1951 the future of Finland was predicted to be “grey and dreary”, but the Finns were tenacious (Sletholt 1951: 126). More importantly than that, they eventually chose the right route to trudge determinedly along.

Finland's postwar recovery and its capacity to establish itself as a serious country depended on the transformation of its (now world-renowned) education system. Alongside providing sufficient support for parents, good housing and high-quality healthcare, education is one of the most important investments in society that a government can make to ensure both the productivity and the well-being of future generations. Politicians such as former Prime Minister Jyrki Katainen of the National Coalition Party have emphasized the role of a highly educated society in promoting global competitiveness (Nygård 2015: 153–4). However, such aspirations may fall short if they are not accompanied by policies that also invest well in public services and education funding.

The frequency with which Finland is acclaimed as the best in the world for education does not mean that it cannot improve further, nor that some of its politicians won't squander that success in the future. Educational mobility is a measure of the degree to which the education system of a country increases or decreases the importance of parental finances and parental power in determining a child's future. Figure 4.1 shows the performance of countries in terms of the social mobility they have achieved and their levels of income inequality, with both factors shown to be influenced by levels of educational mobility within each country.

Statistics Finland produces a handy annual list of areas in which Finland is deemed to excel. It was last fully updated on 5 December 2018, although a few more items were added on 6 December 2019. The source for all the claims found below can be found in the update: http://www.stat.fi/tup/ tilastokirjasto/itsenaisyyspaiva-2019_en.html, and in the original list: http:// www.stat.fi/tup/satavuotias-suomi/suomi-maailman-karjessa_en.html.

Society

• • Finland is the most stable country in the world.

• • Finland is the safest country in the world.

• • Finland is the fourth “best” country in the world. (The Good Country Index).

• • Finland had the best governance in the world in 2018 (and ranked second best in 2019).

• • Finland's police and internal security as a whole are the second best in the world.

• • Finland has the lowest level of organized crime in the world.

• • Next to Norwegians and Icelanders, Finns are the second least insecure-feeling people in the world.

• • Finland's judicial system is the most independent in the world.

• • After the Danes, Finns’ elections are the freest and most reliable in the world.

• • Finland has the third lowest level of corruption in the world.

• • Finland is the third most prosperous country in the world.

• • Protection of property rights in Finland is the best in the world.

• • Access to official information in Finland is the best in the EU.

• • Finnish banks are the soundest in the world.

• • Finland's pension system is the third-best in the world (in a field of 34 countries).

• • Finland has the third highest levels of personal freedom and choice in the world.

In a little over half a century, Finland has become one of the most equitable countries in the world. It is the country with the best life chances for children, and the happiest people. What makes Finland so successful? To what extent is bold social policy key to that success? Or is it because of the growth of a shared belief in the well-being of everyone – and, if so, what role has its recent history played in the rise of that belief? Finland is just as subject to the vicissitudes of globalization and environmental threats as other affluent countries, but today it often confronts these problems better than almost all others and appears to be incredibly robust. We believe that it is time to take a close look at what other countries can learn from Finland.

What drawbacks might there be from so much equality? What are the downsides, if any, to Finntopia? Why haven't more countries achieved what Finland has achieved, and how many have done nearly as well as (or even better than) Finland on one or more aspects of equality – and why? If there are no great disadvantages to the Finnish system, then why don't more people move there or more countries emulate it? Why are there still far-right political parties in a country where life looks – in comparison to the reality for so many people in Britain or the United States – like paradise?

This book begins by acknowledging what almost everyone first mentions: the Finnish winters. And indeed, for many months of the year in Finland, it is very cold. We show that it is not this fact, nor the small size and high homogeneity of Finland's population, that are the underlying reasons for the social equality that exists in Finland today. In the pages that follow, using a huge range of statistics and sources, we explain why it is not Finland's climate, its demographics or its ethnicity that matter. None of those factors made everything that transpired inevitable. In fact, in many cases these factors have been a hindrance to Finland's economic, social and political development.

In the following three chapters, we look at the context of Finland's achievements. The first chapter focuses on geography and climate, which are issues that invariably arise early on in any conversation about the country. Finland is often described as remote, but remoteness is relative. It very much depends on where you are looking from, and how much more easily (for the affluent at least) everywhere is now connected to everywhere else as compared to how difficult travel was even in the recent past. We begin the chapter with a map that puts Finland at its centre, showing how a large part of the world's surface looks from that vantage point.

Chapter 1 continues by showing just how warm the summers are in Finland and how cold it can be in winter, but also how clear the skies can be and how clean the air is. Outsiders are rarely aware of the large geographical variations in climate across the country. We end our introductory chapter by describing how ancient Finland is, geologically speaking, and how its landscape of lakes and forest includes places where rare elements are found in abundance. Although Finland is one of the places where the effects of global warming are likely to be the least adverse, it is also one of the countries at the forefront of initiatives to reduce, mitigate and adapt to climate change – including, controversially, the building of new nuclear power plants that are due to begin operation in 2020 (Reuters 2019).

The second chapter in this section considers the history of Finland amid the empires that surrounded it and dominated it for so long. We chart how for centuries it was the poorest of nations, and show how its towns and cities grew along with the development of transportation routes between its countless lakes; we detail its many border changes, and speculate on the impact of Finland's past as a colony on the outlook of Finns today.

Our third and final chapter in Part I gives a brief overview of the economy and the welfare system that Finland is so famous for.

Traditionally, mid-life is hard to define. When does it begin and end? In Finland currently, average life expectancy for men is 79 and for women 84, with both still increasing and the gap between them narrowing. Because of this we have decided here to define mid-life as being aged 21 to 61, the 40 years after the first 21 years of life and before what, for most people, is typically the last 21 years of their lives.

For most of us mid-life begins after the completion of studies and at the start of employment and possible career, after having left the family who brought you up, but before settling down with a family of your own. This stereotype has undergone various changes, but these key points still remain milestones in the average person's life in one way or another. A growing number of people have no children, but for the majority of Finns, mid-life ends when all your children have left home and you are on your own again. It draws to an end as the career or varied set of jobs you have been doing wind down. It ends as retirement approaches or starts and as your life begins to have more and more in common with everyone else in your age group. Equality is greatest in childhood and young adulthood, and again in old age – especially in Finland. Mid-life is a period of specialization and also the time when people tend to be most unequal.

In Finland children are born remarkably equal. As detailed above, a Finnish child's arrival is marked with a very comprehensive maternity package containing things that the baby and its parents actually need. In Finland the government, and the town or village you live in, ensures that your start in life is one of the most equitable on the planet. As explained in the previous chapter, all children in Finland have access to good schools. The influence of your parents’ income on your outcome in mid-life is minimal (when compared to their influence if you grow up anywhere else).

Finland is far away. Unless you are in Finland, in which case it is – very probably – home. Everywhere is a long way from most places. And everywhere is home to someone.

To the east of Finland lies Russia, endless Russia, Russia as far as the mind can imagine and as far as a car or a train can travel in a day, or two, or three (Figure 1.1). It feels as if it has always been Russia over there.

To the south is the rest of Europe, country after country, sea after sea, peoples and languages, so many languages all just needing to be learned and used in the places just waiting to be visited. And no more meaningful borders. Finland is in the European Union and the eurozone.

In this section there are three chapters that cover the human lifespan, discussing issues that most affect people in their youth, mid-life – which we define as ages 21 to 61 – and old age. We discuss childhood and education in the first chapter, general equality in the second, and health in the final chapter of this section.

We begin by demonstrating how Finland's very high levels of income equality for older people are related to high levels of social mobility for the young; and how schools in Finland further accelerate social mobility. Social mobility is easier when the gap between top and bottom is so much narrower than it is in other countries. We show that Finland is second only to Norway in how little money is spent on private schooling and look at how Finland manages to be a world leader in education without spending more overall than many other countries. We also show how Finland has the lowest variation in school outcomes of any OECD country – which partly explains why its educational results are so good. We end by discussing Finland's work opportunities for the young, youth unemployment and higher education.

In Chapter 5, on the middle years of life, we begin by discussing data that confirm that income inequality in Finland has been low for some time and show how this contributes to high levels of social mobility. Of all the countries in the world, only in Denmark does it matter less who your parents are for your prospects in later life. We show that in the workplace Finnish employees of all grades have much greater flexibility over the hours they work than in all of the 35 other OECD countries for which there is data. This is as true for Finns without formal qualifications as for those with university degrees – employees in Finland are the most trusted to determine their own hours of work. We then discuss the paradox of Finland having one of the lowest proportions of women working in jobs that require science, technology, engineering and mathematics qualifications – despite Finland ranking joint highest on the global index of gender equality, which includes how well girls and women do at school and university in general in Finland. We end the chapter by looking at the taxation that keeps inequality low.

Introduction

In 2019, Finnish politics made international headlines twice. The first time was when the Social Democratic Party won the most votes in the April 2019 general election (The Guardian 2019; Duxbury 2019) and the second was after the prime minister and the Minister for Local Government and Ownership Steering resigned over issues involving a postal strike and his successor, Sanna Marin, became the world's youngest serving prime minister on 10 December 2019 (see Chapter 3). Her appointment meant that the country was governed by a coalition of five female-led parties.

Finland was flatteringly profiled as a hotbed of progressive politics and policies by newspapers such as The Guardian and The New York Times, and by politicians including Hillary Clinton. The hosts for the podcast for the newspaper Helsingin Sanomat, “Uutisraportti”, ended their weekly broadcast on a gleeful note about the attention Finland was attracting in the wake of Marin's appointment. It was unbelievable and exciting, they exclaimed, that William Barr, the US's Donald Trump-appointed attorney general, had asked the visiting Finnish Justice Minister, Anna-Maija Henriksson, for her views on the new prime minister (Peltomaki 2019). Barr wasn't the only American to want to know more about Henriksson's homeland: when she visited a US prison, the inmates asked her about politics in Finland.

Politics is important to the story of Finland's success because effective social policy and the welfare state were the outcome of choices and policies made by government. Of course, Finland's politicians have not always made the right decisions: as we’ve discussed in Chapter 6, lawmakers are still grappling with the thorny issue of social and healthcare reform.

The secret word

There has been a recent boom in books about how, if you live the Nordic way, you too could live longer. Hundreds of little tips essentially all boil down to an instruction to be more Swedish, more Danish, more Finnish. Each country has its own special word that signifies the secret to success. In Swedish, according to Bertil Marklund, the word is lagom, meaning “just the right amount”. However, in each case we are told that there is no exact translation, and hence an entire book on “the word” is needed for the reader to glean the secrets it holds.

In Denmark the magic word is hygge, meaning an atmosphere of cosiness, closeness and comfortable conviviality, which in turn generates feelings of greater well-being and contentment (Norway has koselig, meaning nearly the same thing, with some subtle differences.) Candles, cushions and closing the door on unwanted intrusions feature heavily in hygge, and wrapping yourself in chunky hand-knitted blankets and indulging in pastries is how the concept was presented to the outside world (Country Life 2017). Inevitably, there is no exact English translation or short definition that quite summarizes the concept correctly.

It is not just the Nordic countries that have received this treatment. In Japan the equivalent concept is ikigai. According to The Times “Forget hygge. It's all about ikigai (that's Japanese for a happy life)” (Country Life 2017; Mogi 2017). Unsurprisingly, the Japanese term also defies translation and requires an entire book to explain it. What none of these books point out are the many similarities between these countries.