As far as "equality" goes, Finland is pretty financially equitable in comparison to many countries in the world. Wealth is always on a spectrum however and there are rich and poor ends, and like most places, those ends are stretching outward, whilst the skew is increasingly drawing the mass downward, whilst the rich end becomes a quickening long tail.
Normal distribution?
Whilst scrolling the Finnish news in English (there are about 5 stories a day), I came across a headline that grabbed my attention.
It is interesting to me because I use "obesity" (and health) often in my explanations about the world, because it is something that we can all visualize and probably, have all considered or struggled with in some way. The majority of people in the western world are overweight, the majority of the world have had some kind of severe health issues or know someone who has. And, the majority of the world have had to face some kind of economic hardship.
This is not even to mention all the cultural conditioning around these things.
Weirdly, this particular study was the first of its kind in Finland to look at the links between wealth and obesity. However, anecdotally from my own experience, I have witnessed the change over the last two decades as an outsider. When I came to the country, I was surprised at how "normal" people were in terms of their size. There was a healthy average, with very, very few people extremely overweight. There were also very few people who were extremely "fit" in terms of looks. The massive majority were in decent shape.
However, what is interesting, is that in a country where there is decent education for all up until about year ten and then most go on further, there are large disparities in physical outcomes still.
The obesity rate was 21 percent among boys aged 7-12 whose mothers had low educational attainment, while it was 14 percent for girls in the same category. Among boys with highly educated mothers, the corresponding figure was 11 percent, and for girls, it was six percent.
The dataset was based on 190,000 children, so it is highly reflective. And you can see, that for the boys, the difference in obesity between the low/high education was almost double for the low. And for girls, it was well over double the rate. It was similar for low educated fathers too.
And then, they also looked at the income correlation, which generally reflects the education level anyway, since the more educated, the more likely a person will hold a higher-paying role.
In low-income families, the prevalence of obesity among boys of primary school age was 17 percent and 11 percent for girls, whereas among boys from the highest-income families, the corresponding figures were 9 percent and four percent for girls.
There is a very high correlation, but this doesn't mean that the outcomes are set in stone, because not all children are overweight that come from the lower-educated, or lower-income parent backgrounds. But, the chance is much higher.
17% of Finnish girls aged 2–6 and 27% of boys of the same age are at overweight or obese. 4% of girls and 8% of boys in this age group are obese.
Of young adults under 30, at least 35% of women and almost half of men are overweight. 19% of women and 17% of men in the same age group are obese.
Of adults over 30, 63% of women and 72% of men are at least overweight. 28% of women and 26% of men are obese. Almost one in two men and women have abdominal obesity.
That first point is quite shocking really, isn't it? that means that over 20 of children between 2 and 6 are overweight with 6% being considered obese. This is in young children. How this possible?
But as you can see, it isn't getting any better as we age and if you consider how much impact this makes on our wellbeing and costs to society, this is the epidemic that should be getting billions of dollars in funding. The prevalence of weight related illness is very, very high and is only climbing.
Facts about overweight and obesity
At least 2.8 million adults die each year as a result of being overweight or obese. In addition, 44% of the diabetes burden, 23% of the ischaemic heart disease burden and between 7% and 41% of certain cancer burdens are attributable to overweight and obesity.
We seem caught in a cultural loop, don't we? We keep normalizing being overweight as if it is natural, yet discount the actual affects it has on us, including those who are overweight. It seems that we would rather "feel okay" about being unhealthy as a society, than do the work to make us actually okay.
This isn't an easy problem to tackle, because we have developed a society that is increasingly sedentary unless we have the drive to get up and move. We have created a world where everything we want is available whenever we want it and the only way not to take the option, is through will power. We have conditioned ourselves to have to constantly require motivation and drive to stay healthy, rather than building habits and processes that keep us healthy while living a normal life.
My parents were not overweight.
They also never went to a gym. Nor did they go jogging. They just went about their day, ate "normally" and lived their life. From what I can remember, none of the parents of friends were overweight. And, the "obese" kids would be considered average by today's standards.
A lot can happen in 40 years.
With all that we know, we should be able to do better as a society, which makes me wonder why we aren't. I think it is because unhealthy people consume more and are therefore better for bottom lines and, they are easier to control. Unhealthy people are reliant on the system and therefore, always beholden to it, making them unable to break away. The best they can do is keep asking for support.
In 1950 Finland, the GDP was 16% higher than the average income and as of 2018, it was 21% higher. What this means is that the amount of value being generated is higher per person, but the average person is getting less of it. It might not seem like a significant difference, but if we consider it in another way, we can visualize it better, because this growth compounds.
If things were equal to begin with between two people and each was getting 100 a year, but the second was getting 5% more per year, it would take around 14.5 years for the second to be getting 200 a year, doubling the other. However, this would be increasing each year. It would look something like this.
While not at that rate, you can see how much impact it would make over the space of time. And for instance, if it was 1% more a year, it would take 72 years to double. 1950 was 73 years ago. But even if it is at 0.1%, the difference over the space of a couple generations where corporations are increasing their wealth, whilst paying less for that wealth to be created, the disparity gets large very fast, and only quickens.
Gross domestic product (GDP) is the total monetary or market value of all the finished goods and services produced within a country's borders in a specific time period. As a broad measure of overall domestic production, it functions as a comprehensive scorecard of a given country's economic health.
Economic health - not population health.
The economic alignment of the global economy is to make more money, not to increase wellbeing for all participants. It is because of this that the future of things like obesity will continue to trend upward to the point that people just can't sustain themselves and die from malnutrition. The economy however doesn't care about this, it just cares about making profits. And, because the wealthy are less likely to be affected by the same outcomes as the poor and these are the people running the companies, they don't have a huge drive to make any difference in this area.
Handouts aren't the answer to this issue and if anything, they will just exacerbate it further. It has to be a complete realignment of society to adjust daily life to better health, rather than it being a privilege for those who have the time and money to spend on it. But, it is not likely to be a top-down change, it will have to happen at the grassroots, where we as individuals decide to do something about our condition.
Our health. Our education. Our finance.
I don't know what healthy means to you, but for me, there needs to be greater personal alignment between those things in order to ensure a healthy rise in those areas. But, without health, the other two are pretty useless, aren't they? If we can't keep our kids healthy now, what is going to get compounded into society in the future?
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
