Aleksa's Book Review: Nordic Administrative Reforms

It's no surprise to anybody that the Nordic countries have pretty good governments - even the ones that aren't subsidised by massive fields of oil in the North Sea. It's of great interest to me how this system works - apparently, there's a lot of opt-in systems. Having already gone through 2 or 3 books about the subject, I remained hungry for the lighting-in-a-bottle that the blue-eyed axe wielders seem to have caught in their governments.

This book explains that it mostly boils down to picking what works. The book splits European government cultures into Anglo-Saxon (regulatory capitalism), Napoleonic (heavily top-down and bureaucratic), Germanic (highly codified with some localism), Eastern European (in flux) and Nordic (which is, in turn, split into east and west).

The Nordic model was distant enough historically for isolation to do its thing, allowing for a relatively blank slate approach to the northerners. For the sake of brevity, the book boils down to comparing Nordic systems to one another, and comes to the conclusion that opt-in programs, downsizing government employment and more e-government is key. Correct, but hardly applicable. I'll need to keep digging.
6/10