111–120 of 275 posts
Anyway, the Finns seem to have their hearts in the right place. Well done.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
?? "Hey Bob, glad you could join the team! Here's a big cardboard box to sleep in, it should fit under your desk nicely. You'll find a couple of onesies in there, some shampoo and shower gel, toothbrush, toothpaste etc. You'll never need to leave the office again!" "Oh, and don't worry about that 'I'm sleeping in a coffin' feeling, it goes away after a couple of weeks"
That convinces me its a good idea
Now this is my kind of nanny state. A thought: This program started for low-income families but was extended after a few years to all families. The nice thing about universality rather than means testing is that a) middle class families are more apt to continue supporting it if they can experience its benefits first-hand; b) you save the money that would otherwise be spent testing, enforcing and auditing the system;…
One question I find interesting is to what extent governments should be in the business of building solidarity and shared values. Personally, I'm all for it - but that's a product of my age (40s), location (Scotland) and where I grew up (a small village in the North of Scotland). NB Having a father who served in the RAF during WW2 probably influenced me far more than I realised at the time - my political views around…
To the extent that government is the actual exercise of the public's solidarity and shared values, I'm inclined to think it does have a legitimate role to play in giving expression to those values.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
correlation/causation. E.g. Italy does not have baby boxes, and child mortality went from 60/1000 to 3/1000 in the last sixty years too. This happened basically everywhere, and either cardboard boxes play a big role and are used everywhere, or the effect is quite limited.
The article does not claim that the cardboard box itself played a big role. It implies that the requirement to get prenatal care in order to receive the box played a role. EDIT: And it's not even making a strong claim about that. From the article "Mika Gissler, a professor at the National Institute for Health and Welfare in Helsinki, gives several reasons for this - the maternity box and pre-natal care for all women…
This is the hack of the box that is not being understood here on HN. The hack isn't that its a box or that cellulose is the ideal crib material, the hack is this is the nearly ideal carrot/stick to get moms to prenatal care. There are zillions of other ways to get moms to prenatal care across the whole spectrum of human experience ranging from intensive education, shoved at army bayonet point, bureaucracy and paperwork, tax codes, legal enforcement by goons with guns, who knows what else.
The true hack, the reason this is on HACKER news, is this is an amazing intersection of minimal overall total system cost and its incredibly polite and pleasant and basically civilized.
Its like all the skinner box psychological manipulation brilliance of Zynga, but applied to lowering infant mortality rates at the absolute minimum possible cost.
Frankly I'm not surprised, as a cultural thing, Scandinavian types might not have all the answers to everything, but when they do have an answer, its inevitably always the most elegant and efficient. Health care, architecture... baby boxes... no great surprise once again they rocked it.
The first thing that I noticed about the box is that all the baby clothes are sex-neutral. Here in North America it's almost impossible to find baby clothes that don't immediately scream "I'm a boy" or "I'm a girl".
To my understanding, parents in Finland don't normally know the biological sex of the child before birth. If the box is given before the actually birth, then it makes sense to make the colors gender neutral.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Food for tought: if Norway has the same infant mortality rate and is substantially richer, does that mean something? I am not exactly a socialist but the Finnish people still impress me again and again. (Happen to have a few friends and/or relatives from Finland. )
It means Norway found oil and gas.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you read the article? "In the 1930s Finland was a poor country and infant mortality was high - 65 out of 1,000 babies died. But the figures improved rapidly in the decades that followed." It's now 3/1,000.
According to http://www.hrsa.gov/healthit/images/mchb_infantmortality_pub... "The infant mortality rate in the United States showed a consistently downward trend between 1935 and 2000, with the rate declining from 55.7 per 1,000 live births in 1935 to 6.9 in 2000" So Finland is doing better, but since the US has seen most of that improvement as well very little if any of it seems to be attributable to the box.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The option to know (during the second ultrasound exam) is there, we for example did know. Some people choose not to know and many more keep the gender a secret from others until the baby is actually born.
Interesting, I understand not wanting to know and I also understand wanting to know, but why would people keep it a secret? (Just in case I'm not judging, just curious)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article does not claim that the cardboard box itself played a big role. It implies that the requirement to get prenatal care in order to receive the box played a role. EDIT: And it's not even making a strong claim about that. From the article "Mika Gissler, a professor at the National Institute for Health and Welfare in Helsinki, gives several reasons for this - the maternity box and pre-natal care for all women…
"It implies that the requirement to get prenatal care in order to receive the box played a role." This is the hack of the box that is not being understood here on HN. The hack isn't that its a box or that cellulose is the ideal crib material, the hack is this is the nearly ideal carrot/stick to get moms to prenatal care. There are zillions of other ways to get moms to prenatal care across the whole spectrum of human…