Review of Himanen's paper

Review of the article by Pekka Himanen's "Challenges to the Global Information Society"

First of all, the text was very Finland-oriented, which at some point turned a little bit annoying. You can´t write a paper recommending Finland´s economic etc model, being Finnish. That´s not being objective.

The mayor mistake the study makes, is that the society would accept "gerontosociety" (majority of elderly people). I have a great doubt in the statement, that the youth of a nation simply accepts the pensioners dictation and pays taxes happily ever after.

In my opinion the welfare society model is silly - author suggested, that developed nations should mainly focus on products made for the public sector and/or the elderly. This leads to a following situation - workforce produces products for the elderly, they in turn pay from the support from the government and the government gains it´s money from the workforce. Why this over-simplified and ineffective circle?

There were some interesting points made, when introducing the transformation from welfare state to welfare society. "... the most successful innovations are made when the users of the services or products in question are able to participate in the innovation process" - I´m sorry that the author did not give no clues of what exactly he was talking about. I do believe the statement, but I would have liked to get to know some cases exactly.

I also agree on the fact, that schools are coming more and more solely responsible for the development of a nation. "learn to learn" etc suggestions made by Himanen are all in their places, but the model in my opinion is being negatively affected by the unstandardization of school-systems. This leaves us to greater communication-errors, once the future-workforce is out of the school-benches.

Ideas about the promotion of health, runned by government, are also interesting. Again I wonder, if that is a realistic goal in western societies. Being obese nowadays seems to be turning into a choice - like as being gay, vegetarian etc. If unlucky, someone would maybe even get sued by the "Americans With Food-Disorder" etc organization.

Thoughts about "international exercise campaign" led me to think, that it is mighty weird - you work to later on exercise/relax from work. Again - not very bright system.

The affection against immigrants was also quite surprising, because no nation has yet been successful in integration - thus leaving the nation to future conflicts regarding nationalism vs. cultural freedom for the immigrants. When we think about immigration, the first pictures typically people visualize for themselves, are some Africans taking sunbathes in the middle of the workday at the city mall. I just came from Cyprus, not being racist here.

But I do agree, that the immigration is the only way to sustain western living standards. Also - why should we keep our land for ourselves, if we wont give birth and don´t want to work. Effective in this situation is to let the land be used by people who need and want to use it. Outcome of this would be ideally positive, but it will certainly destroy nationalism as a main thing to hold a country together. But nationalism is a last-century figure anyway.

Lastly, I would like to refer to "Wikinomics" - skilled labor does not have to be hired by a company - modern communicative solutions and open source support communities could give the company the ability to harness workforces all over the world, paying them project-based fees, thus eliminating the need to bring them to the headquarters. But this is a hole new story, which I would continue in my review of "Wikinomics" later on in here.