Don't know exact numbers but hundreds of swedes and finns have played professional Ice hockey in the NHL and I haven't heard of anyone of them going broke... ;-) 
 
The phenomenon of prodigal athletes that end up selling their olympic medals in desperation is well known here, but not so much with ice hockey players. Most of the rich ones seem to invest their money well. 
 
I think there's some sort of selection going on with that. For one thing, ice hockey isn't a cheap hobby at all, especially not for a kid that needs a new set of gear every year. If your parents can't or won't support that, you don't play and you don't practice. Thus ice hockey players tend to come from the more financially stable families.

jaakkeli, u really have issues with the swedes don't you? 
 
Barely passing high school and being stuck without a physics degree for years only because you're unable to pass Swedish courses does funny things to people. 
 
re: social prestige and swedish, my impression is that finnish speaking finns resent having to learn swedish since it's not really useful, and everyone uses english as a lingua franca anyway. 
 
And it was not obligatory in any way before it became useless and unprestigious. When Swedish was a prestigious language, there were of course plenty of students. Then after a while of despair the Swedes found multiculturalism and allies to force minority boosterism on everyone. 
 
The generation for whom it was obligatory is only now entering power (the boomers didn't have it). So watch out for the news of "far right" victories... 
 
BTW the Finnish welfare state never really got comparable with Sweden and it was further massively cut back in the 1990s (aka The Great Depression). Even the rest of it seems to be vanishing now. Eg. universal public health care is simply a myth: everyone I know to have tried lately has been turned away from there and simply told to go to private docs. Even on welfare Finland is rather different from Scandinavia.

I couldn't help thinking it as phenomenom which could be explained by the low self-condidence of Finns, and the fact that Swedish has a higher social prestige in the country. 
 
Swedes are a 5 % minority who've been on welfare and affirmative action for decades. The social prestige has utterly flipped around by now, although they may not have realized it yet in some backwater town... 
 
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/expat...on- Finland.html 
 
Thank God for British newspapers. If I hadn't read this, I would probably never would have even heard of all these customs and traditions that we have. 
 
They did get one thing right though: the Swedes ARE like women. They talk and talk and talk and never do. Finns do. 
 
Oh and I would bet that the suicide difference thing is simple the same as the overall violence difference. Finns don't just kill themselves at prodigous rates, we kill other people too.

it's rather amusing to see that 99% of people in bangladesh believe that corruption is "never justifiable." look it up. 
 
Obviously someone paid off the survey-makers. 
 
that being said i don't get how the church allows people don't believe in god to celebrate their marriage there, but whatever. 
 
This is more or less the norm in Lutheran Europe. Most atheists are still members of the church and I know some are even openly involved in church politics. Identification with Lutheranism is strong even when faith isn't. I got put in the church when I was a kid because my non-believing mom still thinks it's proper and necessary to belong to the church. I was a minor scandal when I resigned, as in rural Finland resigning the church means that you're either communist or really, really religious. 
 
The churches won't really care about atheist weddings when they won't even properly evict atheist priests: 
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorkild_Grosb%C3%B8ll

In the capital Helsingfors as well as Stockholm and Gothenburg the Swedish culture has assimilated foreigners. Mostly Germans from Germany and Baltics. However, most of the them, as the two former presidents of Finland, both noble men, Mannerheim, (mothernal family von Julin) and Svinhufvud af Qvalstadt are Swedish born. 
 
Mannerheim's paternal line is from Germany even if they moved to Finland through Sweden. Svinhufvud spoke Finnish better than Swedish and on his mother's side he descends from Baltic Germans, although that side of the family also migrated through Sweden. Nice try, there. As I said, the aristocracy tended to intermarry a lot in the old days; in Finland it became Swedish-speaking its origin is everywhere.

Torvalds is a Finland-Swede. 
 
As for prominence, 
 
a) The richest families are heavily Swedish-speaking due to very old wealth, but they're often not Swedish in origin. There's lots of Jewish, British, German, Russian etc ancestry there, as any upper-class migrants would traditionally turn Swedish-speaking (there used to be more upper class migration between countries since before fast travel people had to move to other countries to keep an eye on their investments). The genetically more Swedish parts on the rural coast tended to be just as poor as the Finnish parts. 
 
b) there's today no major performance difference between young Finns and Swedes, ignoring the issue that... 
 
c) there's "affirmative action" ie. some minority quotas for Swedish-speakers and it has been so for a long time. As you'd expect, Swedes have a reputation for incompetence and shoddy work and there's all the stupid stuff that comes with AA.  
 
Also note that affirmative action spoils mean that lots of people will officially classify themselves as "Finland-Swedes" even if they don't actually even speak Swedish fluently. That stuff is a MAJOR taboo in Finnish society and thus NO studies EVER discuss the genetics very accurately (they'll speak of "the southwest" when the Swedish population exists really only in very thin coastal strips and it would be trivial to check that - but everybody wants to avoid accidentally saying anything with an obvious connection to modern ethnicities).

Now people should remember where they are. Most people don't hang out at sites like GNXP and most people don't give a shit about anthropology. In Finland people who insist that anthropological classification owns terms like Nordic are classified as Nazi creeps. 
 
Finns don't, of course, call themselves Nordic and neither do the Scandinavians. "Norden" just translates to "the north" and in Finnish the expression is "pohjoismaat", "northern countries". The stuff about "Nordic countries" is a shorthand that became convenient after the countries followed similar social models after WWII. It's even official, we exist in a sort of a semi-union... 
 
http://www.norden.org/ 
 
...a mini-EU, just with no meaningful powers but a lot of nice stuff for ordinary citizens (like the ease of migration between the countries). I wish the big EU was something similar.

There are lots of social liberals who do not want mass Third World immigration. There are *lots* of people who'd vote for an anti-immigration candidate if it didn't usually also mean voting for someone who thinks gay marriage is a serious threat to Western civilization. If you want their votes, you do need social liberalism. 
 
This would be pretty hard in the US with the two-party system, but in Europe there have been occasional flare ups like Fortuyn and that program is always a real vote-winner.

I still don't understand why this is surprising. With the sampling Finns are effectively an island population and unlike with the British Isles, our "original home" is not represented at all. 
 
The reason there's a gap between Finns and Swedes not like what's seen with other neighbours is that we're not like the other neighbours. Greeks and South Slavs likely mostly come from the same waves of settlement, Danes, Swedes and Norwegians largely come from the same waves of settlement that emanated from Denmark and so on... but Finns and Swedes have a fundamentally different origin. This is where two waves of settlement collided. 
 
Sweden was populated from what's now Denmark, Finland was populated from what's now Russia. Whatever similarities there are come from later admixture (and for that: Finnish admixture in Swedes will be underestimated by sampling Uppsala, Swedish admixture in Finns will be overestimated by sampling Helsinki) or the general similarity between Eastern and Western Europeans.

It isn't surprising that there's a gap between Poles and Finns in the results if there's a gap in the samples. Until they do some analysis for Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians, the best assumption is that they'd fill that gap with that sequence of clusters and Finns would not seem so odd.

Oh come on, surely no one on GNXP buys that rubbish about peaceful indigenous tribes who'd neeeever hurt anyone? Saamis have never had the numbers to wage actual war on southerners, but northern nomads are the best for hit and run. You don't think they ever used that opportunity? Ha. 
 
Goddamn Saami propaganda. 
 
the most primitive people on Earth, going around naked and feeding on rotten fish. 
 
So I guess today it's a competition between Finns and Swedes. We do the naked, they do the rotten fish...

This was definitely very true in rural Finland as well and likely true everywhere. One potential Europe/US difference would be that where I'm from religiousity was actually a status marker (opposite to what it's to urban liberals, signaling both education and wealth) and apathy on religion a working class marker. "Redneck" stereotypes mix the rural social groups together in very contradictory ways, the landowning farmers are typically religious and straight (although very much not law-abiding now that so much of the law is written by urban liberals and Brussels...) while the guys who cook moonshine are the areligious teenagers and the older loser loners. 
 
As for social networks of the youth, one obvious difference between the religious and the non-religious was that the social networks of the non-religious had few nodes connecting them to people of different ages while the youth religious network was well embedded in a wider network that included *all* age groups. That puts very different pressures on behaviour.

Peter, only a fraction of men are actively pursued and I never claimed that IQ is the only thing women want in a man. For a thought experiment, let's take men with an IQ of 80 and men with an IQ of 120. Most men in either group do not have a harem, but which one of those groups has a higher proportion of men who are pursued by many women for marriage and children? Maybe some of those dumb guys happen to be star athletes or big in some other way that doesn't take brains, but they're the rare exception.  
 
There is a huge number of guys who aren't getting pursued by many women. The woes of smart but otherwise hopeless nerds just get the press because some of them are bloggers and screenwriters while mateless 80 IQ guys are living under the bridge.

BGC, *we* are making it a moralizing issue? As everyone knows, women tend to want men who have at least the same IQ/education, but men don't care that much about IQ/education. So, as everyone knows, lots of smart women have trouble finding a man, because they don't want dumber men but the smart men chase attractive women while ignoring smarts. And that makes *women* the key to a dysgenic trend? If you can't see how that comes across as pure moralizing, you're beyond hope. 
 
There's the eugenic trend of women selecting for higher IQ mates and the dysgenic trend of high IQ women hoping for a higher IQ man who might not materialize. No one seems to know which one is winning. If you only look at the education level of mothers, you're deciding the answer in advance (of course it shows the dysgenic part, amplified because education is only a correlate of IQ and already selects for women who've decided to not have babies).  
 
As for the other moralizing issue, there will be no "return to patriarchy" because men do not want it. The average man in his twenties wants to fool around, play video games and drink beer. All the data supports this view: women consistently have much higher desire for families and the Western world is having far fewer babies than women want. Lot of women would be perfectly happy not to work and just have babies - it's just that there are few *men* for them. If I'm "moralizing", I'm definitely not "self-righteous", as I'm one of those guys running away from women who keep talking about babies myself. I sure as hell am not going to go Mormon to save the West. 
 
(One reason the northern European states have higher fertility is that even intentionally becoming an unemployed single mom makes sense to some. Some women I know have done just that.)

BTW this demographic panic is nothing new and this isn't the first time fertility has dropped under replacement. Since we're talking about France, see 
 
http://www.insee.fr/fr/ppp/ir/accueil.asp?page=SD2004/dd/SD2004_fecondite.htm 
 
and graph G4.1. That's the completed fertility rate for French women born in a given year. Note that the bust for women born slightly over a century ago was "worse" than the present one. There was a huge demographic panic in the 1920s and 1930s in many European countries blaming the fertility bust on emancipation of women. 
 
BGC: Women are the key, and about one third of women college graduates are having zero children 
 
Jesus! It takes two to have a baby! Men's child count goes up with education. Yet nearly every time you see people (well, men) speaking of dysgenic fertility, they're heaping scorn on women as if the father's genes have magically stopped counting. And every time you see people speaking about low fertility, they're heaping scorn on women while it's painfully obvious from both data and everyone's experience that what's stopping women from having the families that they certainly want is the reluctance of modern *men*. 
 
Women are, indeed, the key, but that's because women are the choosers in mating and they are not choosing stupid men. In fact, one reason why high IQ women have trouble finding spouses is that they're doing exactly that: trying to find a higher IQ man.

Ha, nice try Clio, but digit ratios don't lie. 
 
About what? Apparently Finnish men have the most extreme digit ratios in the world. Are Finns extraordinarily likely to be high testosterone alphas? 
 
Mine is above-average even for those who are abnormally flooded with testosterone in the womb, and I have a good track-record of being competitive in real life. 
 
Competitiveness can be a "masculine" trait in the same sense that high math ability is a "masculine" trait. Ultra nerds are ultra competitive - it's just that they end up competing in WoW levels and the like. "Masculine" digit ratios in fact have a known relation to autism. 
 
I'm not here for impression management -- I could care less what the internet thinks of me, since it cannot profit me in any way -- but to publicize data that bear on questions that people normally bandy about without proof, and to clear up fuzzy-headed reasoning. 
 
You're still conspicuously interested in simultaneously pointing out that you're an assman and that your digit ratio is "above average" and... 
 
It all really sounds like you're trying to convince yourself of something. Did this all start when you discovered the PUAs and their silly obsession with "alphaness"?

I will put it to you that the reason you are attached to the hypothesis that "ass men" are high in testosterone, and "boob men" are betas, is that it confirms your uncertain hope that you, with your much-trumpeted preference for female posteriors, are yourself a high-testosterone alpha.  
 
Ha ha, guy got pwned... by a girl

wait, are you really italian or something? 
 
Italians... 
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbEz9FXtclM

No assman would say that, and who do you think has more trouble keeping his hands off of his preferred body part at close distances in a dance club, let's say? 
 
That's because grabbing ass and grabbing boobs are at different levels of intimacy. Hands on boobs is foreplay and you can't go straight to it. Hands on ass can be just flirtatious.

John Emerson, agreed on the others, but why would nationalism be illiberal? In what sense? Classical liberals were largely nationalists. Remember, the question was whether states would need to be based on a national identity. There was no Austro-Hungarian identity or ethos that would've covered everyone from Italians to Ukrainians; empires like that just included every bit of land they could grab. A liberal was far more likely to agree with the idea that states with an a identity basis would be preferable to states that just existed to grab and rule. Today liberal nationalism is such an essential part of the Western worldview that we forget to point out that we're nationalists... 
 
Calling nationalism illiberal sounds a lot like anglospheric myopia. In large nations it's possible to believe that eschewing international co-operation or walling yourself behind trade barriers would make sense, but in small nations it's obvious that it would be suicide and you don't see many nationalists of the chauvinist/isolationist type. Ethnic nationalism is far less exclusionary outside states like the US where ethnicity is considered to be a pure bloodline issue rather than something you could even join. So on...

Nationalism isn't fundamentally conservative. National liberation movements of nations that do not have their own states tend to include leftists as well, even far leftists (many of those European independence movements that blow up bombs every once in a while are Marxist). Once a nation gets that state, the leftists find other causes and nationalism ends up a right-wing thing, maybe even a conservative thing (something to be defended instead of a distant, utopian goal calling for struggle against prevailing norms). 
 
A century or two ago the equivalents of conservatives were often monarchists or imperialists while nationalism was the radical, progressive ideology. Nationalism is even embedded in Marxist-Leninist theory as an inevitable step in the historical development of societies towards socialism and Lenin even (partly) stayed true to his word once in power of a country with many separatist minority nationalities. 
 
Even today we see leftists who dislike Western nationalists eagerly supporting nationalists of small non-Western nations. Nationalism of small nations is a fundamentally anti-imperial ideology. (Of course, those people rarely realize that the opposites of nationalism, like "multiculturalism", are really good building blocks for an imperialist ethos and thus certain to not produce the unwarlike societies they imagine themselves to be building.)