Finland marks day of jealousy

HELSINKI, Finland — Shortly after 6 a.m. Thursday, people began lining up outside the central office of the Finnish tax administration. It was chilly and dark, but they claimed their places, eager to be the first to tap into a mother lode of data.

Pamplona can boast of the running of the bulls, Rio de Janeiro has Carnival, but Helsinki is alone in observing “National Jealousy Day,” when every Finnish citizen’s taxable income is made public at 8 a.m. sharp.

The annual Nov. 1 data dump is the starting gun for a countrywide game of who’s up and who’s down. Which tousled tech entrepreneur has sold his company? Which Instagram celebrity is, in fact, broke? Which retired executive is weaseling out of his tax liabilities?

Esa Saarinen, a professor of philosophy at Aalto University in Helsinki, described it as “a fairly positive form of gossip.”

Finland is unusual, even among the Nordic states, in turning its release of personal tax data — to comply with government transparency laws — into a public ritual of comparison. Though some complain that the tradition is an invasion of privacy, most say it has helped the country resist the trend toward growing inequality that has crept across of the rest of Europe.

“We’re looking at the gap between normal people and those rich, rich people — is it getting too wide?” said Tuomo Pietilainen, a reporter at Helsingin Sanomat, the country’s largest newspaper.

“When we do publish the figures, the people who have lower salary start to think, ‘Why do my colleagues make more?’ ” he said. “Our work has the effect that people are paid more.”

Employers, he said, “have to behave better than in conditions where there is no transparency.”

A large dosage of Thursday’s reporting concerned the income of minor celebrities, and one journalist moaned at the thought of profiling another beauty pageant winner, noting that, “usually, they are broke as hell.”