I have discovered the driver of the Finnish education miracle! It's not the lack of testing, or the well-paid teachers, or the late school-starting age. It's that Finns are the top coffee drinkers in the world, by a long shot. Per-capita consumption is 12 kilos a year, three times that in the the US. Norway is a distant second at 10 kilos.
Since each kilo produces about 120 shots of espresso, this implies that Finns (including kids!) average four cups coffee a day. Take the kids out of this denominator (17% of the population is under 15) and you get closer to five cups a day per adult. According to recent, crappy research on the health effects of coffee, everyone in Finland should now be dead.
