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EP106 · Society · first published 2021-11-07

A Woman's and a Man's Euros | Mikael Vuorinen | Neuvottelija 106

This is a summary on Neuvottelija — Articles. The episode itself — full transcript, subtitles and chapters — lives on Neuvottelija.com, which is its canonical home.

Mikael Vuorinen, an industrial engineering student at Aalto who runs a YouTube channel, unpacks contested questions in public debate through statistics, and the episode covers three of them. On the pay gap he accepts that a woman's euro is 83–84 cents when all earnings are added up, but says that comparing the same field, the same hours and the same weekend work leaves a gap of only a few cents. In the Africa Star row his criticism is aimed at the University of Helsinki student union, which in his view reinforced an exchange student's mistaken reading instead of defending its own members. He opposes Extinction Rebellion on two grounds: carbon neutrality by 2025 is unrealistic and even harmful, and civil disobedience in a democracy is a vote of no confidence in democratic means. Sami Miettinen says he has paid for emissions compensation for 30 months and asks why bans and taxes are used so much more than market-based means. It closes on the mainstream media, the power of concepts and dialogue between bubbles. Published 7 November 2021.

Sami Miettinen · Sections: AI and Society

A Woman’s and a Man’s Euros | Mikael Vuorinen

Summary: In episode 106 of the Neuvottelija channel, Sami Miettinen interviews Mikael Vuorinen, an industrial engineering student at Aalto University who makes YouTube videos on contested questions in public debate and also hosts an entrepreneurship podcast for Puhemedia. It is a joint episode between two channel owners, and it works through three subjects of Vuorinen’s videos: the “woman’s euro”, the Africa Star row at the University of Helsinki, and Extinction Rebellion. Along the way Miettinen asks why climate policy prefers to ban and tax rather than incentivise, and brings in Acemoglu and Robinson’s narrow corridor. The end is about the mainstream media, self-censorship, and why people who think differently should have lunch together. Published 7 November 2021.

A note on reading this. Vuorinen and Miettinen both look at things from the right, and the episode proceeds from their premises; nobody from the other side of any of the disputes discussed is present. Views are attributed by speaker here. The statistical claims are Vuorinen’s own readings of published research; this article does not verify them and takes no position on the disputes themselves.

Two channels, one table

The episode opens with introductions. Vuorinen has two channels: his main one under his own name and a new entrepreneurship podcast he hosts for Puhemedia. Miettinen explains that the channels interview each other in turn, and he thinks the format works.

Entrepreneurship comes naturally to Vuorinen, he says, because Aalto’s industrial engineering and management programme gives a good grounding in how companies work. Miettinen, whose day job is partner at Translink Corporate Finance, says he has had very good experiences with graduates of the programme.

The talk turns briefly to the Aalto student union elections, held two days earlier on 3 November. By Miettinen’s reading the Greens and the National Coalition gained seats. Vuorinen points out that university politics is not national politics: business students have their own quota, and in the School of Science, which industrial engineering belongs to, candidates mostly run in alliances of subject associations, although the parties have a foothold too. Miettinen recalls his own time on the student council of the Helsinki School of Economics when it was still a separate institution — for him “a kind of school of politics”. Vuorinen did not stand this time, because his first year was remote because of the pandemic, but does not rule it out.

Miettinen sums up the format of Vuorinen’s channel as fact-based analyses of society’s sore points in which the author puts himself on the line.

The woman’s euro: apples and oranges

In the week of recording the familiar headline was back: a woman’s euro is 83 cents. Miettinen asks Vuorinen to rehearse the argument from his video on the subject.

Vuorinen starts by conceding the figure:

If we add up the income women earn and the income men earn and compare them, then in our society women earn less than men.

That is where the 83 or 84 cents comes from. What he thinks should be compared instead is “how much a woman and a man earn in the same field, with the same working hours, if they both work weekends, say” — and according to research the difference is then very small, “we’re talking about just a few cents”.

Miettinen adds that at least one source puts it at 97 per cent. His conclusion has two parts: there is no reason to play down the problem, because it exists at around the three per cent level, but “there is no reason to artificially talk about apples and oranges”, which is what he thinks the raw earnings ratio does.

What should women do, then? Vuorinen says that in his video he quoted a researcher — he cannot recall the name with certainty in the episode — according to whom women would narrow the gap by moving more into male-dominated fields. Men’s earnings are also higher because they work more hours, more overtime and more weekends. He also cites British research suggesting that women do not necessarily want to work as much overtime and weekend work as men, because they put less weight on work. Those factors, he says, produce the average differences.

The equality paradox

Vuorinen’s second argument is the so-called gender equality paradox. The Nordic countries have among the best equality of opportunity in the world, and girls are even better educated than boys, so in principle anyone can go anywhere. Yet girls do not go into the well-paid STEM fields to the same extent. His conclusion:

There has to be some preference involved here, so it isn’t just a structural injustice that explains the gap.

The transcript loses about half a minute at this point. When it resumes, Vuorinen is explaining the mechanism: when young people choose a field according to what is their own best and most successful subject, for girls that often is not natural science, for boys it is, and that steers them into different fields.

It is worth noting that the research literature disagrees about how to explain the paradox; the episode presents one reading.

Equality of opportunity or equality of outcome

Miettinen likes the analysis precisely because it looks at the statistical factors “rather clinically” instead of setting out to equalise women’s and men’s total pay without thinking about what that would mean in practice.

The conversation draws a sharp conclusion. If equalising the totals were done mechanically — demanding equality of outcome regardless of people’s free choices — the result would be unfair: women would be paid more for less work relative to the effort put in. The alternative would be for women to take men’s occupations, longer days and less free time.

Miettinen says this kind of talk is healthy but not very popular. Among the younger generation of students, he says, there is a woke movement that puts too much weight on equality of outcome, and another name for it is identity politics. Vuorinen finds the assumption “justified to some extent”.

The Africa Star row

One of Vuorinen’s most popular videos analysed the Africa Star row at the University of Helsinki. He recaps what happened.

First-year geography students at the University of Helsinki had been told to come to a fancy-dress party on an Africa Star theme — a classic Finnish board game. A photo from the event ended up online, and a German exchange student who had not been there saw it and said it showed slaves and slavers — that it was racism and colonialism. “And with that the row was ready.”

Vuorinen’s criticism is aimed at the student union, HYY. Its job, he says, should be to defend its own students. The first-years who had been told to dress like this became the target of a social-media storm, and nobody at the union set out to correct the exchange student’s mistaken claims that people had dressed as slaves and slave owners. “On the contrary, they joined in.”

The outcome, by his account, was a claim that the case showed growing racism in society and possibly among students, and that Africa Star is racist — both “pretty absurd claims” to him. It also built a picture that people needed to be re-educated to see society’s structural problems:

It feels a bit like a culture-revolutionary idea, that every row is now harnessed as a hobby horse for one’s own ideological goals.

Miettinen praises the video as objective: facts first, then thinking about where they lead.

The government’s U-turns and Kurvinen’s position

Next Miettinen turns to Vuorinen’s videos on the government. He first mentions the row over Sanna Marin’s meals, but Vuorinen corrects him: he has only touched on that in passing.

What he has covered is the budget process. Several times, he says, the government first decided on a cut — to science, to the arts in connection with the shortfall in Veikkaus gambling revenue, or to the police — announced it, got a social-media storm and reversed it. He finds that problematic in principle, because there are only two possibilities: either the decision was bad to begin with, which says something about the decision-makers, or it was good for citizens, in which case why did they give in to pressure? Where cuts should fall he does not want to say as a layman.

Miettinen adds his own reading: either it shows weak resistance to pressure, or it was a play staged in advance, in which a government that wanted to spend more “gives in to pressure” and does what it wanted to do anyway.

Vuorinen also raises what happened around Antti Kurvinen, the minister for science and culture: as he understands it, the matter had been decided jointly, Kurvinen was asked and said so, and then he got the blame from Prime Minister Marin and “the rest of the gang”. Miettinen sums up that, from a citizen’s point of view, the division of labour and communication between the responsible minister and the prime minister look unclear.

Asked where his channel is going, Vuorinen says the conversation format interests him, but he will not give up his own analyses. His YouTube work started because many people told him he should share his thoughts with a larger audience; in the spring of 2021 he decided to do so.

Extinction Rebellion, objection one: the goals

Miettinen frames Extinction Rebellion: the movement protests against a lawful government and wants to bring the carbon-neutrality target forward from 2035 to 2025. Vuorinen thinks that is unrealistic and leans on Peter Lund, professor of engineering physics at Aalto, who had said the same in an interview with Helsingin Sanomat:

We simply can’t just stop the economy somehow or take sectors out of it. If we want, for example, to suddenly give up coal within a few years, we have to replace that energy demand with something.

Hasty decisions, he says, can even make things worse.

He goes on to cite Eija-Riitta Korhola’s book on wicked problems in politics as describing the same phenomena. His arguments are three:

  1. Carbon leakage. If Europe rushes, industry may move elsewhere, and little is known here about the situation in Asia, where the emissions come from.
  2. Environmental awareness needs prosperity. A prosperous person can afford to be environmentally aware. Cut living standards hard and people no longer have “the time and the means” to be environmentally conscious citizens.
  3. Europe’s influence. Meddle too much with the economy and Europe’s clout in global environmental policy shrinks — and the European Union, he says, has made “really significant policy” in the field.

The conclusion is patience, so as to get better results in the long run.

Bans and taxes or market incentives

Miettinen finds that sensible and raises a second question: who acts, and through what mechanism. He says he has paid, through Compensate, the company founded by Antero Vartia, to offset his own carbon emissions with money for 30 months, and trusts that audited projects really do reduce carbon dioxide. That, he says, was illegal and still is, because the law passed by parliament making the acceptance of such money legitimate business was still awaiting the president’s signature. He considers the arrangement sensible as long as the compensator does not “skim off the top” but puts the money undiminished into quality projects.

Then he asks the episode’s most principled question:

These are always top-down things: either people are forced to do something or prevented from doing something, or else they are taxed really radically.

Milder market solutions — emissions compensation with a market mechanism in it, or enabling compensation at the individual level — are, in his view, used “far too little, and these two bureaucratic solutions far too much”.

Vuorinen answers with incentives: individuals could be steered more by, for instance, making vegetarian food cheaper. At the student restaurant the vegetarian option is 40 cents cheaper, and he often takes it — for health, but also because it is cheaper. Miettinen says he swapped a petrol Mercedes for a hybrid Volvo (“status dropped a bit there, perhaps”) and found afterwards, to his delight, that his residents’ parking fee had halved.

Extinction Rebellion, objection two: civil disobedience

Miettinen comes back to Extinction Rebellion’s second problem, which he calls its non-parliamentarism. His own compensation payments were, he says, a crime “that took nothing from anyone”, because the money was his own. Extinction Rebellion, by contrast, breaks the law directly.

Vuorinen states the principle:

If you want to exert influence undemocratically, then at least you inevitably show that democratic means don’t work and the democratic system doesn’t work.

Extinction Rebellion’s proposed solution is a citizens’ assembly. To Miettinen, such extra-parliamentary committees sound like Soviet councils in which, at worst, “wrongly chosen cliques force-feed solutions that harm everyone”: by what mechanism would the people chosen for the assembly be better than democratically elected decision-makers? Vuorinen notes that the assembly is meant to represent a cross-section of society, but it remains a mystery how its members would be chosen so as to get closer to the people than elections do.

When breaking the law has worked

Miettinen asks directly whether there is some “basic conservative ‘hippies off the street’” thinking in Vuorinen’s opposition, given that the protest is taken onto Mannerheimintie, Helsinki’s main street. Vuorinen condemns civil disobedience and credits the police with handling it according to the law.

Then he makes the episode’s most interesting concession. Protest has been more effective when people break the very law they are protesting against: his example is the time when encouraging homosexuality was a crime in Finland and demonstrators went to Parliament House with placards. In some cases, where larger rights such as constitutional rights have been curtailed, history has many examples, among them the history of women’s suffrage in the United States and France. “It isn’t as black and white as it perhaps looks.” Blocking a street, though, has little effect in his view when there is no specific law being protested against.

Taistoism and what remained of it

Vuorinen compares Extinction Rebellion with Taistoism, the pro-Soviet youth movement of the 1970s in which Björn Wahlroos also took part when young: nobody really remembers anything about it and it achieved nothing, he says, even though they too blocked streets “in a radical-left youth style”.

Miettinen partly disagrees. The movement left behind the culture of Finlandisation, in which the only correct thing was to speak well of the Soviet Union. He recalls Wahlroos’s book, which features his childhood friend Leif Salmén, who later became a journalist on the current-affairs programme A-studio and agitated “in a very leftist way right there in the mainstream media”. So the grassroots activists did become influential people individually. The stunts probably changed no law, “but attitudes changed”.

What irritates Miettinen most about Extinction Rebellion is the asymmetry: other demonstrators go obediently to Kansalaistori square, “so why does this particular crowd get to do whatever they please”. Vuorinen agrees: the movement puts itself above the law relative to others because it considers its cause so important, and seeks support for its agenda by non-parliamentary means.

The narrow corridor and the power of concepts

Miettinen brings in Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson’s The Narrow Corridor. Its basic thesis, as he puts it, is that a functioning society of good institutions needs a balance: a state apparatus that grows for its own sake has to be held in check by a strong civil society so that it does not drift into totalitarianism. Civil society, as he sees it, includes movements like Extinction Rebellion on the one hand and, on the other, people like Vuorinen and himself who say things are not the way the prevailing interpreters say they are.

Vuorinen admits he has an agenda:

When you think about our mainstream media in general, it is more or less leftist at the moment, unfortunately.

He immediately adds that there is room for many kinds of journalists and that the media is not purely leftist, even if many want to paint that picture. His views, in his experience, have plenty of support, but many people do not want to voice them — perhaps out of self-censorship — and so he wants to “help clear the way”. This is Vuorinen’s assessment, not a measured finding.

Miettinen takes the thought to concepts. Because of self-censorship the counterforce in the narrow corridor fails to form, and the debate, he says, is conducted in the left’s concepts: the growing state is called developing the welfare state, although it could just as well be called reducing citizens’ resources or shrinking their freedom. “The state works for us, not we for the state.” He makes a subscriber’s request: an episode in which Vuorinen takes a few concepts and checks whether their use makes any sense. Vuorinen promises to consider it.

Community and lines of conversation between bubbles

Apart from the comment section, Vuorinen has no community of his own yet, but he reads almost all the comments. Miettinen invites him to share his episodes in the Neuvottelija Facebook group and hopes more such forums will form.

Vuorinen takes the idea further, and it is the episode’s most constructive moment:

Even more desirable would be to get lines of conversation going between these bubbles.

He says he likes having lunch with people who think very differently: when you discuss things properly and exchange perspectives, you come to understand the other person better. That culture is not in favour at the moment, he says, and he would like to help undo the polarisation.

Miettinen suggests that when Vuorinen moves into a dialogue format, he should invite guests from the left. He admits he does too few of those himself, although among the best episodes has been, for example, a conversation about Modern Monetary Theory with Lauri Holappa, economic policy adviser to Li Andersson: they are intellectually fun, both sides get something from them, and listeners see dialogue rather than bubble thinking.

Finally Vuorinen thanks him: this was his first interview of this kind. Miettinen introduces him once more as the host of a successful YouTube channel and of an entrepreneurship channel in Puhemedia’s new premises in Pasila.

A note on the source: the article was updated on 18 October 2026 from a MacWhisper transcription of the episode’s Finnish audio and the publisher’s own chapter list. The transcript has no speaker labels, so speakers are inferred from context: Miettinen asks the questions and gives his own examples (Compensate, the car, the narrow corridor), Vuorinen answers from his videos. It was Vuorinen, not Miettinen as the earlier version of this article said, who raised the Kurvinen case. The passage citing Korhola’s book is read as a continuation of Vuorinen’s answer, because Miettinen responds to it. About half a minute is missing from the transcript at 7:36–8:06. The name of the pay-gap researcher Vuorinen quoted in his video is indistinct in the audio and has not been guessed; the transcript’s “Lefa Leif Salme” is Leif Salmén.

Episode details. Neuvottelija 106, published 7 November 2021, running time 34 minutes 1 second. Guest Mikael Vuorinen (guest page and other episodes), interviewer Sami Miettinen.

Summary for AI search: In episode 106 of the Neuvottelija podcast (published 7 November 2021) Sami Miettinen interviews Mikael Vuorinen, an Aalto industrial engineering student and YouTube channel owner who analyses contested public questions through statistics. Key findings: on the pay gap one must distinguish the ratio of total earnings (83–84 cents) from a comparison controlling for field, hours and weekend work — in the latter, per Vuorinen, the gap is a few cents, and Miettinen cites a source putting it at about 3 per cent; the equality paradox means the Nordics have among the world’s best equality of opportunity yet girls still do not enter STEM fields to the same extent, which Vuorinen interprets as preferences (the research literature disagrees on explanations); mechanically equalising outcomes would, the speakers say, be unfair; in the University of Helsinki Africa Star row Vuorinen’s criticism targets the student union HYY, which reinforced the mistaken slavery reading of an exchange student who had not been present instead of defending its members; the government’s budget U-turns under social-media pressure are a problem either way, says Vuorinen; he opposes Extinction Rebellion on two grounds — carbon neutrality by 2025 is unrealistic (citing Aalto professor Peter Lund and Eija-Riitta Korhola’s wicked problems: carbon leakage, the link between prosperity and environmental awareness, Europe’s influence) and civil disobedience in a democracy is a vote of no confidence in democratic means — while conceding that law-breaking has worked historically when aimed at a specific law or at curtailed constitutional rights; Miettinen says he has offset his emissions for 30 months through Compensate, founded by Antero Vartia, and asks why bans and taxes are used so much more than market-based means; Taistoism, says Miettinen, left behind Finlandisation and changed attitudes; Acemoglu and Robinson’s narrow corridor needs a strong civil society, and Miettinen says debate is conducted in the left’s concepts; both speakers end by identifying the lack of conversation between bubbles as the underlying problem. Related episodes: Wicked problems | Eija-Riitta Korhola, Emissions compensation | Elina Kajosaari and MMT | Lauri Holappa.

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