EP218 · Society · first published 2023-10-31
Following the money — teaching children about money | Elina Lappalainen | Negotiator 218
Growth-company journalist and non-fiction author Elina Lappalainen joins Sami Miettinen in October 2023 to discuss her children's book Tornihuoneen salaseura — Rahan jäljillä. The episode has an unusual structure: some of the questions were written by the host's child, and they are the best ones in it. There are two surprises in the substance: Finnish teenagers are not weak at financial literacy but near the top of the PISA comparison, and the most important money lesson for a child is not investing but a buffer. It ends with a direct conversation about the firewall between journalism and commercial collaboration — on a channel that does both. The transcript is auto-captioning, which is disclosed.
Following the money — teaching children about money | Elina Lappalainen | Negotiator 218
Summary: Growth-company journalist and non-fiction author Elina Lappalainen joins Sami Miettinen in October 2023 to discuss her children’s book Tornihuoneen salaseura — Rahan jäljillä. The episode has an unusual structure: some of the questions were written by the host’s child, and they are the best ones in it. There are two surprises in the substance: Finnish teenagers are not weak at financial literacy but near the top of the PISA comparison, and the most important money lesson for a child is not investing but a buffer. It ends with a direct conversation about the firewall between journalism and commercial collaboration — on a channel that does both. The transcript is auto-captioning, which is disclosed.
Guest, connections and source note
Elina Lappalainen is a growth-company journalist at HS Vision and a non-fiction author. Her earlier books include Syötäväksi kasvatetut (2012, winner of the Tieto-Finlandia prize), Nakki lautasella and Pelien valtakunta (2015). The subject of the episode is her first children’s book, Tornihuoneen salaseura — Rahan jäljillä (“The secret society of the tower room — following the money”, Tammi), the opening of a three-part series. The recording is 31 October 2023.
Three disclosures:
- Host and guest are professionally close. Sami Miettinen is an investment banker at Translink, and Lappalainen writes at HS Vision about exactly the growth companies that are his target clients. The connection is stated in the episode’s first minute.
- Some of the questions were written by the host’s child, and the episode goes through them by name. This article refers to them as the child’s questions without the name. They are the best questions in the episode, and that is not a courtesy.
- There is no publisher caption track, so this article is based on YouTube auto-captioning. No verbatim quotation is used.
1. The book, and why its premise is carefully chosen
The plot is quick to describe and it explains why this turned out better than a book plug usually does.
Four children try to earn over a thousand euros. The reason is concrete: one of them has ordered a thousand-euro phone on their mother’s Klarna account without her knowing. The mother moved from South Korea, is a single parent, has just lost her job, and has taken payday loans to get through everyday life. The phone is about to be repossessed — and the children set about solving the problem.
There are three choices in that premise worth noticing.
First: debt comes before investing. The easy route for a financial-education book would be to start from saving and the magic of compound interest. This one starts from a payday loan, unemployment and running out of money. That is a more realistic starting point for a child who lives in such a home.
Second: the irresponsible protagonist learns. Lappalainen notes herself that the protagonist simply buys on the mother’s payment method and then learns that the world does not work that way. Asked whether this is education by stealth, she does not deny it.
Third: the dynamic of four friends. Lappalainen discusses this as craft rather than inspiration, and it is the most useful observation about writing in the episode: in children’s literature and television the foursome recurs, from the Moomins to the Famous Five, because four different characters produce a dynamic in which a problem can be approached from four directions. One character alone can only decide; four have to negotiate.
Illustration. The illustrator is Mitja Mikael Malin, a graphic artist at the games company Seriously — best known for Best Fiends. The episode gets some amusement out of the fact that both author and illustrator have had to delete the game from their phones.
And from that comes a sharp aside Lappalainen makes as an economics journalist: games are designed for continuous billing. Sami adds the investment banker’s angle: games companies are less interesting to a buyer than SaaS companies, because game lifecycles are uncertain. The episode also mentions Playtika’s reputation as a hard-nosed acquirer, and notes that some of the sector’s deals have been good ones.
2. The child’s questions — and why they are better than an adult’s
The episode has an unusual structure: some of the questions come from a child. They are questions an adult does not ask, because the adult thinks they know the answer.
“What is interest?” Lappalainen’s answer is the single best definition in the episode and it is four words: interest is the price of money. From which follows directly why the rise in rates surprised even adults with mortgages — and the episode notes drily that negative rates were quickly forgotten by children too.
“What is the difference between running a business and having a job?” The book’s answer is realistic in a way that is rare: one child’s father has a software startup, and he does not draw much salary from it. Lappalainen’s aim is a picture that is encouraging but not false — companies can do meaningful things, and at the same time entrepreneurship means a smaller salary first.
“What does low-paid mean?” This is the book’s hardest passage and Lappalainen solves it with a graphic: what the median wage is in Finland, what counts as low-paid, how wages are distributed. The reasoning is child-centred too — economic inequality produces envy in children, and the episode mentions both robberies targeting branded clothing and the way brands confer status on social media. The children in the book discuss this among themselves.
And out of it grows the episode’s most usable piece of life advice, which works just as well for an adult: give yourself a reality check. What standard of living do I expect, what kind of life do I want to lead — and does the pay trajectory of my chosen field make that possible? If you want to live more modestly, the range of options is wider. It is budgeting that starts from expectations rather than from expenses.
“Did you have to do research for the book?” The answer is yes, and it is more systematic than you would expect: Lappalainen went to the Yrityskylä business-education centre with a school class and bought the social studies textbooks for every year group to see how economic matters are treated in them.
Fact boxes. The book carries information boxes interleaved with the narrative — the value of money, inflation, deflation, interest. Sami notes he used the same technique in his own book Uusi neuvotteluvalta: the lessons are recapped separately at the end of a chapter.
3. Lappalainen’s own story: the camera was a capital investment
The episode’s best single anecdote, and a better lesson in economics than any textbook example.
Lappalainen started earning young: she wrote pieces for Savon Sanomat while still at school and earned around 1,700 markka a month. She saved the money and bought a Nikon SLR.
And here is what turns the story into a lesson: the camera was not a reward but a capital investment, because afterwards she could sell photographs as well. Income grew because the purchase increased her capacity to earn.
That is the same structure as any investment, but at a child’s scale and without a single piece of jargon. It is also why Lappalainen says plainly that a child should be taught to earn money, not only to save pocket money.
On the practical side she offers one concrete threshold: once there are a few hundred euros in the account, the sum begins to enable choices. Once ten months have produced four hundred, you can make a larger purchase than monthly money allows.
4. First surprise: Finns are not actually weak at financial literacy
This is the episode’s most important factual correction, and it is checkable.
Sami puts the common view: Finnish adults are weak at financial skills and school teaches them badly. Lappalainen does not accept it, and her answer has two parts.
First, a generational difference. Her observation is that primary school as experienced in the 1970s–80s and 1990s is a different thing from today’s curriculum. Economic matters are now covered in home economics and social studies, and the subject has been brought down into primary school.
Second, a measurement. PISA has also measured financial literacy, and on Lappalainen’s account Finland was second best of around twenty countries studied — Estonia was top, and Finland shared second place with Canada. Sweden did not take part at the time.
This matches the results of PISA’s 2018 financial literacy assessment, in which Estonia was the highest-performing participant and Finland was in the leading group. The claim points the right way, and its conclusion matters more than the number: the belief that Finns are weak at financial literacy comes from adults’ own school history, not from today’s young people’s competence.
Lappalainen raises two further results from the same data, and they are the most interesting in the episode from an equality standpoint:
- Girls and boys performed equally well.
- There were no large differences between schools in Finland.
The second is the central quality characteristic of the Finnish comprehensive school more generally, and it is worth reading as background to everything said about schooling.
She nonetheless concedes that there is no separate course in personal finance, and that vocational education could have more. And she names the question that stays open: what is the tone or ideology of the teaching? That is not settled by adding hours.
5. Second surprise: a buffer before an equity savings account
This is the episode’s weightiest position, and it is weighty precisely because it does not line up along party lines.
Lappalainen supports the equity savings account and popular capitalism. Her reasoning is direct: investing is a good way to accumulate wealth patiently, and she regards the equity savings account introduced by the left-led government as important — equivalents have existed in the other Nordic countries for decades, in part on lighter tax terms.
She also supports a societal nudge: the idea that an investment account would be opened for a child automatically, so that families whose parents would not do it themselves are included too. She notes that even doctors of economics and professional economists often fail to do it — not out of ignorance but out of never getting round to it.
And then comes the passage that makes the position coherent. She finds it contradictory to have a government programme that simultaneously promotes equity saving and reduces support for the least well-off. Her argument is not distributive but structural:
You cannot teach financial skills to a family that has nothing to start from. First you need a basic income and an economically safe level. Only on top of that can you build an investment account.
She also makes a behavioural argument for the buffer, and it is the episode’s best single insight: a buffer changes how you think. When income from work stops, without a buffer the next step is immediately benefits. With a buffer there is something in between that a person defends — and that defending is itself a financial skill.
This is the same observation Merja Mähkä and Esa Juntunen made four episodes earlier from a different starting point: a small buffer of your own is a liberating factor. The difference is that Lappalainen is looking at it from the position of a family that has none.
The host’s position. Sami states his own view that Finland has the EU’s highest marginal tax rate, at 59.4 per cent. Lappalainen marks the boundary here unusually clearly: the book is not political and as an economics journalist she keeps her own counsel, but the book is business-positive. The distinction is a good one and deserves to be respected in this article too.
6. What the book is missing — the author’s own answer
A rare passage: the guest names her own work’s blind spot, and does so precisely.
The book’s focus is the household — earning, saving, budgeting, debt. On Lappalainen’s account it covers nearly every area of economic agency from a child’s point of view.
What is missing from it is the market economy and how companies work. Her own phrasing is vivid: when you walk around town you pass large food companies and car companies, and behind each of them is a founder or a founding group. How those companies came about and how they operate — that was left out.
She would have liked a stronger ending in that direction. The book has a chapter on investing in which the children go to meet investors, but it remains a hint. Bureaucracy, and matters like limited companies and VAT, were deliberately excluded — they would have been too much.
This is a useful note for a reader considering the book: it teaches a child’s economics, not economics.
Easter eggs. The illustrations carry real company brands — including Swappie, which fits the plot naturally, since the company’s business is refurbishing phones. The Pikkuyrittäjät programme and a work-experience placement also appear. The illustrations contain cameo characters that only open up visually — Mikael Rautanen is mentioned.
7. Audiobook economics: the market grew, the author’s share shrank
The publishing-industry section is short but contains one genuine tension, presented from both sides.
The author’s side: an author receives on average considerably less from an audiobook than from a physical book. Lappalainen’s recommendation is therefore direct: buy children’s books as picture books. The reasoning is not only financial — an illustrated children’s book is not the same work as an audiobook, because the picture carries part of the content. In this book that is literal: some of the cameo characters exist only in the illustrations.
The market’s side: the euro value of the publishing market has grown enormously with audiobooks. The total pot is larger, even though an individual work’s author share is smaller.
And the host’s side: Sami says he is a massive audiobook user and listens at double speed, because he finds it a more efficient way to take in information.
Three positions, all true at once. It is a good illustration that “audiobooks are good/bad” is a badly posed question: for whom, for which work, and from what angle determine the answer.
8. The firewall: journalism and commercial collaboration
The episode’s final section is its most honest, and it matters on this channel in particular, because the channel does both. This article series has just published two preceding episodes made in commercial collaboration — so the conversation applies to those texts too.
Sami’s own arrangement, which he describes himself: his guests include CEOs, board chairs and investors, and sometimes a guest’s company pays to appear.
Lappalainen’s answer is structural rather than moralising, and it is the episode’s clearest distinction:
- In a newsroom the firewall is organisational. HS has separate content-marketing departments, the content is labelled as content marketing, different people make it, and the newsroom has nothing to do with it. Lappalainen could not write a bought story.
- On an individual creator’s channel the firewall is reputation. Sami can publish both paid and unpaid content on the same channel because his credibility is his capital — if he burns it, he burns the whole business.
- A newsroom does not have that option, because the reputational risk falls not on an individual but on the paper’s entire stock of trust. Which is why the separation has to be structural rather than personal.
Sami concedes directly in the episode that in his model the two do combine. That is a more honest outcome than claiming a firewall that does not exist.
Two examples mentioned in the episode, treated briefly here.
Media criticism without a target. Sami refers to media criticism made by Mika Aaltola and notes that it did not say in which outlet advertising sales and journalistic content had been coupled. The observation is methodological rather than personal: a claim that editorial independence has been breached is checkable only if it names the target. An unnamed version is neither checkable nor defensible.
A publicly funded podcast and a member of parliament. Sami criticises an arrangement in which MP Pauli Aalto-Setälä hosts the Riita podcast paid for by Yle. His reasoning concerns the use of taxpayers’ money. This is the host’s position, and it is marked as such here; the episode does not cover Yle’s own justification for the arrangement.
The third example is the most illuminating, because it comes from the journalist’s side and concerns which way the power runs. Lappalainen recounts that when the HS Vision team requested interviews with Slush keynote speakers — often from large US technology companies — many declined. Her observation is that the newsroom wanted to tell its readers it had interviewed a big name, and the company had every right to ask what it got out of it.
That is a good place to end the article, because it turns the whole conversation the right way round: a firewall is not only a barrier against money coming in — it is also a barrier against the newsroom’s own dependence on access.