When I was writing a book on working life, I first began to properly read the international literature on economic history, and the following ten years of teaching, collaboration with Marku Kuisma led to my lecturing on the long history of capitalism from early capitalism until the present global system.

Pondering the different reasons for the rise and fall of various centres combined naturally with the comparative history of civilisation, whose classics we dealt with in academic reading circles. The history of civilisation wound its way back to what kind of adaptive mechanisms different living conditions produced and linked in with the larger modern debate on the decrease or increase of violence and the development of empathy. The theme of institutional or social trust continued in my treatment of the subject of social fragmentation or cohesion at a watershed moment of Finnish history.

I worked with all this in a wide range of publications on the history of internal peace in Finland and explanatory theories on political violence and the replacement of armed groups by the State and the State’s relationship with the market economy (2011–2012). In truth, I decided to develop the old themes of the history of civilisation and morals produced by Adam Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment in a new set of circumstances.

Nuoriso – mainettaan parempi? (‘Youths – better than their reputation?’ 2013) was no book of current affairs; rather, it was an attempt at generational psychohistory in relation to economic conditions, a parallel work to the international debate on altruism and empathy. Its central message was that years of economic growth and broadened expectations support individualisation, the good treatment of children and empathic skills, while diminishing expectations cause people to strengthen their identification with in-groups against out-groups and leads to the emphasis of collective identity at the expense of individual identity.