Hi, I’m Tim, a German guy from the Ruhr Area living in Finland. In this blog I write long reads about Finnish politics, culture, society,  the political economy and everything else I find interesting.

“Why are you in Finland?” is a common question I hear as if it were something weird. I came here as an exchange student and walked right into the common trap Finns set up for unsuspecting foreigners: romance. I fell in love with a local girl and I am now happily married with three little children. After some years in Tampere and short stints in Helsinki and Australia, I’m back where I started: Turku, Finland’s oldest city (täl pual jokke, for the locals).

In my texts I concern myself with broader political and economic developments, their historical context, path dependencies and the larger, less visible political currents running through society. My particular interests are industry, manufacturing and trade and their relationship with issues such as inequality, economic concentration, urbanization and the political consequences of these developments. I’m no activist and interested in the world as it is and not how I would like it to be and therefore try to separate what I want as much as I can from what I’m seeing.

This blog is just my hobby and I write whenever I find the time. I work in industry where I babysit robots for a living. Robots are cool but really, really dumb. They need help.

You can follow me on Twitter @TimRuhr and contact me there or by using this contact form. You can also subscribe to my quarterly newsletter if you like. Comments are very welcome.