Northern Lights - The New Yorker
Books FEBRUARY 16, 2015 ISSUE
Northern Lights
Do the Scandinavians really have it all figured out?
BY NATHAN HELLER
TABLE OF CONTENTS
It’s hard to envision the Nordic model ever finding a home on these shores.CREDITILLUSTRATION BY SCRIPT & SEAL
Some say that the American Dream is not what it once was: wages are low, retirement is not a parachute glide but a plunge, and those chosen to fix such problems labor at undoing one another’s laws. For these doubters, there are the Swedes. On any given day, a Swedish man—call him Viggo—might be reclining on a sofa underneath a Danish lamp shaped like an artichoke. He is an artist, and he has a pension. He is wearing boldly colored pants. His young wife, Ebba, is a neurosurgeon, though she has never paid a krona in tuition, and her schedule runs between the operating table and the laboratory. Things are busy. She and Viggo have small kids (the government gives them a combined four hundred and eighty days of maternity and paternity leave for every child), and when the younger ran a fever yesterday he needed to be whisked from day care to the doctor (both charged mostly to the state). Now it’s the weekend. They are in their country house. It’s nothing fancy, just a little place among the birches near the Øresund, but Viggo spiffed it up with some IKEA deckware, and their friends drop by for oysters and beer. As dawn comes, he brews coffee. He is listening to a radio report on the Prime Minister, who brokered a budget agreement among six parties, and then Stieg Larsson, who is being memorialized on-air. He turns the dial to the multiethnic band Icona Pop, which has soared across the global charts. Icona Pop sings, “We’re just living life, and we never stop,” and that is what Sweden now means to Viggo. Freedom to follow your talents. Community and coalition-building all around. American life promises liberty, cultural power, and creative opportunity, but by many measures it’s the Swedes who turned this smorgasbord of concepts into a sustaining meal.
And not only the Swedes. Look to the south, and there is Denmark, where wind power is ascendant and the gorgeous armchairs are as plentiful as herring. Norway has been No. 1 on the Legatum Prosperity Index for years. What unifies the Scandinavians is at once specific (social-democratic government, mutually intelligible languages, a love of sauna) and ineffable (something to do with modesty, a naturalistic cast of mind, and candles). If trivial things are vital to the French, as Mark Twain once suggested, Nordic culture runs to the soft power of a hard settee.
The global pull of Scandinavian life, never weak, continues to strengthen. Sweden was once known for ABBA and dispiriting blue films (“I doubt that pornography is turning any Swedes on to sex,” Susan Sontag wrote), but it’s now the nation of Tove Lo, H&M, and literary mysteries. Finland—which is not strictly Scandinavian, but is often tossed in—gave us Angry Birds and womb chairs. Norway drove Karl Ove Knausgaard to print. Those who loved “Law & Order” or “The West Wing” might today watch “The Killing,” “Wallander,” and “Borgen.” The last issue of Vogue declared the new “It diet” to be eating like a Viking.
Peek behind a fad these days, in other words, and you are apt to find a Scandinavian, pedalling hard. Finland has the West’s finest education system, according to the Organization for Economic Coöperation and Development. Sweden has taken in more refugees, proportionally, than any European country. Icelanders—spawn of a Scandinavian settler colony—buy more books than anyone and draw most of their energy from geothermal power.
The most galling measure of Nordic superiority, though, comes from the Danes. In 2012, Denmark took first place in the United Nations’ inaugural World Happiness Report, having topped similar surveys for decades. By the numbers, there is very little rotten in the state of Denmark, and its neighbors aren’t far behind. Bliss of this kind is startling from a group of countries that are frozen half the year, subsist substantially on preserved fish, and charge among the highest tax rates in the modern world.
One can be forgiven for wondering whether there’s something fishy about the so-called Nordic Miracle itself. Are the Scandinavians really good and prosperous and happy, or do crude measures of goodness, prosperity, and happiness play to their strengths? In “The Almost Nearly Perfect People” (Picador), Michael Booth, a travel journalist, scrutinizes the success of the Scandinavian brand. He points out that many people who speak glowingly of Sweden’s welfare state have never actually been to Sweden, let alone seen its most famous housing project. This “blind spot” has produced facile assessments, Booth believes. He seeks to reappraise the Nordic peoples by observing their behavior in the wild.
He begins, as many people do, with the Danes’ contentment. Look at the data, Booth says, and biases emerge. Prune out wealth as a factor, and countries like Colombia come out on top. Emphasize good health, and Denmark falls farther. In the past decade, the proportion of people who live below its poverty line has nearly doubled, to almost eight per cent. Finland may have fine schools, but it’s one of the least diverse places on the planet. Booth wonders why these countries receive doting praise:
Booth, a British man, came to this work through honest means. His wife is Danish, and he has lived in Copenhagen, with imperfect happiness. He has problems with Danish food. He finds its people “solemn.” (And Copenhageners are said to be the fun Scandinavians, the Ibizans of the tribe.) Danish taxes offend him so deeply that he cannot stop writing about them; at one point, he calculates that a Dane can end up forfeiting up to seventy-two per cent of her income to the state. What does she get in return? Free health care and higher education, a pension that sustains her pre-retirement life style, a living wage if she loses her job—that sort of thing. Booth finds these services “patchy.”
Travelling elsewhere in the region, he sharpens his gaze. He blames Iceland’s 2008 crash on “the classic small, tightly knit Nordic social model”—certain leaders and bankers were school chums—and the bingeing of a sheltered people loosed at the frat party of the American Dream. He points out that the Norwegians take pride in their doughty environmentalism, yet pump more than a million and a half barrels of oil a day and cede manual labor, such as the peeling of fruit, to foreigners (the banana thing); one-third of people of working age don’t work. Finnish leaders have repeatedly sought to portray their people as even drunker than they are, apparently to gain control of the booze industry. And the Swedes? Timid and tense, Booth says. Also, fixated on the character of Donald Duck.
When Booth is not taking the Scandinavians to task, he is being charmed by them, and when he is not doing that he is generalizing from their history. Denmark spent much of its past being bombarded or annexed. Booth writes, “It would be surprising if this long litany of loss and defeat had not had a lasting impact on the Danes, but I would go further. I suspect that it has defined the Danes to a greater extent than any other single factor.” This cigar-hour style of theorization turns up frequently; Booth’s Englishness defines his writing to a greater extent than any other single factor. (“ ‘Whoa, there,’ I said, placing my elderflower cordial on the table. ‘This is heading into fairly dodgy territory, isn’t it?’ ”) His approach to reporting tends to be to look up an expert, let him or her gas on at length, and quote enormous sections of the transcript, misremembered facts and all.
The low bar lets a lot in. Much is made, by Booth and many Scandinavians themselves, of what he calls “their Viking heritage.” He keeps returning to the idea that the Vikings—a rapey seafaring people who assimilated into northern European culture a millennium ago—are the cause of modern Scandinavia’s autonomy, egalitarianism, and restraint. (The Danish word for fair and moderate has origins in the Vikings’ term for passing mead around a fire.) The past casts a long shadow, no doubt, and family patterns die hard. But a thousand years? If there’s a connection between modern Nordic people and the Vikings, it is in the sense that pasta puttanesca from Rao’s probably owes a little to the cultural life of the Romans.
The indulgence of half-baked theories is a minor offense, though. Booth’s project is essentially observational; it aspires to a comic genre that might be called Euro-exotica. The form was well established by the time Twain published “The Innocents Abroad,” in 1869, and it has been carried through the twentieth century by writers as varied as S. J. Perelman and Peter Mayle. It usually involves a witty, stumbling narrator simultaneously charmed and bemused by the foreign nation he encounters. He is a naïf but not a boor: he wants to do everything right, but he is hamstrung by his ignorance of etiquette, by his squeamishness around unwelcome foods, and—this being Europe—by the daily, soul-crushing throes of bureaucracy. Euro-exotica is generally poured in a confectionery mold, light and tart, but its core is an assertion of the narrator’s cultural power. Change the balance of the recipe slightly—make it, say, about the bumbling adventures of a Guatemalan farmer in Florence—and the cookie hardens. Can you believe how these people do things? the Euro-exoticist asks, with the courage of his own convictions. In this sense, Booth’s book is as much about Anglo-American power as it is about the Nordic way.
By the measure of Viking time, Scandinavia’s current social model is new. Mary Wollstonecraft, visiting in the late eighteenth century, lamented “how far the Swedes are from having a just conception of rational equality,” and her complaint was fair for years afterward. Denmark began offering a state benefits program to old people only in 1891. Norway launched insurance for industrial accidents a few years later. Similar schemes proliferated in the early twentieth century, and by the postwar years the modern Nordic welfare state had its distinctive form. The model, crucially, interprets “welfare” to mean not just financial capacity but well-being. It might take into account that a woman forced to defer dreams of motherhood because of work, or vice versa, is hostage to her circumstances even if she’s able to pay her bills. And, rather than simply catch people on their way down, it aspires to minimize the causes of inequality—more climbing web than safety net.
Books FEBRUARY 16, 2015 ISSUE
Northern Lights
Do the Scandinavians really have it all figured out?
BY NATHAN HELLER
TABLE OF CONTENTS
It’s hard to envision the Nordic model ever finding a home on these shores.CREDITILLUSTRATION BY SCRIPT & SEAL
Some say that the American Dream is not what it once was: wages are low, retirement is not a parachute glide but a plunge, and those chosen to fix such problems labor at undoing one another’s laws. For these doubters, there are the Swedes. On any given day, a Swedish man—call him Viggo—might be reclining on a sofa underneath a Danish lamp shaped like an artichoke. He is an artist, and he has a pension. He is wearing boldly colored pants. His young wife, Ebba, is a neurosurgeon, though she has never paid a krona in tuition, and her schedule runs between the operating table and the laboratory. Things are busy. She and Viggo have small kids (the government gives them a combined four hundred and eighty days of maternity and paternity leave for every child), and when the younger ran a fever yesterday he needed to be whisked from day care to the doctor (both charged mostly to the state). Now it’s the weekend. They are in their country house. It’s nothing fancy, just a little place among the birches near the Øresund, but Viggo spiffed it up with some IKEA deckware, and their friends drop by for oysters and beer. As dawn comes, he brews coffee. He is listening to a radio report on the Prime Minister, who brokered a budget agreement among six parties, and then Stieg Larsson, who is being memorialized on-air. He turns the dial to the multiethnic band Icona Pop, which has soared across the global charts. Icona Pop sings, “We’re just living life, and we never stop,” and that is what Sweden now means to Viggo. Freedom to follow your talents. Community and coalition-building all around. American life promises liberty, cultural power, and creative opportunity, but by many measures it’s the Swedes who turned this smorgasbord of concepts into a sustaining meal.
And not only the Swedes. Look to the south, and there is Denmark, where wind power is ascendant and the gorgeous armchairs are as plentiful as herring. Norway has been No. 1 on the Legatum Prosperity Index for years. What unifies the Scandinavians is at once specific (social-democratic government, mutually intelligible languages, a love of sauna) and ineffable (something to do with modesty, a naturalistic cast of mind, and candles). If trivial things are vital to the French, as Mark Twain once suggested, Nordic culture runs to the soft power of a hard settee.
The global pull of Scandinavian life, never weak, continues to strengthen. Sweden was once known for ABBA and dispiriting blue films (“I doubt that pornography is turning any Swedes on to sex,” Susan Sontag wrote), but it’s now the nation of Tove Lo, H&M, and literary mysteries. Finland—which is not strictly Scandinavian, but is often tossed in—gave us Angry Birds and womb chairs. Norway drove Karl Ove Knausgaard to print. Those who loved “Law & Order” or “The West Wing” might today watch “The Killing,” “Wallander,” and “Borgen.” The last issue of Vogue declared the new “It diet” to be eating like a Viking.
Peek behind a fad these days, in other words, and you are apt to find a Scandinavian, pedalling hard. Finland has the West’s finest education system, according to the Organization for Economic Coöperation and Development. Sweden has taken in more refugees, proportionally, than any European country. Icelanders—spawn of a Scandinavian settler colony—buy more books than anyone and draw most of their energy from geothermal power.
The most galling measure of Nordic superiority, though, comes from the Danes. In 2012, Denmark took first place in the United Nations’ inaugural World Happiness Report, having topped similar surveys for decades. By the numbers, there is very little rotten in the state of Denmark, and its neighbors aren’t far behind. Bliss of this kind is startling from a group of countries that are frozen half the year, subsist substantially on preserved fish, and charge among the highest tax rates in the modern world.
One can be forgiven for wondering whether there’s something fishy about the so-called Nordic Miracle itself. Are the Scandinavians really good and prosperous and happy, or do crude measures of goodness, prosperity, and happiness play to their strengths? In “The Almost Nearly Perfect People” (Picador), Michael Booth, a travel journalist, scrutinizes the success of the Scandinavian brand. He points out that many people who speak glowingly of Sweden’s welfare state have never actually been to Sweden, let alone seen its most famous housing project. This “blind spot” has produced facile assessments, Booth believes. He seeks to reappraise the Nordic peoples by observing their behavior in the wild.
He begins, as many people do, with the Danes’ contentment. Look at the data, Booth says, and biases emerge. Prune out wealth as a factor, and countries like Colombia come out on top. Emphasize good health, and Denmark falls farther. In the past decade, the proportion of people who live below its poverty line has nearly doubled, to almost eight per cent. Finland may have fine schools, but it’s one of the least diverse places on the planet. Booth wonders why these countries receive doting praise:
Where were the discussions about Nordic totalitarianism and how uptight the Swedes are; about how the Norwegians have been corrupted by their oil wealth to the point where they can’t even be bothered to peel their own bananas (really: we’ll get to that later); how the Finns are self-medicating themselves into oblivion; how the Danes are in denial about their debt, their vanishing work ethic, and their place in the world; and how the Icelanders are, essentially, feral?
Booth, a British man, came to this work through honest means. His wife is Danish, and he has lived in Copenhagen, with imperfect happiness. He has problems with Danish food. He finds its people “solemn.” (And Copenhageners are said to be the fun Scandinavians, the Ibizans of the tribe.) Danish taxes offend him so deeply that he cannot stop writing about them; at one point, he calculates that a Dane can end up forfeiting up to seventy-two per cent of her income to the state. What does she get in return? Free health care and higher education, a pension that sustains her pre-retirement life style, a living wage if she loses her job—that sort of thing. Booth finds these services “patchy.”
Travelling elsewhere in the region, he sharpens his gaze. He blames Iceland’s 2008 crash on “the classic small, tightly knit Nordic social model”—certain leaders and bankers were school chums—and the bingeing of a sheltered people loosed at the frat party of the American Dream. He points out that the Norwegians take pride in their doughty environmentalism, yet pump more than a million and a half barrels of oil a day and cede manual labor, such as the peeling of fruit, to foreigners (the banana thing); one-third of people of working age don’t work. Finnish leaders have repeatedly sought to portray their people as even drunker than they are, apparently to gain control of the booze industry. And the Swedes? Timid and tense, Booth says. Also, fixated on the character of Donald Duck.
When Booth is not taking the Scandinavians to task, he is being charmed by them, and when he is not doing that he is generalizing from their history. Denmark spent much of its past being bombarded or annexed. Booth writes, “It would be surprising if this long litany of loss and defeat had not had a lasting impact on the Danes, but I would go further. I suspect that it has defined the Danes to a greater extent than any other single factor.” This cigar-hour style of theorization turns up frequently; Booth’s Englishness defines his writing to a greater extent than any other single factor. (“ ‘Whoa, there,’ I said, placing my elderflower cordial on the table. ‘This is heading into fairly dodgy territory, isn’t it?’ ”) His approach to reporting tends to be to look up an expert, let him or her gas on at length, and quote enormous sections of the transcript, misremembered facts and all.
The low bar lets a lot in. Much is made, by Booth and many Scandinavians themselves, of what he calls “their Viking heritage.” He keeps returning to the idea that the Vikings—a rapey seafaring people who assimilated into northern European culture a millennium ago—are the cause of modern Scandinavia’s autonomy, egalitarianism, and restraint. (The Danish word for fair and moderate has origins in the Vikings’ term for passing mead around a fire.) The past casts a long shadow, no doubt, and family patterns die hard. But a thousand years? If there’s a connection between modern Nordic people and the Vikings, it is in the sense that pasta puttanesca from Rao’s probably owes a little to the cultural life of the Romans.
The indulgence of half-baked theories is a minor offense, though. Booth’s project is essentially observational; it aspires to a comic genre that might be called Euro-exotica. The form was well established by the time Twain published “The Innocents Abroad,” in 1869, and it has been carried through the twentieth century by writers as varied as S. J. Perelman and Peter Mayle. It usually involves a witty, stumbling narrator simultaneously charmed and bemused by the foreign nation he encounters. He is a naïf but not a boor: he wants to do everything right, but he is hamstrung by his ignorance of etiquette, by his squeamishness around unwelcome foods, and—this being Europe—by the daily, soul-crushing throes of bureaucracy. Euro-exotica is generally poured in a confectionery mold, light and tart, but its core is an assertion of the narrator’s cultural power. Change the balance of the recipe slightly—make it, say, about the bumbling adventures of a Guatemalan farmer in Florence—and the cookie hardens. Can you believe how these people do things? the Euro-exoticist asks, with the courage of his own convictions. In this sense, Booth’s book is as much about Anglo-American power as it is about the Nordic way.
By the measure of Viking time, Scandinavia’s current social model is new. Mary Wollstonecraft, visiting in the late eighteenth century, lamented “how far the Swedes are from having a just conception of rational equality,” and her complaint was fair for years afterward. Denmark began offering a state benefits program to old people only in 1891. Norway launched insurance for industrial accidents a few years later. Similar schemes proliferated in the early twentieth century, and by the postwar years the modern Nordic welfare state had its distinctive form. The model, crucially, interprets “welfare” to mean not just financial capacity but well-being. It might take into account that a woman forced to defer dreams of motherhood because of work, or vice versa, is hostage to her circumstances even if she’s able to pay her bills. And, rather than simply catch people on their way down, it aspires to minimize the causes of inequality—more climbing web than safety net.
.