Michael Booth
By Michael Booth
‘What’s there not to love?” actor Will Ferrell enthuses in the second episode of NBC’s expat-comedy Welcome to Sweden. “Picking blueberries, outhouses, a year off if you have a baby — even if you don’t have a baby, just a year off. Your family around constantly. Lagom — not too much, not too little. I mean, they’re doing it right over here.”
Ferrell is in character, but his fervour is all too familiar. The United States is in the midst of an episode of Scandimania, brought on in part by the habitually high placing of Sweden and its similarly prosperous, egalitarian, collectivist neiaghbors — Denmark, Norway, Iceland and Finland — in global rankings of everything from happiness to lack of corruption, gender equality and consumption of organic root vegetables.
It is true, the old Viking tribes excel in many of these areas, but I fear, lately, we non-Scandis have become rather blinded by the Northern Lights.
Consider the glowing reports on Finnish schools (the best in the world, says Smithsonian Magazine, though the latest rankings show they are slipping), Norwegian prisons (“superior” claims the Atlantic — it helps that Norway barely has any criminals) and Swedish road safety (New York Mayor Bill de Blasio wants to borrow the model, though I suspect that speeding fines that rise with income wouldn’t be popular in Manhattan). And there’s the adulation of Nordic cuisine (is there a US publication that hasn’t gone foraging with René Redzepi? Car and Driver, maybe).
The Washington Post is not immune to Scandinavia’s charms, recently marvelling at how Danish branches of McDonald’s manage to pay their employees 2.5 times US McDonald’s workers’ wages (clue: When about 75 percent of earnings disappear as income and consumption taxes, higher wages are more necessity than choice).
The New York Times also seems to have a crush on the Nordics. “Joy Is Always in Season,” it gushed in a piece on Denmark (the latest Gallup polls indicate that’s less true than it once was), and last month the Times assured us that “A Big Safety Net and Strong Job Market Can Coexist. Just Ask Scandinavia.” (unemployment is 5.6 percent in the US, vs 8.1 percent in Sweden, 8.9pc in Finland and 6.4pc in Denmark.)
I live in Denmark, and although it appears to have been surpassed as the happiest country in the world by Panama, Costa Rica or Fiji (depending on which list you believe), it is still a pretty great country, especially in which to raise kids. But Scandinavia is not the utopia that American liberals or the 11 million Americans of Nordic descent often make it out to be, just as it is not the quasi-commie, statist gulag that those on the right would often have us believe.
Plummeting oil prices have made the Norwegians jumpy, for instance. The oil boom that began in the early 1970s transformed them from the butt of country-bumpkin jokes to the Beverly Hillbillies of the north. But now that revenue is declining, and their economy is stuttering for the first time in decades.
Meanwhile, the Norwegians seem to have lost their parsimonious, workaholic, Lutheran mojo. Norwegians treat Friday as a “free day” and take more sick leave than anyone else in Europe, if not the world — a law enshrines their right to claim sick days even while on holiday.
Sweden, too, has its problems. It is struggling with increasing racial tension — as evidenced by the firebombing of a mosque in Eskilstunaon on Christmas Day.
It has also seen the rise of a hitherto gagged right wing. The Sweden Democrats party, which has its roots in the neo-Nazi movement, won 13 percent of the vote in September’s general election. Some credit its rise to Sweden’s “open door” immigration policy; others point to the poor integration of those immigrants and their resulting overrepresentation in crime and unemployment figures.
WP-Bloomberg
By Michael Booth
‘What’s there not to love?” actor Will Ferrell enthuses in the second episode of NBC’s expat-comedy Welcome to Sweden. “Picking blueberries, outhouses, a year off if you have a baby — even if you don’t have a baby, just a year off. Your family around constantly. Lagom — not too much, not too little. I mean, they’re doing it right over here.”
Ferrell is in character, but his fervour is all too familiar. The United States is in the midst of an episode of Scandimania, brought on in part by the habitually high placing of Sweden and its similarly prosperous, egalitarian, collectivist neiaghbors — Denmark, Norway, Iceland and Finland — in global rankings of everything from happiness to lack of corruption, gender equality and consumption of organic root vegetables.
It is true, the old Viking tribes excel in many of these areas, but I fear, lately, we non-Scandis have become rather blinded by the Northern Lights.
Consider the glowing reports on Finnish schools (the best in the world, says Smithsonian Magazine, though the latest rankings show they are slipping), Norwegian prisons (“superior” claims the Atlantic — it helps that Norway barely has any criminals) and Swedish road safety (New York Mayor Bill de Blasio wants to borrow the model, though I suspect that speeding fines that rise with income wouldn’t be popular in Manhattan). And there’s the adulation of Nordic cuisine (is there a US publication that hasn’t gone foraging with René Redzepi? Car and Driver, maybe).
The Washington Post is not immune to Scandinavia’s charms, recently marvelling at how Danish branches of McDonald’s manage to pay their employees 2.5 times US McDonald’s workers’ wages (clue: When about 75 percent of earnings disappear as income and consumption taxes, higher wages are more necessity than choice).
The New York Times also seems to have a crush on the Nordics. “Joy Is Always in Season,” it gushed in a piece on Denmark (the latest Gallup polls indicate that’s less true than it once was), and last month the Times assured us that “A Big Safety Net and Strong Job Market Can Coexist. Just Ask Scandinavia.” (unemployment is 5.6 percent in the US, vs 8.1 percent in Sweden, 8.9pc in Finland and 6.4pc in Denmark.)
I live in Denmark, and although it appears to have been surpassed as the happiest country in the world by Panama, Costa Rica or Fiji (depending on which list you believe), it is still a pretty great country, especially in which to raise kids. But Scandinavia is not the utopia that American liberals or the 11 million Americans of Nordic descent often make it out to be, just as it is not the quasi-commie, statist gulag that those on the right would often have us believe.
Plummeting oil prices have made the Norwegians jumpy, for instance. The oil boom that began in the early 1970s transformed them from the butt of country-bumpkin jokes to the Beverly Hillbillies of the north. But now that revenue is declining, and their economy is stuttering for the first time in decades.
Meanwhile, the Norwegians seem to have lost their parsimonious, workaholic, Lutheran mojo. Norwegians treat Friday as a “free day” and take more sick leave than anyone else in Europe, if not the world — a law enshrines their right to claim sick days even while on holiday.
Sweden, too, has its problems. It is struggling with increasing racial tension — as evidenced by the firebombing of a mosque in Eskilstunaon on Christmas Day.
It has also seen the rise of a hitherto gagged right wing. The Sweden Democrats party, which has its roots in the neo-Nazi movement, won 13 percent of the vote in September’s general election. Some credit its rise to Sweden’s “open door” immigration policy; others point to the poor integration of those immigrants and their resulting overrepresentation in crime and unemployment figures.
WP-Bloomberg
