The Almost Nearly Perfect People

Michael Booth, a British journalist living in Copenhagen with his Danish wife, reads that Denmark has been named the happiest country in the world by the University of Leicester's Satisfaction with Life Index. The finding baffles him. His daily life involves sullen checkout clerks, punishing taxes, dreary weather, and pedestrians who tut when he crosses the street on a red light. He discovers that Denmark has topped European well-being surveys since 1973, with Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Iceland close behind in virtually every global ranking. Skeptical of the glowing international coverage, Booth decides to travel through all five countries, interviewing historians, anthropologists, economists, and politicians, to test whether the so-called Nordic miracle holds up to scrutiny.

Booth begins in Denmark, attending a Midsummer's Eve party at a friend's summerhouse. He observes traits he associates with Danish contentedness: guests mingling easily across class lines, a relaxed attitude toward work (Danes average 1,559 working hours per year compared to the American average of 2,087), and children granted unusual freedom. More than 20 percent of the working-age population does no work and lives on generous benefits, sustained by a "flexicurity" system that blends easy hiring-and-firing rules with a robust safety net. To explain how this society came into being, Booth traces Denmark's long history of territorial loss, from the 1397 Kalmar Union, which placed all of Scandinavia under Danish rule, through the cession of Schleswig and Holstein to Prussia in 1864, which collectively stripped the country of roughly a third of its land and population. He argues that these losses produced a "positive parochialization" captured in a nationally known saying: "What was lost without will be found within." The Danes turned inward, built agricultural cooperatives, and established universal education, creating a culture of humble pride and self-sufficiency.

Booth examines the prevailing explanation for Nordic success: economic equality, as measured by the Gini Coefficient, a tool for quantifying income distribution. Yet Denmark, consistently rated happiest, is not the most equal Nordic nation. He finds that social cohesion may matter more. In a 2011 survey by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 88.3 percent of Danes expressed high trust in others, more than any other country. Economist Christian Bjørnskov calculates that this trust may account for as much as 25 percent of GDP and argues it predates the welfare state, while Copenhagen Business School professor Ove Kaj Pedersen insists the welfare state itself created trust. The Danish tax system is the world's most burdensome, with total rates reaching 58 to 72 percent of income. Yet more than half the adult population either works in the public sector or receives state benefits, making a vote to shrink the state, as Booth writes, "as likely as the turkeys voting for Thanksgiving" (60). Public services do not obviously justify the expense: Denmark ranks sixteenth on the UN Human Development Index and performs poorly on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) education rankings.

Booth identifies three social forces enforcing Danish conformity. The first is Jante Law, a set of fictional commandments from Aksel Sandemose's 1933 novel A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks, including "You shall not believe that you are someone," which suppress individual achievement. The second is hygge, the concept of coziness and conviviality, which anthropologists describe as a vehicle for social control and normative conformity beneath its appealing surface. The third is folkelig, a populist cultural force favoring communal togetherness over individual expression. Booth concludes his Denmark section by arguing that Danish happiness rests on low expectations and denial. Epidemiologist Kaare Christensen's research suggests Danes are "pleasantly surprised to find that not everything is getting more rotten in the state of Denmark" (106). Booth catalogs what they deny: the highest cancer rates in the world, growing private debt, declining productivity, and the fourth-largest per capita environmental footprint globally.

Booth travels to Iceland, which he frames as a cautionary tale. With only 319,000 people, Iceland is a micro-society whose tight social connections, which foster trust elsewhere in the Nordic region, instead produced nepotism and the suppression of dissent. In 2008, its three main banks collapsed after borrowing over $140 billion, ten times the country's GDP. Ordinary citizens had taken out mortgages in foreign currencies, and the krona lost almost half its value. Anthropologist Gísli Pálsson traces the crisis to a 1991 decision allowing fishermen to trade government-allocated fishing quotas, which concentrated wealth among roughly 15 families who then moved profits into banking. Booth argues that decades of American military presence pulled Iceland away from its Nordic roots and toward free-market capitalism.

In Norway, Booth attends Syttende Mai (May 17, Constitution Day) in Oslo, where his initial skepticism gives way to admiration as he watches multiethnic children marching in traditional folk costumes called bunad. Seven months after Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 people in a bombing and mass shooting, Booth finds no visible security changes, reflecting the Norwegian commitment to openness. He traces Norway's transformation from Scandinavia's poorest nation to the holder of the world's largest sovereign wealth fund, following the 1969 discovery of North Sea oil. The fund owns shares in more than 8,000 companies worldwide, and Norway limits itself to spending 4 percent of the fund annually. Yet oil wealth has made Norwegians work 23 percent fewer hours, and Booth raises the moral contradiction of a nation that sources its own energy from clean hydroelectric power while profiting from selling fossil fuels.

Finland earns Booth's most unguarded affection. He describes Helsinki as refreshingly noncommercial. German expatriate writer Roman Schatz, a beloved media figure in Finland, tells Booth that Finnish dependability is absolute: "If a Finn tells you they are going to bring you firewood on Friday, you can bet your sweet ass the firewood will be there on Friday" (214). Booth explores Finnish taciturnity through anthropologist Edward T. Hall's theory of high-context cultures: In a population of extreme homogeneity, people share so many assumptions that verbal communication becomes nearly unnecessary. He examines the concept of sisu, quiet determination and endurance, and speculates it may mask insecurities rooted in centuries of foreign rule, the Winter War against the Soviets, and decades of Cold War "Finlandization," a period in which Finland maintained nominal independence through careful diplomatic accommodation of the Soviet Union. Finland's world-leading education system appears all the more remarkable against this backdrop. Finnish students consistently rank at or near the top of PISA tests, with only 4 percent variation between the best and worst schools. The secret lies in teacher training: All teachers must hold a master's degree, and programs are oversubscribed by factors of ten.

Booth's final and longest section addresses Sweden, which he calls the hub of Scandinavian culture. He profiles Swedish reticence through ethnologist Åke Daun's classic study Swedish Mentality, which traces the national reserve to a preindustrial past of isolated farming communities. Booth visits Rosengård, Malmö's most notorious immigrant neighborhood, expecting a ghetto but finding well-maintained tower blocks. Almost 15 percent of Sweden's population was born outside the country, and Booth examines the controversial media policy of excluding the anti-immigration Sweden Democrats from public debate, a stance that has not diminished the party's support. He traces the Social Democrats' near-unbroken grip on power through most of the 20th century, labeling the result "benign totalitarianism" and citing the forced sterilization of roughly 60,000 women between 1935 and 1976 as evidence of overreach. He presents historian Henrik Berggren and coauthor Lars Trägårdh's counter-thesis that the Swedish state's true aim was the liberation of individuals from dependence on one another, making Swedes paradoxical "hyper individualists" with the world's highest divorce rate and the most single-person households.

In his epilogue, Booth concedes the region's real problems: aging populations, integration challenges, rising inequality, and suffocating conformity. Yet he contends that the Nordic countries' greatest accomplishment is genuine social mobility. A London School of Economics study found the four main Nordic countries occupied the top four global positions for intergenerational income mobility. He closes with a half-serious plea to the Nordic countries not to unite, joking that if they ever banded together, "the rest of us would not stand a chance" (372).