Simon’s Kindle Notes & Highlights for The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia

The happiest? This dark, wet, dull, flat little country that I now called home, with its handful of stoic, sensible people and the highest taxes in the world? Britain was forty-first on the list. A man at a university had said it, so it must be true.

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Back then, I had come to think of the Danes as essentially decent, hard-working, law-abiding people, rarely prone to public expressions of . . . well, anything much, let alone happiness.

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who cited the fact that ‘people leave their children in buggies outside of cafés, that you aren’t worried they will get stolen . . . that everyone isn’t racing racing racing to get more more more’ as the Danes’s secret to success.

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To paraphrase Lady Bracknell, to win one happiness survey may be regarded as good fortune, to win virtually every one since 1973 is convincing grounds for a definitive anthropological thesis.

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although, sadly in my view, the English never adopted the Scandinavians’ very useful far-far, mor-mor, far-mor, mor-far method of distinguishing between maternal and paternal grandparents.

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The Norwegian Viking Leif Ericson discovered America around AD 1000.

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The Danes work almost half the number of hours per week they did a century ago, and significantly fewer than the rest of Europe: 1,559 hours a year compared with the EU average of 1,749 hours

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the Danes were second only to the Belgians in the laziness stakes – that’s globally.

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few feel pressurised to work at weekends, and you can forget about getting anything done after 1 p.m. on a Friday.

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The New York Times has called Denmark ‘The best place on earth to be laid off’, with unemployment benefits of up to 90 per cent of previous wages for up to two years

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flexicurity,

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As I said, tonight the alcohol is flowing like the river Jordan. Denmark has a much more laissez-faire attitude to booze than the rest of the region; there is no state-owned alcohol monopoly here as there is in the other four Nordic countries.

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The Swedes, whose twinkling lights I can see just across the Øresund strait this evening, have long flocked to their southern neighbour to let their hair down and sample what is from their perspective the Danes’ louche, fun-loving lifestyle. (Younger Danes, in turn, head for Berlin to get their jollies.)

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As long as they can avoid opening their credit card bills, life must feel pretty great as a middle-aged, middle-class Dane. It is hard to imagine how it could be any better, in fact. But things have not always been so rosy in the state of Denmark. To reach this point of heightened bliss, the Danes have had to endure terrible trauma, humiliation and loss.

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The Kalmar Union of 1397 was a historic high point for the Danes, with their equivalent of Elizabeth I, Queen Margaret I, ruling a loosely unified Norway, Sweden and Denmark. The union held for over a century until, in 1520, the then Danish king, Christian II, rashly beheaded around eighty Swedish nobles in the so-called Stockholm Bloodbath, something of a diplomatic faux pas.

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In contrast, by the time Gustaf Vasa died, battling the Germans (a preoccupation of his later life), he had transformed Sweden into the key power in the region and beyond.

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But Bismarck was an all-or-nothing kind of guy, and so both duchies became for ever German, and Denmark’s borders were redrawn once more.

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Denmark and Germany had signed a pact of mutual non-aggression a year earlier, but the Danes had effectively extended an open invitation to the Nazis to invade when they decided to leave many of their military posts unmanned for seven months of the year. The Danish Nazi Party had grown in strength, thanks largely to support from farmers and landowners, and now had representatives in parliament; the Germans rightly assumed that the Danes would be reluctant to retaliate and risk provoking a bombardment similar to the one they had endured in 1807.

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Churchill called the country ‘Hitler’s pet canary’.

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The territorial losses, sundry beatings and myriad humiliations forced the Danes to turn their gaze inward, instilling in them not only a fear of change and of external forces that abides to this day, but also a remarkable self-sufficiency and an appreciation of what little they had left.

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the Danes adopted a glass-half-full outlook, largely because their glass was now half full, and it is an outlook which, I would argue, has paved the way for the much-trumpeted success of their society to this day.

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But Holst’s declaration also encapsulates what turned out to be the Danes’ great cultural ‘Golden Age’, a mid-nineteenth-century period of increased social mobility and artistic blossoming that saw the son of a washerwoman, Hans Christian Andersen, publish his first fairy stories and go on to become one of the first genuinely world-famous figures; Søren Kierkegaard write his groundbreaking existentialist works; and the great classical sculptor, Bertel Thorvaldsen, along with painters like C. W. Eckersberg and his pupil Christen Købke, and the Royal Ballet master August Bournonville, contribute ...more

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They were learning how to do what they still do best: to be grateful for, and make the most of, the resources available to them; to cherish the simple pleasures of community; to celebrate their Danishness; and, above all, avoid annoying the Germans.

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You had the loss to Sweden in 1658, and the bombardment by the British in 1807, and the loss of Norway in 1814, but at that time the people in Jutland didn’t know what people in Zealand thought about any of this. Of course the bombardment affected the bourgeoisie and the military, but they were centred on Copenhagen; and the loss of Norway was felt more in Aalborg, which had been Denmark’s second city, was very wealthy, and lost about 75 per cent of its trade. But still it was only really a very small group of people who had any opinion. The development of a Danish national consciousness ...more

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The Danes have a deep and justifiable satisfaction born from the knowledge that they have built, from relatively unpromising foundations, arguably the most successful society on the face of the earth.

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Then someone realised what type of streaky bacon the British preferred for breakfast, figured out a way to standardise pork production to meet that demand, and the Danish labour force found its true calling.

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They have never looked back: today, the Danes are the world’s leading pork butchers, slaughtering over 28 million pigs a year. The Danish pork industry accounts for around a fifth of all the world’s pork exports, half of domestic agricultural exports and over five per cent of the country’s total exports.

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The TV series Klovn – a Scandinavian Curb Your Enthusiasm, only far ruder.

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(The former US housing commissioner, Catherine Austin Fitts, once came up with something called the Popsicle Index, which ranks countries according to the percentage of people in a community who believe that their children can safely leave their home, walk to the nearest possible location to buy an ice lolly, and walk back home again. Denmark must surely rank at, or near, the top of this index.)

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They sell wine and beer in cinemas, and you are usually allowed to take it into the auditorium with you. Is there any greater litmus test of a civilised society?

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The Danes do seem to have an uncommon facility to get on with each other regardless of age, class or outlook. Egality comes easily to them.

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90 per cent of the population [of Denmark] enjoy an approximately identical standard of living.’

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The Italian scientist Corrado Gini was born into a wealthy land-owning family in Treviso in 1884. Gini was an academic prodigy; by the age of twenty-six he was head of statistics at Cagliari University. A cold, hard-working, autocratic figure, he befriended Mussolini early on in his career, becoming head of Il Duce’s Central Institute of Statistics. By the time he died, Gini was widely judged to be the greatest Italian statistician of all time, credited with paving new ground in the fields of demography, sociology and economics.

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answering the ultimate secular question of our age: how to be happy.

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This is the Gini Coefficient, a statistical method for analysing the distribution of wealth in a nation, which he introduced to the world in 1921. The Gini Coefficient quantifies how large a percentage of the total income of a society must be redistributed in order to achieve a perfectly equal distribution of wealth.

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The closer a country’s Lorenz curve is to the 45-degree total-equality line, the closer the Gini Coefficient will be to zero, and the more equal it will be; the more the curve bows away from that diagonal, the closer the figure will be to 1, indicating a greater distance between the haves and the have-nots in that particular society.

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according to much of the prevailing anthropological, political, sociological and economic thought, from eminent figures such as Nobel-Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, author Francis Fukuyama and organisations as august as the United Nations, the Gini Coefficient is the silver bullet which goes

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directly to the heart of not just how equal a society is, but how happy and healthy its people are likely to be. It is, if you like, the very sum of human happiness.

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The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone,

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they claim – to clearly, methodically and irrefutably prove why more equal societies are simply better in every way, shape or form than unequal ones.

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that greater income inequality has a direct correlation to just about every social problem we face in the West, from obesity to crime, drug abuse, mental illness, depression and stress.

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The US is wealthier and spends more on health care than any other country, yet a baby born in Greece, where average income levels are about half that of the US, has a lower risk of infant mortality and longer life expectancy than an American baby.

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Their most radical conclusion is that inequality breeds stress among poor and rich alike; the more unequal a society, the less benefit is obtained from an individual’s wealth. The stress of inequality does not just breed envy, it is not just about coveting your neighbour’s ox/Audi A8. Inequality breeds depression, addiction, resignation, and physical symptoms including premature aging, that affect the entire population.

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(tellingly, the amount a country’s corporations spend on advertising increases in relation to economic inequality as people become more susceptible to, and dependent on, the allure of advertising messages),

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Though the global Gini rankings of the world’s countries do change from year to year, the top spot is usually held either by Sweden – as is currently the case and has been for a couple of years – or that honorary Nordic country, Japan.

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If Gini is the best indicator of income equality, and if income equality is the key ingredient for a social utopia, then how come it is the Danes, the southernmost members of the Nordic clan, the ones with the highest taxes, the most meagre natural resources, the worst health, the most ignoble history, the very worst pop music and the weakest economy, who are so regularly held to be the happiest people in the world, and not the more equal and, by most parameters, the much more successful Swedes?

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How people use the word “happy”, for instance, or how they present themselves. I don’t think these surveys mean nothing, but I wouldn’t put a great deal into them.

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Unfortunately, the Danes score notably badly in terms of their health. According to a recent report from the World Cancer Research Foundation they have the highest cancer rates in the world (326 cases per 100,000 people, compared with 260 in the UK, in 12th place). They also have the lowest average lifespan of any of the Nordic countries, and the highest levels of alcohol consumption, ahead even of the famously boozy Finns.

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each Dane has 11.8 people in their personal network, compared with 8.7 per British person. There are 83,000 local and 3,000 national societies and associations in Denmark – on average every Dane belongs to three.

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These clubs, associations and societies are one manifestation of the Danes’ remarkable social cohesion.