The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia

by Michael Booth

“Do Danes really leave their bikes unlocked?” I was once asked by a British radio interviewer with an especially rose-tinted view of the region. Not in Copenhagen, they don’t, but it is true that, out in the countryside, front doors, cars, and bicycles are often left unsecured. If you drive around the country lanes you will find fruit and vegetables on sale in stalls to be paid for via honesty boxes, and, as I have mentioned, people do leave their kids sleeping in strollers outside cafés and shops, even in the cities, and they let their children commute to school alone, often by bicycle, from as young as six or seven years old. But beyond these few examples, I had to admit, I couldn’t really come up with much more evidence that the Danes were any more trusting—or, by implication, trustworthy—than the rest of us. After all, one encounters honesty boxes in rural England, too, and you need only open a Danish newspaper to find plenty of stories about Danish swindlers, smugglers, crooks, and fraudsters. (In fact, when talking all this over with my Danish publisher, he said that it was the Swedes he really trusted the most. “They simply don’t have the imagination to lie or cheat,” he said.)