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

by Michael Booth

Improbably, considering his background, it is thanks to Gini that we have what many believe is the single most revealing piece of evidence—statistical or otherwise—for the root cause of Nordic exceptionalism, not to mention the most helpful guide to answering the ultimate secular question of our age: how to be happy. This is the Gini Coefficient, a statistical method for analyzing 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. It remains to this day a brilliantly concise way to express the inequality of a group of people as a simple figure (although technically, I am told, it is not actually a coefficient).