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

by Michael Booth

If you wanted to sum up each of the Nordic lands in a single statistic, one peremptory and reductive yet insightful factoid, what would they be? In Iceland, it would probably be the size of the population, which tells you just about everything you need to know about the windswept and frozen island’s appeal over the centuries as well as providing a fairly strong clue about how the financial misadventures of recent years came to pass. In Finland my gateway fact would be a list of the three most popular prescription drugs (no skipping ahead). In Sweden it is probably the size of its immigrant population; in Norway, the gargantuan size of its oil-revenue wealth fund. Denmark’s defining statistic has to be its tax rate. The Danes have the highest tax rates in the world, both direct and indirect.