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

Hvad udad tabes, skal indad vindes. (What was lost without will be found within.)

They have never looked back: today, the Danes are the world’s leading pork butchers, slaughtering more than twenty-eight 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 more than 5 percent of the country’s total exports.

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

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.

Midsummer’s Eve is one of the highlights of the Scandinavian calendar; pagan in origin but hijacked by the Church and renamed in honor of “Sankt Hans” (St. John). In Sweden they will be dancing around maypoles garlanded with flowers; in Finland and Norway they will have gathered around bonfires. Here in Denmark, in the garden of my friend’s summerh

The Danes have a refreshingly laid-back approach to their work-life balance, which, as we will see, has had major consequences—both positive (the happiness) and potentially negative (sometimes you do really need to buckle down and do some work: during a global recession, for example).

Annual leave is often as much as six weeks, and during July, the entire country shuts down as the Danes migrate en masse, like mild-mannered wildebeest, to their summerhouses, caravan parks, or campsites located an hour or so away from where they live.

When asked in a survey a few years ago to select eight adjectives to describe themselves, the Finns chose: honest, slow, reliable, true, shy, direct, reserved, and punctual.

Do not underestimate the Finnish woman.