The Almost Nearly Perfect People Page 4
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. Yet the weird thing is, you can travel the length and breadth of the country and never see a single sow.
My own ignorance of Denmark was almost total before I started coming here a decade and a half ago so, before we attempt to divine the secrets of the Danes’ success in greater depth, I am going to take a moment to fill you in on some of the aspects of contemporary Danish life that I believe make it such a wonderful place to live, but of which you might not be aware. It is a bit random but bear with me, I think it gives a good overview:
– The landscape of southern Funen (Fyn), which undulates like a reclining nude.
– The pleasantly woozy feeling after a lunch of pickled herring with red onion on rye, a Tuborg and an icy schnapps.
– Flødebolle – a chocolate-covered Italian meringue with a wafer base (a bit like a Tunnock’s teacake. Sometimes they have a marzipan base, but those are to be avoided).
– There’s parking.
– The view from the room which houses the numismatic collection at the National Museum of Denmark (the Nationalmuseet) looking across to the royal stables at the rear of Christiansborg Palace, the Danish parliament building.
– The word overskud, meaning a kind of surplus of energy. As in, ‘I can’t cut the lawn now, after that great big boozy lunch I simply don’t have the overskud.’ I don’t know how I managed without this word for so many years. Smask is another great Danish word: it’s the annoying noise some people make when they eat, say, an apple, or breakfast cereal, or when radio presenters have dry tongues.
– The bittern that is honking like a foghorn outside my window as I write this.
– The fact that I once saw the Danish prime minister on a pre-election walkabout in Copenhagen, on the equivalent of Oxford Street, and no one was paying him the slightest bit of attention.
– Arne Jacobsen’s petrol station on Strandvejen, the most elegant petrol station in the world.
– The TV series Klovn – a Scandinavian Curb Your Enthusiasm, only far ruder.
– A visit to Bakken, the old amusement park to the north of the city. It is the best way I know of travelling back in time to 1968.
– Babies left sleeping outside cafés; a perfectly normal occurrence throughout the country and one which happens in all weathers. (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.)
– The word Pyt. A dismissive exhalation which roughly translates as ‘Let it go, it’s not worth bothering with.’ Midsummer party threatened by rain? Pyt med det! (‘Pyt with that!’)
– 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?
– The actor Jesper Christensen (Mr White in Casino Royale), upon whose wry, weary face is etched all the tragedy of the world.
– The hollyhocks that spring up from between the cobbles of Christianshavn, the canal quarter of Copenhagen.
– The rainbow of grey in a Hammershøi interior.
– The Lego Death Star.
Do great confectionary, pickled herring and complex modular construction toys amount to the recipe for human happiness? Probably not (although for me, yes). There is more to Denmark’s success and the enduring, Olympic-gold-level happiness of its people. Much more.
* * *
1 A good example of this is Danish news coverage. Generally, not a lot happens in Denmark, but this doesn’t stop the news editors putting whatever has happened in Denmark at the top of the agenda, regardless of events elsewhere in the world. I was once so infuriated that the national radio news, in the aftermath of the Japanese tsunami and at the commencement of the Libyan Civil War, was running as their lead item a story about how some tenants of rented properties might not be aware that their home contents insurance could assist them in claims against high rents, that I rang the news editor to ask what they were thinking. ‘Well, we didn’t think there was much new to say about Libya,’ he told me, a little embarrassed.
Chapter 3
Gini
BACK TO THE summer-house party. Perhaps the most striking aspect of my friend’s midsummer get-together is the socio-economic mix present here this evening, which is far broader than I would expect to find at a similar get-together back home. So far I have chatted with a gynaecologist, a wine writer, a member of parliament, a few theatre people (the host is a singer) and several teachers (there are always teachers), but also craftsmen, cooks, a baggage handler and many, many public sector workers, including a nurse, a civil servant and a museum administrator. Over there is Danish television’s golden girl, a presenter of the evening show; she’s talking to a roofer. Behind me is a member of parliament earnestly debating Denmark’s chances in some or other handball tournament with the man who grows the strawberries in these parts.
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. One of my most cherished memories of this inclusiveness is of a friend’s fortieth birthday party where his octogenarian grandmother was seated next to the country’s most notorious rapper, and the two spent a jolly evening chatting together.
It helps, of course, that Denmark is essentially one giant middle class or, as the Danes would have you believe, effectively classless. The creation of this economically and gender-equal society has driven much of Denmark’s social and economic development over the last hundred or so years. One very well known Danish quotation sums this up – it is another line, like Holst’s ‘What was lost without . . .’, that every Dane knows by heart, and was written by N. F. S. Grundtvig:
Og da har i rigdom vi drevet det vidt, når få har for meget og færre for lidt.
(And we will have made great strides in equality, when few have too much and fewer too little.)
It sounds like some kind of utopian fantasy but, by and large, the Danes have succeeded in achieving it. As historian Tony Hall writes in Scandinavia: At War with Trolls, Grundtvig’s Folk High Schools were founded on the principle of ‘teaching them, whenever feasible, that regardless of their social rank and occupation, they belonged to one people, and as such had one mother, one destiny and one purpose’. The result is that, according to the New Statesman, 90 per cent of the population [of Denmark] enjoy an approximately identical standard of living.’ This striking economic equality lies not only at the core of the happiness and success of the Danes but of the people of the Nordic region as a whole. To find out why, we must take a brief detour to northern Italy at the end of the nineteenth century.
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.
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 analy
sing 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, but let’s leave that discussion to people with dandruff and elbow patches).
The Gini Coefficient of a country is divined by mapping the degree to which the range of wealth of its people diverges from a point of total equality (i.e., where everyone is as rich/poor as everyone else), the latter represented on a graph as a 45-degree diagonal line. The divergence from this zero line is charted by what is known as a ‘Lorenz curve’, which traces the dispersal of income or wealth in the society in a beautifully succinct parabola of poverty and wealth. Between the curve and the diagonal line is a space which is converted into a ratio, usually expressed as a fraction. 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.
If, due to what would surely have to be an exceptional set of extenuating circumstances, you are not able to join me on the fascinating, insightful, hilarious and at times deeply moving journey through the Nordic region on which we are about to embark1 and are only able take away one nugget of information from this book, it might as well be this: 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 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.
The most talked about, and politically influential, treatise on the subject of Gini-measured equality was published in 2009 by epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. In The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone, Wilkinson and Pickett use statistics from sources such as the World Bank and the UN to compare twenty-three of the richest countries in the world and – they claim – to clearly, methodically and irrefutably prove why more equal societies are simply better in every way, shape or form than unequal ones.
Through page after page of their trademark graphs, Wilkinson and Pickett sledgehammer home their argument: 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. Crucially, it isn’t the absolute levels of poverty and wealth that are the issue, but the differentials in income levels from the lowest to the highest in each country which are the crux of the matter. So, while notions of poverty differ greatly between, say, the UK and Cambodia, the fact that more people have a dishwasher in the former, for instance, is by no means a guarantee that crime rates will be lower and people will be happier or healthier. As the New York Times pointed out in its review of the book:
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.
In virtually all of Wilkinson and Pickett’s graphs the most drastically unequal countries – the US, the UK and, oddly, Portugal – the countries where the top 20 per cent earn up to nine times that of the lowest 20 per cent, are invariably at the Shameless end of the social problem spectrum, while the most equal societies are the least afflicted by almost all categories of social malady.
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. In other words, the well-being of individuals, rich or poor, is mutually dependent. Living as a richer person among the poor is very stressful. It heightens your competitive consumption (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), and you never know when the rabble are going to try and snatch your wealth away from you.
The equality argument is highly persuasive, though not without its critics, whom we will meet in a while. For now, there is one glaring anomaly that I can see: if this theory of economic equality leading to societal success is true, then the happiest country in the world should also be the most economically equal. But that is not the case. 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.
Denmark, the happiest country in the world as judged by a wide range of researchers, institutions and Oprah Winfrey, over many decades, is usually around fifth or sixth on the list, the lowest of all the Nordic countries. 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?
I wondered what to make of this, so I rang Richard Wilkinson.
‘Well, my answer is going to be a little bit disappointing,’ said Professor Wilkinson with a sigh. ‘I don’t really think measures of happiness internationally are necessarily very dependable. For instance, for an American to say they are not happy sounds like an admission of failure, but for a Japanese person it sounds like bragging to say they are, so I think one has to be very careful. We find there are systematic problems with subjective measures related to inequality. 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. All of our measures are objective, like death rates, obesity and so on.’
He is right, there are obvious flaws in these happiness surveys. Happiness is subjective and clearly tricky to quantify, plus, as Wilkinson points out, notions of happiness differ depending on whom you ask. Happiness probably does conform to roughly comparable parameters among the people of the Nordic countries, but it probably won’t mean the same to a Bolivian or a Tutsi. There is a risk of cultural bias, not just from the people answering the questions, but from those asking them: one can’t help but notice, for instance, that when the Swiss measure international happiness they report that more direct democracy is the key (as, say, just for instance, in the direct democracy they have in their cantons). When others have sought to remove simple measures of wealth as a factor in happiness – as in the New Economics Foundation’s Happy Planet Index – countries like Vanuatu and Colombia have topped out as the happiest on earth, which is patently preposterous. Does anyone even know where Vanuatu is?
It has also occurred to me that it might well be the case that these kinds of polls become self-perpetuating. The Danes are now well aware that the world considers them to be the happiest people, so perhaps this knowledge, along with the pleasure and pride they justifiably feel in having such a reputation, influences the way in which they respond to these quality-of-life surveys. Just a thought.
According to Wilkinson and other ex
perts in this field, such as University College London’s epidemiologist Michael Marmot (the world leader in research into inequalities of health), you get a much more accurate picture of people’s well-being – as distinct from, and slightly easier to quantify than, their happiness – by analysing the state of their health, than you get from asking them if they feel happy, or satisfied, or content, or any other such subjective measure.
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.
‘Yes, the Danish health statistics are quite bad – they’re a bit of a puzzle to most people,’ chuckled Professor Wilkinson. ‘People suggest it is the high levels of smoking that’s doing it. There is an enormous gulf between these happiness surveys and actual health. Why take these simplistic measures of happiness when we have objective measures of well-being?’
I asked the professor to indulge me on the happiness question just a little longer. In terms of the Nordic countries, I had a hypothesis, I said. Could it be that, once a society achieves a certain high level of equality, beyond that point greater equality merely leads to diminishing happiness returns? As has been proven with measures of wealth, once people have enough equality to cover their basic needs, greater equality does not necessarily result in corresponding increases in happiness. Could this explain why the Danes were judged to be the happiest people on earth, even though they were not the most equal?
‘Colleagues at Harvard think there might be a levelling-off in terms of some health aspects,’ said the professor. ‘But if you look at our graphs, where we put all our sources together in terms of all health and societal problems, there is no sign of it levelling off at the other end. It is a linear relationship. My view is that we don’t know what happens if you get more equal than Sweden.’