The Almost Nearly Perfect People Read online

  Ultimately, for Wilkinson, Gini was all (‘It is much the most powerful tool at a government’s disposal.’) Far be it from me to disagree with such a distinguished academic, but I was not so sure that the Gini Coefficient was the be-all and end-all. I could not quite shake the suspicion that, once a society reaches a certain level of income equality, other factors take on a greater importance in determining how happy the people are.

  And I was beginning to think I had a good idea what those factors might be.

  * * *

  1 Are you sure? There’s lots of really great stuff coming up about sex, violence, alcohol and Nazis.

  Chapter 4

  Boffers

  ‘SCARAMOUCHE, SCARAMOUCHE . . .’ FOUR hundred pairs of eyes flick our way as we squeeze through the door into the high school hall, and then flick back to their notes. ‘Will you do the fandango?’

  My wife, who knows her way around a choir, immediately locates the soprano group and disappears into the crowd. I have no idea whether I am soprano, tenor or castrato so I nod along with the music, try to look as if massed choirs are my natural habitat, edge over to a vacant seat, and begin to mouth along to the words.

  I am not a joiner. Some have gone as far as to call me a hermit, which is a little unfair, although it is true that there are few evenings out that can compete with a Larry Sanders box set, a box of Jaffa Cakes and a squashy sofa. In contrast, the Danes are arguably the most sociable people on earth. According to the Danish think tank Mandag Morgen, they belong to more associations, clubs, unions, societies and groups, and have larger social networks, than any other nationality – 43 per cent of over-sixteens belong to something or other. On average, each Dane has 11.8 people in their personal network, compared with 8.7 per British person. There are 83,000 local and 3,000 national societies and associations in Denmark – on average every Dane belongs to three. Over a third belong to a sporting club or association. These range from your common-or-garden leisure-orientated groups – the Bittern Spotters Club, say, or the Danish Flødeboller Association – to the still-powerful trade unions, which have a combined membership equivalent to a quarter of the population (1.25 million people). Support for all these groups is enshrined in Danish law – the Folkeoplysningslov, or General Education Act – and local authorities provide all manner of assistance, funding and premises for free, provided the association is properly organised and registered.

  Right now, the Danes are especially preoccupied with role playing – dressing up like Gandalf or elves and acting out violent narratives deep in the woods with their foam ‘boffers’ (the name given to role-play weapons). There are also 219 folk dancing clubs in Denmark, but do not worry, as with the pigs, you very rarely see them.

  Crucially, like my friend’s Midsummer’s Eve party, Danish clubs and societies tend to draw their members from across the class spectrum. One friend’s weekly indoor hockey club, for instance, includes a factory worker, a doctor, several middle-management types and a forester in its members. Another friend’s Wednesday football game in Parken (the park beside the national stadium) draws public sector workers, graphic designers, shop workers and a spin doctor; and a pub quiz team of my acquaintance boasts two academics, another spin doctor (they are something of a plague in Copenhagen), a shop assistant, and a dashing, award-winning English journalist of the very highest calibre.

  These clubs, associations and societies are one manifestation of the Danes’ remarkable social cohesion. They do seem to be very much more tilknyttet or ‘tied together’ than the rest of us. You will be familiar with the concept of ‘six degrees of separation’ – the idea that the world’s population (or Kevin Bacon’s co-stars) can be joined together by six relationships. In my experience, between Danes, the degree of separation is three, perhaps fewer. When two Danes who do not know each other meet at a social gathering they will take, on average, no more than eight minutes to discover either a direct mutual acquaintance, or at the very least a friend-of-a-friend connection (I have actually timed this). More than three degrees of separation is genuinely rare.

  The Danes’ fondness for clubs and associations is shared by their Nordic neighbours. The Swedes have an even greater trade-union membership and in their spare time are particularly keen on voluntary work: they call this instinct for diligent self-improvement organisationssverige or ‘organisation Sweden’. The Finns are famed for their after-work classes, particularly their amateur classical musicianship and fondness for joining orchestras, while the Norwegians’ love of communal outdoor pursuits, most famously cross-country skiing, is one of their defining characteristics.

  It seems logical to conclude that this social cohesion is closely linked to another factor that is often cited when talk turns to the Danish happiness phenomenon: their extraordinary levels of trust. All of the Nordic countries have high levels of trust, but the Danes are the most trusting people on the planet. In a 2011 survey by the OECD, 88.3 per cent of Danes expressed a high level of trust in others, more than any other nationality (the next places in the list were filled by Norway, Finland and Sweden respectively, with the UK a creditable 10th, but the US way down in 21st out of 30 countries surveyed). In the same OECD survey, 96 per cent of Danes said that they knew someone on whom they could depend in times of need. The Danes even trust their politicians, one measure of this being their 87 per cent general election turnout. Other surveys show that Denmark is one of very few countries in which trust levels have maintained an unbroken upward trajectory for the last half-century. And Transparency International’s annual Corruption Perception Index currently ranks Denmark and Finland as the least corrupt countries in the world, with Sweden and Norway following closely behind.

  As anyone who has lived in a city knows, anonymity breeds a lack of responsibility and trust, so it seems logical that the greater the number of people who know each other, or are able to identify one another, will have the opposite effect, as is the case with the tightly knit Danish tribe. One example of how this affects the way in which the Danes behave to one another is that, when I first moved to Denmark, whenever I had a Dane in my car and was given, I thought, good cause to sound the horn at another road user or pedestrian, my passenger would invariably squirm uncomfortably. ‘What if they know you?’ they would hiss. It is a small example, admittedly, but I am convinced that high levels of interconnectedness must have an impact on everything from crime rates to levels of altruism – there being a greater chance that a supposedly altruistic gesture will be spotted and broadcast.1

  It can be no coincidence that the happiest people in the world are also the most sociable and the most trusting, but I wanted to find out more about the connection between these three archetypal elements of Danishness, which is why I have allowed myself to be persuaded by my wife and children to join this residential choir week, held over six days every summer in the idyllic southern Jutland town of Tønder, close to the German border. I want to experience for myself, first hand, what kinds of benefits the Danes enjoy as a result of their collective approach to life – from their so-called ‘third sector’ activities. For what could be more communal in this most communal of countries than gathering together to sing popular tunes from the seventies and eighties?

  The plan is that, from our (late) arrival on Sunday afternoon we will spend the next five days rehearsing a programme of around ten songs which we will then perform at a concert for the public on Friday night. It turns out that most of the choristers are staying in the same youth hostel, so we will all eat together three times a day and spend the evenings singing other popular Danish folk songs and hymns. Just for fun.

  Some might see this as a blessed opportunity to live the Danish communal dream but, in fact, the whole week is so far beyond my comfort zone (I’ll explain more about this in another chapter, but ‘youth hostel’ and ‘hymns’ offer a reasonable clue), that it is virtually an out-of-body experience. My fellow choristers – this year a record-breaking attendance of four hundred – are almost entirely late-middle
-aged or elderly, exclusively white, and mostly, it turns out, Danish public sector workers. I don’t have that much in common with them, which is no criticism and, I hasten to add, my loss, not theirs. Actually, my disconnectedness is quite helpful, as it has allowed me to view the proceedings one step removed, and I soon realise that I have chanced upon a serendipitous metaphor for the cohesion, high trust and collectivism of the Nordic model. It may sound obvious to anyone who has sung in a choir before, but I am quite struck by the way individual members strive to sing together in one voice, safe in the knowledge that, should they lose their key, struggle with the tempo, or fumble the lyrics, they can lean back and let the others carry them to the safety of a familiar chorus. These four hundred people have gathered here from all over Denmark because they love to sing, but more importantly, they love to sing together and it is easy to understand why. Singing in a choir gives a salutary and surprisingly moving lesson in the power of the group; the massed voices weave together helix-like, lifting the collective heavenwards on thermals of community and trust. It is social capital, to an Andrew Lloyd Webber soundtrack.

  How does the trust fostered by these kinds of social activities manifest itself in the rest of Danish society? ‘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 prams 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.)

  I grew curious: how do you actually measure trust in a society? It turns out to be remarkably simple.

  ‘You ask people, “How much do you think other people in your country can be trusted?”’ associate economics professor Christian Bjørnskov of Aarhus University told me when I met him in the dimly lit back room of a café in the centre of Denmark’s second city one blustery spring afternoon.

  For example, the EU’s Eurobarometer asks: ‘Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you need to be very careful in dealing with people?; the answers are given on a scale of one to ten. From the answers given you can indirectly argue that the Danes are not only the most trusting, but also, Bjørnskov said, the most trustworthy, because the ‘people’ in the question are, by definition, other Danes (just as they are other Americans when Americans are asked the same question).

  Bjørnskov, an expert in the fields of social trust, subjective well-being and life satisfaction, told me about some other, highly revealing experiments that had been carried out in the field. ‘Back in the nineties there was an experiment done [in 1996, by Reader’s Digest] where wallets were left around in various cities and they counted how many were returned. And the cool thing is that in the places where more people say they can trust others, the more wallets were returned. I think they did an experiment with about forty wallets and the only two countries where all forty were returned were Norway and Denmark. I thought it was too good to be true, but TV2 [a Danish TV channel] did the same experiment again four years ago in Copenhagen Central Station, and they literally could not even leave the wallets – people would instantly pick them up and come running after them, so they had to give up!’

  According to Bjørnskov, trust doesn’t just have an intangible, feel-good, socially cohesive impact on a society; as well as the warm, Little House on the Prairie glow you experience paying for your asparagus via an honesty box, trust also contributes measurably to Denmark’s economic success. By his calculations, Danish trust saves the justice system 15,000 krone (£1,500) per person per year, for instance; others believe that as much as 25 per cent of the economy can be accounted for by social capital. That’s a fairly sizeable proportion of GDP. Enough, say, to cover the cost of a rather large welfare state.

  The theory goes that, if there is trust in society, then its bureaucracies will be more straightforward and effective – the cost and time of transactions between companies will be reduced and less time will be spent paying lawyers to draw up costly contracts, and in litigation. A handshake is free. Anyone who has tried to conduct business in France or America will have soon become aware of the massive inconveniences involved with living in a society where the default setting is to assume the other person is trying to pull your trousers down. Danish companies are freer about sharing knowledge and divulging secrets to one another; this has been cited as one of the reasons why, for instance, the wind turbine industry flourished here in the 1970s, ultimately becoming the world leader.

  Bjørnskov also claims that education is more effective in societies with higher levels of trust because the students trust their teachers and each other more, and are thus able to concentrate better on the business of learning. Higher-skilled industries fare better too – the more skilled a job is, the more difficult it is to check up on whether an employee is carrying out his or her duties as they should be, and so trust becomes that much more important. It is tricky and costly to check that high-level consultants, architects, IT technicians or chemical engineers are working as they should, so trust becomes that bit more important, which is one reason why high-trust societies such as Denmark, Finland and Sweden, excel in advanced industries like pharmaceuticals and electronics and attract foreign companies operating in these fields. ‘If you talk to German businessmen, that’s what they see in us,’ said Bjørnskov. ‘They have realised that it is cheaper to employ highly skilled workers here.’

  But where do these trusting tendencies come from? Do high levels of trust and an overriding flock instinct lie deep in the psyche of the Danish? Is their collectivist approach a legacy of the painful diminishment of their territory and power over the last five hundred years – a symptom of Holst’s ‘What was lost without’, parochialised approach to life? Or is it something more recent – a hallmark of the welfare state, high taxes and economic equality?

  This, it turns out, is the million-krone question.

  * * *

  1 The only strange anomaly in this regard is civic manners, an area in which the Danes – and indeed, all the Nordic peoples – suffer an epic fail. They often seem fantastically rude from an English perspective. Someone once explained this to me as a kind of ‘perverse egalitarianism’, as in, ‘I am just as important as you, so I have every right to barge my shopping trolley into yours to get by,’ but I don’t think I will ever properly come to terms with the Scandinavians’ brutal rudeness (and the Swedes are the worst offenders, as we will discover). Oh yes, and they use the word ‘fuck’ indiscriminately – in adverts, children’s books, church, wherever – much to the chagrin of Americans and my mother.

  Chapter 5

  Chicken

  WHICH CAME FIRST, the chicken or the egg? That’s easy. Allow me: the chicken evolved into an egg-laying bird from some other kind of egg-laying creature, probably a fish. Sorted. Done. Finding out which came first, Denmark’s high trust levels or its social cohesion, is a far, far knottier conundrum.

  Does social cohesion generate trust because it brings people together in a shared goal or interest, or is trust a precondition for people gathering together in the first place? After all, if you don’t trust someone, you are hardly likely to want to spend Friday evenings line
-dancing with them, are you?

  I suspect trust and social cohesion are so inextricably intertwined and mutually reinforcing as to be indivisible. One thing I do know about trust is that it does not appear to have much to do with the absolute wealth of a country. If this were the case, why is relatively poor Estonia in seventh place on the OECD’s trust index, while far more prosperous South Korea and the US are in the bottom quarter of the list? Another theory used to be that wealthy people are at less risk financially and so trust people more. But if this is true then why is super wealthy Brunei a lowly forty-fourth place on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index?

  It turns out that explaining the reasons for Denmark’s trust, social cohesion and, ultimately, the happiness of its people, is the most politically divisive discussion in the country right now, encompassing, as it does, highly polarised political beliefs regarding everything from immigration through tax, class and equality to, yes, even the Vikings.

  Divining the cause of Danish happiness has created an uncharacteristic schism in this ordinarily consensus-orientated society. In simple terms, in one camp are those who believe that the source of Denmark’s remarkable trust and social cohesion, and by extension also its happiness, is the country’s economic equality – let’s call this group the ‘Ginis’. Naturally, the Ginis are the cheerleaders for the Danish welfare state model, which they believe plays a central role in redistributing the country’s wealth fairly via taxes. Having read Wilkinson and Pickett’s arguments, I too assumed that this was the main explanation for high trust levels in Denmark – inequality breeds ill-feeling, resentment, envy and mistrust so, naturally, equality would have the opposite effect. I had even begun to feel happier about handing over more than half my earnings to the government in the form of taxes. It was comforting to think that my immediate financial loss, no matter how painful it might feel at the time, would be society’s, and therefore, indirectly, my, gain.