The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia
Do not underestimate the Finnish woman.
Michael Booth • The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia
Its great strength lies in fostering large-scale international corporations, like Tetra Pak (the world’s largest food-packaging company), H&M (the second largest clothing retailer in the world), industrial engineering firm Atlas Copco, Eriksson, Volvo, and that global chain of marriage graveyards, IKEA. In fact, almost half of the largest compa
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“Finnish women are tremendous,” agrees Neil Hardwick. “It is a very matriarchal society.
Michael Booth • The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia
Never touch glasses when you toast. Despite what you might have been led to believe from the various carousing scenes in Hollywood Viking movies over the years, in Scandinavia this is considered unforgivably proletarian.
Michael Booth • The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia
There is one other, actually quite important reason why Finland does so well. That word again: equality. There is no two-tier, public-private education system in Finland. There are no private schools in Finland, at least not in the sense of private schools in the rest of the world. All schooling in Finland is state-funded. The message from Finland,
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The abiding view of the Swedes from their neighbors to the south is of a stiff, humorless, rule-obsessed, and dull crowd who inhabit a suffocatingly conformist society and chew tobacco. The Danes love to tell each other stories of Swedish prissiness, drone-like obedience, or pedantry.
Michael Booth • The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia
The Danes are in denial about their poor health, too. In surveys they claim that they have above-average health, though the reality is quite the opposite. They are in denial about their creaking public services; in denial about the increasingly rampant gang criminality that has resulted in numerous shootings in Copenhagen suburbs; in denial about t
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“In Denmark it is shameful to be unhappy,” she told me. “If you ask me how I am and I start telling you how bad I feel, then it might force you to do something about it. It might put a burden on you to help me. So, that’s one of the main reasons people say things are all right, or even ‘super.’”
Michael Booth • The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia
(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.)