What We Should Learn From Nordic Happiness
Do you know how to get an American company to grant you excellent wages and amazing benefits, even for an entry-level job?Move to Norway and take the job there.Construction workers, hotel maids, gas station attendants and store cashiers will typically earn more than $20 an hour plus evening or weekend bonuses, about five weeks’ paid vacation each year, a pension, maternity and paternity leave that add up to a year and paid leave when a child is sick. You may even get paid time off if you move homes.Those are broadly the terms for Norwegian and foreign companies alike, including the likes of 7-Eleven shops, Burger King restaurants and ExxonMobil-affiliated gas stations. Which raises the question: If American and other international firms can offer such munificent terms for retail jobs in Norway, could they do so in our country?We’ll get to that, but what unfolds here is a result of the Nordic social and economic model, which aims to reduce inequality, boost opportunity and optimize the quality of life — providing a lift, in particular, for those at the lower end of the income scale. What we tend to think of as “low wage” jobs aren’t truly low-earning in Norway, and they also come with state-provided health care and child care, plus strong unions that ensure that layoffs or firings are rare.You want security, health care and the American dream? Look to Scandinavia.“We actually live the American dream,” Jens Stoltenberg, a former prime minister of Norway who is now the finance minister, told me. “The American dream, it’s more reality in the Nordic countries than in America.”Skeptics have argued that generous welfare benefits and the resulting high taxes have held back the Nordic economies. Perhaps a bit. “Farewell, Nordic model,” The Economist wrote in 2006. But Norway is now richer than the United States per capita, and Norwegian workers are more productive than American workers, with higher output per hour. Scandinavians live longer than Americans, and people are happier. The five Nordic countries — Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden — all rank among the six happiest countries in the world in the World Happiness Report, based on Gallup polling.Yet the Nordic countries are themselves facing significant challenges, including fiscal pressures, immigration, widening inequality and perhaps some breakdown in the social consensus. Some doubt whether the model can survive here, let alone be exported to countries that are larger, less homogeneous and more suspicious of taxation.On the other hand, it’s not an alien model but, for Americans, a path we once blazed. Lawrence Katz, a Harvard economist, told me that the United States and Scandinavian nations pursued similar policies from the 1940s through the 1960s. That was the period when the United States rapidly expanded educational opportunities, had strong unions and, in the 1940s, experimented with universal child care. The post-World War II period is sometimes thought of as a golden age, for the economic pie both grew and was sliced more equally.“The U.S. in the mid-20th century was sort of like Scandinavia today,” Katz said. But America changed course in the 1970s and eventually embraced the Reagan revolution.One reason for the retreat, I’ve argued, was racialized political rhetoric that characterized some safety-net programs and investments in opportunity — used by Americans from all walks of life — as handouts primarily benefiting Black people, with a particular emphasis on caricatures of the “welfare queen.”It’s also true that the American economy in the 1970s was underperforming and markets did need a kick in the pants in the form of deregulation. Meanwhile, the Nordic countries largely continued their investments in human capital and reducing inequality.Although I’ve been visiting the Nordic countries for decades, I became more interested in their model over the past 15 years because of the struggles of my hometown in rural Oregon. Mills and factories closed, meth arrived, and three school friends died while homeless on the streets.I can’t help thinking that they might be alive today if they had been born in Scandinavia with its strong social safety net.How does this system work in practice?Consider Hauk Kjaeran, 24, a waiter at Nektar restaurant in Oslo. He has been at his job for only a few months but is paid more than $25 an hour, not including tips.He also gets five weeks’ vacation, earns a pension, is entitled to hefty parental and sick leave and is studying to be a sommelier, all paid for.A full workweek in Norway is 37.5 hours, but Kjaeran asked for a 60 percent contract. “I have some other stuff to do, and I like my freedom as well,” he explained.One waitress at the restaurant is on leave, sailing around the world with friends. I asked the restaurant owner, Veslemoey Hvidsten, what she thought of her missing employee.“She wanted to do this,” Hvidsten said. “So we said, ‘Yeah, why not?’”Hvidsten emphasized that her aim isn’t to squeeze every last penny she can out of her restaurant, and that happy employees are better for customers and for her business.“That’s how we build the whole country,” she added. “Taking care of each other.”When Americans discuss the Nordic system, they sometimes suffer from three misunderstandings.The first is that these are socialist countries. While they are often run by social democrats, they have market economies. Sweden did experiment in the 1970s and ’80s with quasi-socialist policies, but the upshot was an economic crisis. As Johan Norberg, a Swedish writer, put it: “We have been socialists and we’ve been successful — but never at the same time.”The second misunderstanding is that because of their strong welfare systems, citizens of Nordic countries lie around while collecting benefits. Sure, some people do manipulate the system, but the labor force participation rate is higher in Nordic countries than in the United States.The third is that in the case of Norway, its success is mostly a reflection of its oil wealth. Oil has given Norway a nice cushion, but the country has also managed the cushion unusually well — putting it in what is one of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds. Moreover, according to Geir Axelsen, the director-general of Statistics Norway, the increase in female labor force participation in Norway since the early 1970s appears to have added roughly as much to the country’s gross domestic product as oil has.Indeed, women are an underappreciated component of the Nordic economic engine. Historically, American women had higher rates of labor force participation than did women in most other countries, but Scandinavia now easily surpasses the United States by this metric. In 2025, some 56 percent of American working-age women were in the labor force; in Sweden and Norway, the figure was around 62 percent; in Iceland, 70 percent. Having the flexibility to work part time or adjust hours is one factor that almost certainly increases the share of women in the labor force in Nordic countries. Another factor is the availability of high-quality day care. Norway’s system, which is typical, takes children from the age of 1, and the cost is about $120 per month. For low-income families, it’s nearly free.“If it wasn’t for this kindergarten, we wouldn’t have three kids,” Mats Brekke, a solar engineer, told me as he dropped by the day care center in Oslo where his middle child spends the day. He had his 10-month-old daughter on his arm; she’ll start in August.The day care center where I met Brekke was in a working-class Oslo neighborhood, with bright rooms and a diverse group of children playing with one another — all rattling away in Norwegian. That’s one aim of the system: encouraging children in immigrant communities to embrace being Norwegian from an early age.“Especially for children who come from other countries, like immigrants or refugees, it will help them to integrate,” said a teacher, Worod Alkazemi, herself an Iraqi Norwegian who says she was molded into a Norwegian a generation ago as a little girl in day care.One-fifth of Norwegians are either immigrants or their children, often from countries like Syria or Somalia with conservative social cultures. Day care centers try to nurture Nordic social attitudes, which tend to be more liberal.“It’s June and we’re talking about Pride Month,” said Cathrine Pedersen, the chief of the day care center, which had a rainbow flag fluttering outside. “To have a symbol of diversity. Showing that there are different ways of living lives.”To understand how the Nordic socioeconomic system evolved, I dropped by the office of Kalle Moene, an economist at the University of Oslo. The system began in the 1930s, he said, when workers in thriving sectors of the economy agreed to hold down their wage demands to support sectors that were struggling.That principle — sacrificing to help those not doing so well — still underpins the region’s business model. Norwegians who are better off are willing to give up some income to ensure that people in blue-collar jobs get by.Moene argues that this wage compression promotes innovation and dynamism by boosting the profitability of growth industries and by lowering profits in lagging industries.“The lowest wages become higher, destroying bad jobs,” Moene said. “The highest wages become lower, creating more good jobs.”In addition, the social safety net in Nordic countries means that workers are less fearful of trade and technology costing their jobs. This makes it easier to embrace policies that boost growth overall but threaten some positions, Stoltenberg said.I wonder if wage compression may also have resulted in political compression. There seems to be less political toxicity in Nordic countries than in the United States and many other countries. By international standards, civility reigns. Right-wing nationalists exist here, but haven’t made as many inroads as in Germany, France or Britain.Eirik Lae Solberg, the governing mayor of Oslo, is an important figure in the country’s conservative party. He opposes the country’s wealth tax and generally thinks Norwegian taxes are too high. But by American standards, he would count as liberal.“I strongly believe that what we do in the Nordics to provide opportunity for all is growth-promoting,” Solberg told me. “In the U.S., I would probably be on the left.”For all the success of the Nordic model to date, it is under great pressure. Many social benefits are expensive, and paying for them is a growing challenge as the population ages and requires more elder care.“Every institution in the society is under strain,” said Shazia Majid, a columnist at VG, a Norwegian newspaper. She noted that because so many women are working, they aren’t able to care for aging parents — at-home labor that would probably fall to women more often than to men — and the system is financially pressed even as it needs tens of thousands more health workers.Immigration adds to the challenges, particularly in Sweden, where a quarter of the population is now made up of immigrants or their children. Violent crime, often linked by commentators to immigration, is a serious problem in Sweden (although the country is far from being the world’s “rape capital,” as some lurid right-wing accounts claim).Serious observers, most notably Mario Draghi, the former European Central Bank president and a former prime minister of Italy, suggest that Europe has lost some of its competitiveness, and that sentiment resonates in the Nordics as well. I think there’s something to that, but the hand-wringing can be overdone in the case of the Nordic countries. Sweden ranks No. 2 in the Global Innovation Index, produced by the World Intellectual Property Organization, ahead of the United States at No. 3. Finland and Denmark are also in the top ten.I’ve been talking about Nordic policies, but what if the big driver of success isn’t policy so much as norms? These are traditionally homogeneous societies that maintain village values of mutual support. When researchers “lost” wallets in 40 countries around the world, the two countries with the highest rates of the wallets being returned (when they contained money) were Denmark and Sweden.My sense is that norms and policies reinforce each other. Iyad el-Baghdadi, a prominent Palestinian in Norway who was accepted as a refugee, said that Norwegians had been extraordinarily welcoming and kind. But it’s not just that, he added: “It’s that this is the system.”Stoltenberg offered an example of policy molding norms. In the 1980s, he and others pushed for paid paternity leaves in part to ensure that dads would spend time with their newborn children. This social engineering worked: Fathers now are deeply involved in caring for children, taking some of the load off mothers. “That’s perhaps one of those reforms that have really changed Norway,” Stoltenberg told me.Is the Nordic model replicable? Could convenience stores and gas stations in America pay their cashiers and attendants $20 or more an hour plus a pension and five weeks’ vacation?One challenge, economists told me, is that relative to many American workers, Norwegian laborers often have higher literacy rates, appear more able to pass a drug test, can handle technology better and can be relied upon to stay in their jobs longer, meaning that employers benefit from a more experienced, more productive work force. In effect, Nordic employers can pay more in part because workers generate more income.In that sense, learning from the Nordics is not as simple as raising minimum wages and seeing happiness soar. Rather, it’s the challenge of investing in human capital from early childhood through university-level education, pushing relentlessly to broaden opportunity at every level.
Diterbitkan : 2026-07-04 11:09:00
sumber : www.nytimes.com
