Share This. April 11, Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. Latest Posts. What's Trending. Regulatory Policy. Yet the Nordic countries are small and more ethnically and culturally homogeneous than most developed countries. These special conditions have facilitated high levels of nationwide trust and cooperation — and consequently a willingness to pay higher-than-average levels of tax.
As a result, Nordic policies and institutions cannot be easily exported to other countries. Large developed countries, such as the US, UK, France and Germany, are more diverse in terms of cultures and ethnicities. Exporting the Nordic model would create major challenges of assimilation, integration, trust-enhancement, consensus-building and institution-formation.
Nonetheless, it is still important to learn from it and to experiment. Despite a prevailing global ideology in favour of markets, privatisation and macro-economic austerity, there is considerable enduring variety among capitalist countries.
Furthermore some countries continue to perform much better than others on indicators of welfare and economic equality. We can learn from the Nordic mixed economies with their strong welfare provision that does not diminish the role of business. They show a way forward that is different from both statist socialism and unrestrained markets. Portsmouth Climate Festival — Portsmouth, Portsmouth. Edition: Available editions United Kingdom. Become an author Sign up as a reader Sign in.
As we head into , we're running the best, most insightful and most essential Worklife stories from Read all of the year's biggest hits here. The area is packed with people in designer sunglasses soaking up the autumn sunshine. Standard narratives about Sweden tend to highlight its social democracy, high taxes and low income inequality by global standards. But while this stereotype is rooted in facts, the gap between the rich and the poor has been steadily widening since the s.
A high income is a badge of success in many countries, but Swedes have a deep-rooted aversion to talking about their cash. Our repeated efforts to arrange interviews with young, wealthy Swedes proved tricky; off-the-record, people were happy to talk about large second homes, family yachts, sports cars or champagne sprees in nightclubs, but getting them to formalise their comments was a struggle.
But why is this? While discussing your wealth feels perfectly appropriate in some parts of the world, why does it seem like nobody in Stockholm is proud of being rich?
It is a view shared by Stina Dahlgren, a year-old Swedish journalist who spent several years living in the US.
But over here in Sweden, if you say that you have a good salary Many cultural commentators agree that a large part of the taboo can be explained by a deep-rooted Nordic code called Jantelagen , which promotes the idea of never thinking you are better than anyone else and calling out those who break this norm.
Jantelagen — which translates to The Law of Jante in English — takes its name from a rule-abiding town called Jante which featured in a fictional book by Norwegian-Danish author Aksel Sandemose in But Dr Stephen Trotter, a Scottish-Norwegian academic who wrote about the concept while he was working at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, says its sentiment has existed in the Nordics — especially in rural areas — for centuries.
As a shorthand for celebrating modesty and humbleness, Jantelagen is not dissimilar to tall poppy syndrome , a popular term in Australia and New Zealand that embraces putting down those who are showy about their wealth or status. Yet he also points out that the way Jantelagen plays out in Sweden and other Nordic societies is linked to specific cultural norms in those nations.
Embedded deeply in Nordic culture, Jantelagen is an unspoken rule that aims to keep everybody seemingly equal and reduce social tensions Credit: Benoit Derrier.
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