Banta med vikingarna; Skandinaver i The New Yorker

WASHINGTON Glöm Medelhavet – tänk kalla nordiska vatten. I ett nummer av Vogue nyligen beskrev Kate Christensen hur hon ramlade över entusiastiska omdömen om en ”New Nordic diet” i brittisk press.

Det hela var förstås inte nytt, vilket framgår av Christensens artikel. Hon berättar om nötter, bär, sill, torsk, vilt, rapsolja. Och om sina norska rötter och kokboken från Noma. Trevlig läsning om inte annat även om det hela kokar ner till att äta mindre portioner.

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Skandinavien skärskådas i The New Yorker, här, av Nathan Heller med anledning av engelsmannen Michael Booths bok The Almost Nearly Perfect People som just utkom i USA. En hel del tänkvärt om skillnaderna mellan exempelvis Sverige och USA.

Några citat av Heller:

– In Sweden, control comes through protection against risk. Americans think the opposite: control means taking personal responsibility for risk and, in some cases, social status.

– In recent years, however, a strange thing has been happening in Nordic countries: they’ve been getting more unequal. Inequality has risen in Sweden, in the past decade and a half, at a rate four times as high as in the United States.

– A lot of the appeal of the Nordic model comes from its ostensible resilience: it’s supposed to be able to provide for anyone who comes to it. The rise of both anti-immigration sentiment and wealth inequality challenges that premise.

– A recent study by the Norwegian political scientist Henning Finseraas tried to correlate immigration politics in Europe with stances on inequality policies and found no obvious relationship; some people resented immigrants, but they didn’t necessarily see that as cause to scale back welfare. Nor do the economics justify this linkage: another analysis, by Christer Gerdes and Eskil Wadensjö, in Sweden, found that the net flow of wealth has sometimes been from immigrants to natives.

– “Integration” has become a watchword at Rosengård and in Nordic ethnic politics more generally. It underscores the social and economic pressures to join the Swedish pack, the common turf where its supportive, all-embracing system thrives. The trouble with the Scandinavian model isn’t that there are no exceptions to sameness; it’s that exceptionalism is not something the system is set up to protect and serve.

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Och, slutligen, om Gunnar Myrdals stora studie om rasrelationer i USA som fick honom att fundera på samband mellan fördomar och ekonomisk status:

– Myrdal seems to have been right. In those countries with social programs guided in part by his principles, inequality runs low, with few clear market costs. In the assessment of most Scandinavians, the system helps to impart freedom, too. How are you free to realize yourself, they ask, if your education depends on your parents’ wealth? Or if you’re loath to get divorced for fear of losing your standard of living? (The per-capita divorce rate in Scandinavia is notably high, which, depending on your notions about marriage, is either a healthy or an unhealthy sign.) According to Newsweek, Iceland is the best place in the world to be female, and gender equality in Denmark is so deeply rooted that it startles even some enlightened American women: checks on a first date are split, and door-holding is considered rude. Booth tells us that his Danish wife, during their courtship, took his chivalrous habit of walking on the outer edge of the sidewalk as a weird personal tic.