Thursday, January 27, 2022

Review of "The Year of Living Danishly" by Helen Russell

I thought this would be fluffier than it was, but actually there's quite a lot of serious stuff in there about how Denmark functions as a society, and about what might be behind its status as "the world's happiest country". Lots of it is about equality - it's a high-tax society with a high level of state provision in terms of welfare, education and healthcare. Some of it might be about perceived ethnic homogeneity too - it's easy to support levelling when you feel that the beneficiaries are "people like me", though of course the political culture of the place helps to define where those boundaries are.

It's nice that it's not completely soppy about everything Danish. Denmark seems to tolerate a high level of interpersonal violence, and drunkenness. Women have it better there than in other OECD countries, but it's far from perfect. There's lots in the book about hetero swingers, but I have no idea what it's like to be LGBT in Denmark. 

Still, this is a nice book, worth the time spent reading it.

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