Denmark

Copenheaven

Copenhagen swept us off our feet, starting with the driverless, silent, and sparklingly clean subway that ran every 2 minutes from the airport to our downtown AirBnb. When we emerged into the sunlight 35 minutes later, we found public parks on just about every block, replete with children jumping on trampolines built into the pavement and adults licking ice cream cones on park benches. We could see that there were more bicycles on the road than cars, but we could hear and smell this fact too. The absence of cars in an urban environment brought such a feeling of well-being and delight! I had heard the rumor that the Nordics have life figured out but I did not expect that I would feel this fact so viscerally upon landing. 

Perhaps we landed on a particularly good day, but Denmark consistently rates among the top 3 happiest countries in the UN’s World Happiness Report. I made a habit of spot checking this finding every time we had a chance to chat with a Dane, asking them how they felt about Denmark’s ranking. They universally nodded in agreement that they were both happy and lived in a happy country. They  attributed this to a collection of social factors that develop and strengthen trust and optimism.

The first theme was trust, especially trust in government. While Danes pay among the highest taxes on earth, they seem to view taxes as money well spent. In exchange for rates sometimes exceeding 50% of income, Danes trust their government to provide financial and social safety nets that allow them to live with ease. Education is among the top ranked in the world at each level, and when students enter college, both their tuition and living expenses are covered. Healthcare is similarly superlative. While their healthcare spending per capita is roughly half of the USA’s, their life expectancies are substantially longer. The Danish government has earned the trust of its people. 

The government also reciprocates this trust. The metro has no turnstyles;  riders are simply expected to buy a ticket. Police presence was extremely light, and certainly did not flash guns, as we saw in other countries. Since the community was trusting me, I wanted to prove myself to be trustworthy. I found myself patiently walking to crosswalks rather than jaywalking, eager to obey the rules despite knowing they would never be enforced. The extensions of this concept are really far reaching. More government, not less, has led Danes to trust each other, greater feelings of safety, and most importantly, a greater sense of freedom. 

The second theme was about social integration. Central Copenhagen is primarily comprised of  multi-family homes with similar designs and dimensions. They’re all about 5 stories tall and surround a central courtyard full of swing sets, benches and bike parking. The mind-blowing part of it to me was that ~25% of each building is required to be affordable housing. This could not be further from the American tendency to concentrate urban poverty in housing projects, far away from the rich neighborhoods. Instead, rich and poor Danes grow up interacting every day. If not in the stairwells and schools, then in the seemingly infinite parks and playgrounds throughout the city, designed for all ages. Abby took the boys to a park designed to teach kids traffic rules, and I took them to a chess themed park later that day. Across the street from our apartment was a community center (Folkehuset Absalon) offering an affordable community dinner for anyone to join each night. On the evening we had dinner there, we sat at a long table with a college gymnastics team to our left and a group of middle-aged government employees to our right. Everyone passed the salad, bread, beans and beer down long rows and made friends along the way. The ladies to our right asked if we planned to join them for the drag show after dinner. While it was past our bedtime, it made me smile to be invited, both because it seemed to be a genuine expression of friendship, and a nod to the normalization of lifestyles that are still not broadly accepted in the United States. 

The third theme was about innovation as a community. To be fair, no one actually mentioned this, but it was all around us! The city’s waste incinerator, for example, completely changed my notion of what waste management can be. CopenHill rises 70m above the otherwise flat city, collecting and burning trash, using the waste heat to both generate electricity and provide “district heating”  for 150,000 homes. The building itself is an architectural wonder, with an enormous green roof with hiking trails and a ski slope. At the bottom visitors can rent skis and buy lift tickets to ski the green, artificial (ambient temperature) “snow.” At the very top, there is a cafe and playground with panoramic city views. The day we went, there were tens of other families spending the afternoon there, atop a waste management facility! There was no smell, and no other sign of what lay below us. I wonder if such innovation as a community would ever be possible in the USA where I might not trust corporations or government to convert an active "dump" into an urban oasis. 

The Price of Paradise

Copenhagen was also the land of sticker shock. A bowl of ramen was $25, a coffee $8, a subway ticket $15. At first I winced every time my credit card came out, but I began to think about it differently. Prices may be suppressed in the USA partly because we often don’t pay for the healthcare, childcare, higher education or other life necessities of the people who produce those products. Just as we talk about the invisible “embodied energy” of products when considering climate change, I started to think about the invisible “embodied poverty” of low priced products. I suspect (and often choose to ignore) that someone else’s poverty enables my click-to-buy, American lifestyle. In the USA, when I see high prices my inner monologue explains them with high quality or high profit margins. In Denmark, my inner monologue shifted to explain high prices with high quality and a higher quality of life for workers behind the scenes, whether that is true or not.

Whose Paradise? 

Copenhagen also struck us with how white it is. Nearly 90% of Denmark is of Danish descent. Though the Danes colonized and enslaved Inuit, African, and Caribbean people, some historians suggest that there is a colonial amnesia which leads many visitors (and perhaps some Danes) to imagine Denmark as a racist-free paradise. It was easy to lull myself into this perception while I was there. However, weeks later, two minutes on the web revealed prominent anti-immigration political parties who actively fight against a multi-ethnic or multi-cultural Denmark. In recent years, they have successfully amended laws to restrict immigration, especially of refugees. Racism and xenophobia may simply be less apparent because the population is so homogenous. I imagine our level of comfort might have been different had our family not been of European descent. 

Poverty is a Policy Choice

Visiting Denmark as a citizen of one of the richest countries in the world, I began to wonder if the USA may have the opportunity to eradicate poverty in much the same way that Denmark has (immigration policies aside). What if instead of grumbling about the taxes we pay, we had a high enough trust in the government to view taxes as investments in our social fabric and collective wellbeing. And if we could do that, could our tax code shift from subsidizing the rich to assisting the poor? Matthew Desmond (an academic on this topic) points out that our lawmakers (and voters!) currently insist on subsidizing affluence more than alleviating poverty. For example, as a homeowner, I enjoy the mortgage interest deduction which applies to all homeowners regardless of mortgage size. Not only is there no equivalent for renters (who are often lower income), but I had not realized that the USA spends $190 billion on homeowner tax subsidies and only $53 billion on direct housing assistance to the needy. In my own desire to reduce my tax burden, I never considered how it was a subsidy offered only to the wealthy. Perhaps I am being naive but I don’t think the Danes would stand for this. They understand that poverty hurts everyone, and our collective quality of life only rises when everyone gets to share the wealth.

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