Quotes from Michael Booth

Perhaps Danish happiness is not really happiness at all, but something much more valuable and durable: contentedness, being satisfied with your lot, low-level needs being met, higher expectations being kept in check.

To achieve authentic, sustained happiness, above all else you need to be in charge of your life, to be in control of who you want to be, and be able to make the appropriate changes if you are not.

Inequality breeds depression, addiction, resignation, and physical symptoms including premature aging, that affect the entire population. In other words, the well-being of individuals, rich or poor, is mutually dependent.

When you visit a Danish company and can't tell the CEO from the office clerk, that's Viking egalitarianism at work.

In Sweden, self-sufficiency and autonomy is all; [interpersonal] debt of any kind, be it emotional, a favor, or cash, is to be avoided at all cost. The Swedes don't even like to owe a round of drinks.

In Scandinavia the standard of education is not only the best in the world, but the opportunities it presents are available to all, free of charge. This is the bedrock of Nordic exceptionalism.

If you are spending more time matching your Kitchenaid to your kettle to your cupboards than you are cooking, something is very wrong.

Hvad udad tabes, skal indad vindes. (What was lost without will be found within.)

More than half of the Danish adult population—as much as two-thirds, according to some estimates—either works in the public sector or is financially supported by it in the form of benefit payments. The idea, then, of the Danes voting for a reduction in the size of the public sector funded by tax cuts seems about as likely as the turkeys voting for Thanksgiving. The majority will always vote for the status quo because their livelihood depends on it.

I recently read—and I am not making this up—that members of Sörmland County Council had passed a motion, so to speak, to insist that men working for the local council should urinate sitting down, with the ultimate aim of making their public toilets genderless. Reading about all this you get a sense of the almost religious fervor with which the Social Democrats went about dreaming up and implementing their radical policies.

All of the Nordic countries have high levels of trust, but the Danes are the most trusting people on the planet. In a 2011 survey by the OECD, 88.3 percent of Danes expressed a high level of trust in others, more than any other nationality (the next places on the list were filled by Norway, Finland, and Sweden, respectively, and the United States was way down in twenty-first place out of thirty countries surveyed).

They are funny, too. And not always intentionally, either, which as far as I am concerned is the very best kind of funny.

Everything I read about the Swedish Social Democratic government of the last century suggested an organization that was driven by one single, overarching goal: to sever the traditional, some would say natural, ties between its citizens, be they those that bound children to their parents, workers to their employers, wives to their husbands, or the elderly to their families.

Proper, deep, enduring joy usually requires a remarkable facility for denial, something which the Danes have in spades.

The autonomy enabled by a high-quality, free education system is just as important as the region's economic equality and extensive welfare safety nets, if not more so.

The word overskud, meaning a kind of surplus of energy. As in, "I can't cut the lawn now—after that great big boozy lunch I simply don't have the overskud.

the Popsicle Index, which ranks countries according to the percentage of people in a community who believe that their children can safely leave their home, walk to the nearest possible location to buy a popsicle, and walk back home again.

This striking economic equality lies not only at the core of the happiness and success of the Danes but of the people of the Nordic region as a whole.

The Gini Coefficient quantifies how large a percentage of the total income of a society must be redistributed in order to achieve a perfectly equal distribution of wealth.

Now is probably a good time to make my confession about Finland, our next destination in this Nordic odyssey: I think the Finns are fantastic. I can't get enough of them. I would be perfectly happy for the Finns to rule the world. They get my vote, they've won my heart. If you ask me, they should just change the word 'fantastic' to 'Finntastic.' Helsinki? Heavensinki, more like.

today, the Danes are the world's leading pork butchers, slaughtering more than twenty-eight million pigs a year. The Danish pork industry accounts for around a fifth of all the world's pork exports, half of domestic agricultural exports, and more than 5 percent of the country's total exports. Yet the weird thing is, you can travel the length and breadth of the country and never see a single sow because they are all kept hidden from view in intensive rearing sheds.

a country can be too small, too socially knitted, too tightly tied for its own good. Strong social networks can, in certain circumstances, turn to incestuous corruption and the shutting down of democratic discourse. You

Parochialism remains the Danes' defining characteristic, but their radically recalibrated sense of identity and national pride has created a curious duality best described as a kind of "humble pride," though many often mistake it for smugness.

EARLY ONE DARK April morning a few years ago I was sitting in my living room in central Copenhagen, wrapped in a blanket and yearning for spring, when I opened that day's newspaper to discover that my adopted countrymen had been anointed the happiest of their species in something called the Satisfaction with Life Index, compiled by the Department of Psychology at the University of Leicester. I checked the date on the newspaper: it wasn't 1 April.