Viking Economics

A few years ago, I sat in a living room in the Norwegian town of Skien, surrounded by relatives. As a young man I’d married an international student from Norway, and her family had adopted me. Whenever I was back in Norway, we’d get together for pastries and coffee. I’d lived in Oslo more than half a century ago, but I’d come back many times. Gathered in the living room that day were relatives of a variety of ages and occupations: teacher, industrial worker, owner of a garden center, social worker, organic farmer, middle manager in a business.

As we talked about this and that, one of the cousins mentioned that she’d just heard about the results of an experiment for shortening the workweek. She told us with some excitement that the study measured people’s productivity when their workweek was shortened from forty to thirty hours. The researchers found that the workers got more work done.

I watched the ripple of satisfaction around the room as the relatives started speculating about whether a reduction in hours could work in their jobs, too. They wondered about the implications of having more time off with the same total paycheck. On average,
Norwegians work only 1,400 hours per year—the lowest in Europe—and are famous for their high productivity. I was struck by the quiet confidence everyone in the room seemed to have that as soon as the research was done, their employers would change policies easily.

“What about you, George?” a young woman asked. I had been quiet throughout the conversation. “What’s the trend in hours worked in the States?”

“Actually,” I said, “the trend with us is in the opposite direction. Overall, people with jobs work longer hours than before.”

She was visibly surprised. “Does that mean that you take the time off in other ways, like super-long vacations? Here in Norway the national law is a month paid vacation for all, but some occupations get more because they are more stressful.”

“Well …” I paused, trying to ensure my Norwegian vocabulary was up to the task of conveying disappointing news. “In the United States, we don’t tend to have long paid vacations. Lots of people have two weeks, lots have one week, and some don’t have any paid vacation.”

The room became very still. I could sense my interlocutor trying to imagine living under such conditions. After a while, she chanced another question, clearly wanting to allow for cultural differences.

“Maybe people in your country don’t
want
to have free time to enjoy your families, and go hiking and do recreation, and have hobbies?”

I was slow to respond. “Yes, we do want those things, just as you do. It’s just that, well, we don’t know that we can have them.”

Hence this book. I wrote
Viking Economics
because so many of my fellow Americans experience the stark impact of our economic
challenges every single day, yet feel socially powerless about solving them. One reason we’ve gotten stuck is that we’ve forgotten how successful Americans have been when we’ve formed social movements. Everything from child-labor laws to Social Security, after all, is a result of popular action.

But it’s not just our own history we have to look toward. Too often, we’re unaware of other societies that have tackled similar economic problems and taken giant strides forward; without that knowledge, it’s hard to visualize the big changes we need to make.

Equality is probably the most potent example of this gap. Most Americans are deeply aware of the wealth gap—even Republican politicians are starting to talk about it.

Yet even as the wealth gap continues to grow, very few politicians seem to know what to do about it. Fortunately, bits of news are seeping into our country from the northwestern periphery of Europe. More Americans have now heard that over there, they have free higher education, robust support for families, a healthy work/life balance, active response to climate change, and an abundance of high-paying jobs for young and old alike. Almost no one connects the dots, however, to realize that these positives represent an egalitarian structure. Economists call the set of connections “the Nordic model.”

The conversation in that living room in Skien reveals what’s been going on: the descendants of the Vikings set themselves up to conduct experiments that support abundance for the people as a whole. Only one of the countries—Norway—struck it rich with oil, but all of them progressed in similar ways. Their economies have a sixty-year track record of delivering increased freedom and equality.

I want the United States to benefit from the living laboratory
that Norwegians, Danes, Swedes, and Icelanders have created, and I’m confident that their experiments with egalitarianism can be inspiring, useful, and applicable to Americans.

The Nordics weren’t always this way, of course. To get to the top of the global ratings, they paid their dues. They started out far behind: for decades Norwegians and Swedes fled poverty, emigrating to the United States and elsewhere. A century ago, their wealth gap was huge. Their economic elites, who held the power, were unwilling or unable to steer their countries toward justice and prosperity.

But eventually, the people mobilized—nonviolently—to displace their ineffective leadership and open the space for democracy. It did take open struggle, but they finally created a situation where they achieved a remarkable degree of freedom and equality key to the Nordic vision—and our own.

I believe we can catch up. We have a long tradition of citizens standing up for themselves and for their collective interests, and I have every reason to think that we can take any lessons we choose from the laboratories of the North, and run with them. I sincerely hope that
Viking Economics
can help in that effort.

I’m at the Viking Ship Museum in Bygdøy, in Oslo, marveling at the open wooden ships—seventy-five feet and smaller—that braved storms and the bitter cold of the Northern seas, all without modern navigational aids.

In the 790s, Vikings swept out of Norway and across the North Sea to raid the British coast. They seized booty and killed anyone who resisted. With their light, shallow boats, which could navigate rivers as well as handle the waves of the sea, the Vikings also plundered villages upstream.

The ancient world knew the ancestors of ethnic Norwegians, Swedes, and Danes to be amazing sailors, and indeed, the very name
Viking
means, “to go on an expedition.” Between the ninth and eleventh centuries, Viking men and women ventured eastward to present-day Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, and even as far as Baghdad, and sailed west to Iceland, Greenland, and Canada.

The ancient Vikings traded—depending on how willing the local people were—and they sometimes established farms and communities. They settled in such numbers in northern England and Scotland that their genes still show up in the local gene pools.

Which isn’t to say that we should romanticize the Vikings and the scope of their achievements: these were people who raided and killed people near and far without provocation. They set farms afire, raped women, claimed as theirs the property of others.

Yet the positive aspects of those accomplishments have been a source of confidence to the moderns. Norwegians, Danes, Swedes and Icelanders have all looked to the ancient Vikings for inspiration. Today we still invoke a Viking spirit. It is part of the cultural DNA, still emboldening the Vikings’ descendents to try new things—even when it means leaving the comforts of hearth and home.

I’d never been outside the United States when, at twenty-one, I boarded a transatlantic steamer bound for Oslo. I’d borrowed the money for a ticket from my grandfather, who recognized a lovesick young man when he saw one. I was determined to marry Berit Mathiesen, the Norwegian woman I met in Massachusetts, in a Quaker summer service project for students.

Five days after I got off the
S.S. Stavangerfjord
in Oslo, Berit and I were married in a red brick church with tall towers in her hometown of Skien, an old port city west of Oslo.

Berit was the first in her family to go to college, and she did it by venturing out, getting a scholarship to go to an American school. She earned her degree in Nebraska surrounded by prairie about as different from her Norwegian mountains as anything she could find.

When Berit’s three brothers were young, they did what many
working-class boys did: took a turn at sea as crew members on Norwegian freighters. Einar, Kjell, and Leif Erik explored ports of call in Africa and Asia. (Tiny Norway is the sixth-largest owner of merchant ships, following Germany, Japan, China, Greece, and Russia.)

At the turn of the twentieth century, most Norwegians lived in economic hardship. It would have been even worse if hundreds of thousands weren’t emigrating, leaving the few jobs and farms to their other family members. Small farmers supplemented their meager income by fishing and logging. Industrial workers toiled for long hours in dangerous conditions for small wages and no security. The country as a whole had little in the way of natural resources: forests, waterfalls, fish. Only 3 percent of the country was even suitable for growing food.

The tiny population, about three million, was scattered over an area larger than Great Britain, and widely distributed in small valleys separated by mountains and fjords. Trying to build roads to knit the population together was daunting given all the tunnels and bridges that were necessary, and building railroads wasn’t any easier. The nation’s internal market was tiny, and the dependence on global markets for the sale of commodities like timber and fish meant being at the mercy of rising and falling prices.