Nicholas Kristof Discovers Norway

By Bruce Bawer

The New York Times may be Ground Zero for distortion of the facts, but among the regulars at that newspaper no one has a longer and more impressive record for colossal dissembling than the columnist Nicholas Kristof. In 2019 I reported here on a column entitled “Learning From Cuba’s ‘Medicare for All,’” in which Kristof shamelessly parroted Havana’s grotesque lie about the surpassing excellence of its health-care system. “Cuba is poor and repressive with a dysfunctional economy,” Kristof wrote, “but in health care it does an impressive job that the United States could learn from.” As I commented, “It’s been definitively documented that while Party-connected elites and tourists with hard cash receive decent medical treatment in Cuba, the care accorded ordinary Cubans is deplorable.”

Indeed, the hospitals for those ordinary Cubans look like every other Havana building you’ve seen pictures of – squalid and ramshackle – and the supplies are meager, with patients, as Jay Nordlinger noted in 2007, obliged to “bring their own bedsheets, soap, towels, food, light bulbs – even toilet paper.” Exhibit A in Kristof’s demonstration of the superiority of Cuban medicine was the case of one Claudia Fernández, who had allegedly received first-rate prenatal care. Which led me to ask: “how did Kristof hook up with Fernández? Did he ask his Cuban handlers (one imagines some equivalent of the Soviet-era Intourist) to introduce him to a typical example of an expectant Cuban mother? If she’s really getting the kind of care he describes, who exactly is she – which is to say, whom is she connected to? This, and many other questions, occur immediately to any remotely informed reader of Kristof’s column but seem never to have crossed Kristof’s mind.”

That chunk of fantasy about Cuba, of course, is only one of countless reality-defying columns that Kristof has served up over the years, often professing to provide the gospel truth about some country that has a remarkably complex history and culture but that Kristof thinks he can sum up on the basis of a couple of night’s stay at some five-star hotel in the capital, interviews with one or two highly placed government officials, and accounts of his encounters with purportedly ordinary people like the aforementioned Claudia Fernández. So it was that the other day, seven years after “Learning From Cuba’s ‘Medicare for All,’” Kristof treated us to “What We Should Learn From Nordic Happiness.” The title refers, of course, to those ridiculous surveys that routinely conclude that people in the Nordic countries are happier than those elsewhere. As Kristof put it: “The five Nordic countries — Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden — all rank among the six happiest countries in the world in the World Happiness Report, based on Gallup polling.”

Well, let’s start by putting that one to bed. It takes exceedingly little for most Nordic people to tell pollsters, or anyone else, that they’re happy. These are low-expectation societies. They don’t seek happiness. They seek contentment, predictability. Yes, they’re become more Americanized – meaning that it’s not unusual to see affluent-looking teens and twenty-somethings strolling around central Oslo on a mild Saturday afternoon laden down with shopping bags from H&M, Zara, and Louis Vuitton. But they’re an exception. Contrast them with the old widows – and yes, they still exist – whose idea of a special Sunday treat is a single boiled egg.

Take that habit of splurging on upscale togs too far, moreover – or too far into your adulthood – and you’ll find yourself on the receiving end of a considerable amount of resentment. You’ll get the same reaction if your ambition, your spunk, your individuality, and your success cross the line. This resentment, of course, is a not uncommon phenomenon outside of the U.S.; it’s often called “tall poppy syndrome.” In Norway and other Scandinavian countries, it has its roots in the Jante Law, a set of precepts that, to this day, are still driven by parents and teachers (if perhaps not quite as fiercely as before) into the minds of young people, and that were codified by Aksel Sandemose in his 1933 novel A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks. “You shall not think you are anything special,” the Jante Law says. “You shall not imagine yourself better than we are.”

It’s because of the Jante Law, ingrained into their minds since childhood, that Norwegians tend not to lie in bed at night itching for a raise at work, a nicer car, a bigger house. It’s why they don’t tinker endlessly in their garages eager to invent the next gadget that will revolutionize the world. It’s why they’re more comfortable fitting in than sticking out – even if they’re sticking out for having achieved something wonderful. (The sole exception to this rule is in the realm of sports, where worshiping soccer hero Erling Haaland, for instance, is de rigueur.) Quite simply, Norwegians derive a feeling of coziness in the presence of ordinariness, concord, conformity. They like doing the same things at the same time – such as reading crime novels over the Easter holiday (påskekrim) or eating tacos on Friday (tacofredag). A current TV commercial features an older couple who spy on the neighbors with binoculars and are shocked to see them eating Indian food on a Tuesday. Exotic cuisines, you see, are to be saved for the weekend – just like drinking alcohol.

One consequence of the Jante mentality is that the difference between high- and low-level salaries is much smaller than in the U.S. Although this is not necessarily something to be scoffed at, Kristof not only celebrates it but misrepresents it – and ignores its downside. “Do you know how to get an American company,” he asks his reader, “to grant you excellent wages and amazing benefits, even for an entry-level job?” Answer: “Move to Norway and take the job there.” Cute, but preposterous. Americans can’t just pick up and move to Norway and be handed residency and work permits. Besides, even if a highly educated American with an impressive CV were somehow to acquire these documents, he would likely find it surprisingly hard to find a position commensurate with his credentials.

I’ve been through that myself (I ended up being saved from a futile years-long search for work by my contract for the book that became While Europe Slept), and I’ve met innumerable non-Nordics with similar experiences. Kristof’s assertion that an American can find success by moving to Norway and applying to an American firm is, then, either sheer fantasy or a tremendous lie. Which brings us to the anecdote that he proffers in order to prove just how terrifically young Norwegians in modest occupations have it. “Consider Hauk Kjaeran, 24, a waiter at Nektar restaurant in Oslo,” he writes. “He has been at his job for only a few months but is paid more than $25 an hour, not including tips. He also gets five weeks’ vacation, earns a pension, is entitled to hefty parental and sick leave and is studying to be a sommelier, all paid for. A full workweek in Norway is 37.5 hours, but Kjaeran asked for a 60 percent contract. ‘I have some other stuff to do, and I like my freedom as well,’ he explained.”

Who is Hauk Kjaeran? (Or, rather, Kjæran – the Times, even now, refuses to properly reproduce the extra letters in the Scandinavian alphabet.) As in the case of Christina Fernández in Kristof’s above-mentioned Cuba piece, I wondered: if he’s got such a sweet gig, whom is he connected to? So I looked him up. It turned out that Kristof had gotten the waiter’s last name wrong. It’s Skjæran, not Kjæran. And he’s not some standard-issue lad in his first job waiting tables – not by a long shot. For one thing, he’s the son of Bjørnar Kjæran, a famous Labor Party politician and former cabinet minister – in other words, a member of Norway’s small, privileged, tightly interconnected left-wing elite, among whom things operate according to a special set of rules that the rest of us in Norway can only behold with envy and admiration. Hauk himself is registered as the owner of a business called Skjæran Investment, with its address at a handsome old building in Oslo’s quaint Gamlebyen (Old City). As for Nektar, it’s more properly called a winebar than a restaurant, and is the kind of cutesy, rustic-looking place where rich kids work (kind of). Nor is Skjæran just “studying to be a sommelier”: before moving on to Nektar, he worked at the Lasarett Vinbar (“A ‘hole-in-the-wall’ wine bar” in Oslo’s upscale Torshov district with a “raw and industrial” look), where he and a colleague shared the Norwegian Gold Star at the Star Wine List of the Year International Final for 2025.

In short, Skjæran isn’t a random Norwegian kid who walked into a random restaurant seeking his first job and was handed an impressive salary package; and Kristof’s account of Skjæran’s supposedly typical success couldn’t be less representative of how ordinary folks fare on the Norwegian labor market. Just to up the level of audacity, Kristof follows this tale about the scion of a Labor Party bigwig with a quotation from an even bigger Labor Party name – namely, Jens Stoltenberg, Norway’s former prime minister and current finance minister – who (surprise!) sums up in a few words the precise point that Kristof wants to make with his yarn about Skjæran. “We actually live the American dream,” Stoltenberg tells Kristof. “The American dream, it’s more reality in the Nordic countries than in America.”

Imagine asking a country’s finance minister to sum up its financial health! Kristof didn’t even bother to speak to one or two of Stoltenberg’s political opponents. Or anybody who might have rebuffed his absurd claim. Granted, there is something you could call the Norwegian dream: as Kristof has suggested himself, perhaps without realizing it, it’s about finding some low- or middling-level job, which may or may not be personally rewarding, and putting in a minimal amount of work, which in Norway (where it’s hard to fire people after a certain amount of time) will be enough to keep you there forever, earning the occasional promotion or raise. If you want that kind of life, well, there’s your dream. But it’s not the American dream – the American dream is about refusing to abandon your highest possible aspirations and achieving them on the basis of hard work and merit.

Consider a friend of mine who, raised in a small Norwegian town, is a hard-working expert mechanic but took years to find a job. In the U.S., he’d likely have taken out a loan, opened his own garage, and thrived. In Norway, however, the paperwork, regulations, and taxes strongly discourage entrepreneurship. And while well-connected young sommeliers in Oslo may be able to boast of their fine salaries and long vacations, Norwegian doctors – just to take one example – are fearsomely overworked and appallingly underpaid. Nor are there enough of them to provide patients with the degree of attention they need. It’s a scandal, and a threat to Norway’s otherwise immensely admirable health-care system. But did Kristof mention any of this? Does he even know about it?

Kristof’s article contained some other slippery statements. “Norway is now richer than the United States per capita”: only slightly, and only because the relevant statistics take into account its sovereign wealth fund, which contains over $2 trillion in petroleum revenue. He mentions immigration, which of course is rapidly dragging Norway down the tubes, only to suggest – risibly – that the Norwegian system has been successful in “encouraging children from immigrant countries to embrace being Norwegian from an early age.” (Kristof comes to this laughable conclusion after being shown a day-care center where “a diverse group of children” were “rattling away in Norwegian.” Can you say “Potemkin village?”) Kristof further informs his readers that “one-fifth of Norwegians are either immigrants or their children, often from countries like Syria or Somalia with conservative social cultures. Day care centers try to nurture Nordic social attitudes, which tend to be more liberal.” Tend to be more liberal! Hilarious. The key word in that quotation, needless to say, is “try.” Do day-care centers succeed to any meaningful degree in teaching Muslim children that hijab, forced marriage, honor killing, gay bashing, and beating up Jews are wrong? By all evidence – none of which Kristof attends to – the answer is a big whopping no.

I love Norway. I love it because of its virtues and in spite of its problems, which I’ve been observing and writing about for almost three decades. But Kristof is clueless about both the virtues and the problems. How could he be otherwise? In his silly article, he was pontificating about a country to which he’s made a brief visit and sought out people who he knew would support a narrative that he’d formulated even before getting on the plane. Then there’s this point: in order to ponder the mystery of Nordic happiness, Kristof visited Norway at the height of the summer equinox, when the sun barely sets, the weather is perfect, and (for a change) everybody is smiling. I’d propose that he try spending, say, two months here in the dead of winter. You want to talk about happiness? I’ve yet to meet a Norwegian who contends that the bitter cold, the dangerously icy sidewalks, and above all the unrelieved, godless darkness do anything other than to drive him to the edge of despair.

First published in Front Page Magazine