The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

Growing up in Minnesota, I was always taught that Scandinavian society was some sort of utopian system that helps everyone. The taxes were high, but the payoff was the world’s highest standard of living. Living in an age of increasingly regressive tax cuts and anti-welfare rhetoric, I thought it was time to look to Norway for a firsthand experience of the welfare state in the world’s most expensive country. So The Rake assigned me to go there and have a baby.

That’s not exactly true. Actually, my wife Katy found out that she was pregnant right about the time I received word that I’d won a Fulbright fellowship. We’d be in Trondheim when our first child was scheduled to arrive.

Naturally, one of our chief worries was getting health care coverage abroad. Katy had been covered by my insurance through the University of Minnesota, but when my teaching assistantship ended, we had to scramble. We called around to Blue Cross and other insurers for rates. Pregnancy is considered a “pre-existing condition,” as if it’s some sort of disease, and no one would have us. Even the health insurance guaranteed through the U.S. Secretary of State’s office for Fulbright grantees excludes pregnancy. Finally, we asked an official at Norwegian University of Science and Technology, where I’d be studying, if we’d be covered by the national Norwegian system. Her response: “I don’t see why not.” We asked if she could send us the proper forms. “There’s really no rush,” she said, “You can just fill them out once you arrive.” Thanks to the health care mess in our own nation, which has conditioned us to be skeptical and nervous, we were panicked by this carefree, almost reckless attitude toward health insurance.

Back in Minnesota, without insurance we would have been facing a hospital bill for at least $5,000 for a normal delivery, or as much as $21,000 for a C-section or other complications—and that wouldn’t even include the physician fees. As it turned out, a simple residency permit for a year in Norway meant that the Norwegian government would take care of us, and cover the considerable expenses involved in having a baby. We received a pamphlet from the Royal Ministry of Health and Social Affairs, which confirmed, “Compulsorily insured under the National Insurance Scheme are all persons resident or working in Norway.”

No wonder Norway has had the highest quality of life among all nations for the last couple of years. “It’s not that we buy more things or have more things, it’s that we are guaranteed a high standard of living,” an American living in Oslo told me. “We don’t have two cars, we take the bus, and we can probably count on one hand the number of times we go out to eat.” While this may not be the American dream of wealth, Norway’s system offers its citizens a degree of stability and certainty unheard of in the U.S.: Your health care, higher education, and pension will be provided by the government, and you won’t be out on the street if you lose your job.

Just scraping by on my student stipend, then, is not so scary in a country with such comprehensive social services. While Norway’s prices are sky-high—a small bottle of water can run you more than four dollars and a Burger King Whopper sets you back ten bucks—it can also boast the world’s highest standard of living because of its shared wealth.The high tax rates, including forty-nine percent on income, twenty-three percent on sales, and rates that make liquor prohibitively expensive—a forty-dollar bottle of Linie Norwegian aquavit in Trondheim goes for $19.95 at East Lake Liquor in Minneapolis—don’t seem to inspire the rancor that they do in the United States. Even though some Norwegians shop in the U.S. because of the low taxes, many people I’ve met are proud of their welfare system, though Norwegian modesty keeps them from bragging. “It’s the system we have chosen,” Sissel, a teacher in Trondheim, told me matter-of-factly, “and I’m happy to pay the taxes for it.”

Happy for taxes, for welfare? Happy to have their hard-earned dollars going to support others who may not work as hard as they do? The number of Norwegians that hold this view is large enough that Norway has refused to join the European Union and use its common currency. Even though the E.U. is a federation and it’s questionable whether membership would hurt Norway, citizens do not want to give up this comprehensive welfare system that helps all Norwegians. After all, the country’s social democracy provides the most liberal welfare system in Europe, though it’s based on the same principles as systems in Germany, Britain, and even Norway’s own Scandinavian neighbors. A middle-aged man from the town of Orkanger put it succinctly: “In Norway, all of our political parties are to the left of America’s Democrats.”

Once in Trondheim—Norway’s “City of Kings,” perched dramatically on a peninsula of a fjord seven hours north of Oslo—we went to the trygdekontor (insurance office) so that Katy could register for health care to cover the baby’s birth. A clerk perused our documents somberly and said she didn’t think we qualified. We panicked, of course. “What? How can that be?” we protested. “We filled out all the forms and we were told we’d be covered by the Norwegian insurance system.”

“Oh, the government shall pay for the birth,” she assured us mildly. “I just don’t know if you are eligible for maternity benefit. I shall control the situation and call you.”

Later, I asked our Norwegian friend Rachel what the woman at the trygdekontor meant by “maternity benefit.” “Of course Katy won’t get maternity leave because she hasn’t been working here,” Rachel explained, “but she should get the child credit of several thousand dollars. It’s not really your money, though—it belongs to the baby.”

I couldn’t believe we’d actually be paid to have a baby in Norway, so I scoured the literature from the insurance office. If Katy had been working for at least six months in Norway, she would receive forty-two weeks off full-time paid leave from work or fifty-two weeks at eighty percent of her salary, paid by the government. Four of these weeks, however, are reserved for the child’s father (who must live with the mother and child), and if he doesn’t use the time, both parents lose that month’s pay—a non-transferable inducement to ensure that dad stays home. The forty-two or fifty-two weeks can also be divvied up between the parents; meanwhile, the mother also gets her earned vacation time from the maternity leave. A mother can take the next year off without pay, but still hold on to her job. An extra three to twelve weeks can be taken off work before the due date. Self-employed people, too, can get one hundred percent of their pay for forty-two weeks (based on their previous three years’ earnings), and even adoption gets you thirty-nine weeks of full pay or forty-nine weeks at eighty percent. If a mother hasn’t been working in Norway—as was our case—she still receives a lump sum of 33,584 Norwegian kroner (about $5,000) for the baby.

Norway’s Velferdsstaten (welfare state) was established in earnest following the brutal German occupation during World War II. While numerous bold Norwegians lost their lives in risky sabotage missions to resist the Nazis, a strong sense of camaraderie and national identity was forged. Arbeiderpartiet (the Labor Party), which led the country until 1965, decided that the government should take responsibility for the public welfare, striving for the highest possible level of equality and a just distribution of wealth. Norway’s King Haakon set a good example by serving fish balls, a common peasant food, to foreign dignitaries at his castle. Led by Prime Minister Einar Gerhardsen, the Labor Party helped establish laws to ensure that everyone had the right to a reasonable house, food on the table, education, health care, child care, a livable pension, and so on.

I told Rachel I felt guilty about receiving this benefit. “Why should you feel ‘guilty’ about receiving money from the government?” she replied. “It’s our money, after all; even you pay taxes here now. Everyone receives the child credit, even the King, and Prince Haakon will when his wife Mette-Marit has their child.” No wonder I’ve overheard expatriates talk about having “bargain babies” in Norway.

Norway’s policies regarding wealth redistribution and equality extend to the workplace, where the salary gap between entry-level workers and CEOs doesn’t begin to approach the outrageous levels reached by many U.S. companies. For example, oil executives earn up to 300,000 or 400,000 Norwegian kroner (about $43,000 to $57,000), while hotel maids average about 200,000 kroner ($28,500). “Everyone’s income is public knowledge, and now is even listed on the Internet,” said Arild, an engineer for a small oil exploration business. People are probably very respectful of each other’s privacy, though, right? “No way,” he replied. “The day after they list income, everyone comes to work and they are all very angry that so-and-so makes a little bit more. Often, it’s not even a dollar more, but it causes many arguments.”

Sissel, our teacher friend, added, “If you see that your neighbor makes a million kroner, and the responsibilities in his job description don’t really fit what he’s being paid for, you can report them. This rarely happens, though. But the idea of it keeps people honest.”

And does it keep salaries more equitable? Arild confirmed that it does: “People figure that a regular construction worker who requires no education can go to work right away and get a paycheck. Compare that to a higher-paid manager or engineer who gets years of education—and debt—and their lifetime earnings are about the same.” Therefore, years of preparation for a job ultimately don’t result in that much more money.

Although Norwegians are encouraged to work until sixty-seven (otherwise they don’t reap full retirement benefits), their workdays are short. When we stopped at the bank in downtown Trondheim to open an account, our banker Arne looked at his watch and said, “Now it is three-fifteen and banks are closed.” Closed? “Yes, the bank is open until three o’clock in summer. We work seven and one half hours in winter, with one half hour for lunch. In summer, we work seven hours with a lunch break.” We realized we were holding him overtime. “Oh, it’s OK. You know in Norway, we work thirty-five hours a week. In the old days, I remember people worked forty hours a week, but it’s too much. You have no life then. I want to see my family sometimes. Luckily, we have five weeks of vacation a year so we can enjoy life.” Obviously, all Norwegians take “banker’s hours” to heart.
One of the main reasons that Norway can continue to afford such a high standard of living is due to the massive oil reserves recently found in the North Sea, which make the country the third-largest oil exporter behind Saudi Arabia and Russia. Rather than allow Phillips Petroleum to explore for oil in the North Sea and reap any profits to be made, the Norwegian government set up its own company, Statoil. The revenues go into an oljefond (oil fund) to support the government, thereby indirectly subsidizing the rising costs of this welfare system.

“Norway is rich not only because of Statoil,” said Knut, an art curator in Trondheim, “but also because as a country we’ve made a decision to share our resources with each other, like Sweden and Finland. We’re founded on a fusion between social solidarity and a democratic ideal. Therefore we don’t have the poor like you do in the United States—or the crime, for that matter.” Norway does have one of the lowest murder rates in the world, in spite of 720,000 registered firearms. And unlocked bikes are everywhere around town, although Arne warned us that this could still be risky. “You best keep bikes locked. Even Norwegians have learned to steal!”

Being thrown in the clink in Norway isn’t all bad, though, with a government like Norway’s picking up the bill. “See that?” a cab driver asked me, pointing to a building painted in soft Scandinavian colors. It looked like a fenced-in industrial park. “That’s Norway’s second-largest jail, but it’s really more like a hotel. They each have their own room with TVs and Internet access. Some have even studied to become lawyers while they are in jail, and the Norwegian government pays for everything. It’s better to be a prisoner in a Norwegian jail than free in Albania or Belarus.” He blamed foreigners for filling the jails, claiming that only ten percent of the prisoners were Norwegian. However, it’s clear that the population of Norway would actually decline without these arrivals. Helping immigrants resettle and aiding new families with the high cost of having children are both efforts by the government to bolster the population and to avoid the negative birth rates of Italy, France, and other European countries—along with the resulting decline in a productive populace.

In order to get by on a student stipend in Norway (short of doing time in a supposedly luxurious jail), Arild recommended, “You need to go on the meat bus to Sweden. Because meat is so expensive, Swedish stores pay for a bus to bring Norwegian pensioners, especially little old ladies, over the border to do their shopping.” It’s practically a tradition in Norway to evade high prices and taxes by shopping in Sweden, he explained. Less than three percent of the land is arable in Norway, making food prices, except for fish, some of the highest in Europe; Sweden’s prices, meanwhile, are slightly lower to be more on par with its fellow European Union countries.

We spotted the line of senior citizens waiting for the meat bus on a picturesque main street of Trondheim, with the medieval Nidaros cathedral at one end and the fishing boats on the fjord on the other. When an unmarked bus pulled up and the ladies hurriedly piled into both the front and rear doors, we followed suit, after confirming with the driver that this was the bus to Sweden. “Ya, ya. Please enter,” he replied impatiently, as if resigned to his lot in life. Once the bus was full, everyone pulled out either cinnamon rolls or knitting needles and began to chat. A woman in front of us managed to eat a sandwich, knit an entire sock, and carry on a conversation simultaneously, telling us about her relatives in Richfield (“Do you know them?”) when she discovered we were from Minnesota.

Two other women, a sandwich-toting chatterbox and a meticulously dressed knitter, took us under their wing after I explained that we need to shop in Sweden because my wife is pregnant. “Oh yes, we can tell. She must eat.” They assured us that the Swedish storekeepers understand Norwegian. But do they take Norsk money? “Oh ya!” They asked us if we had ordered our wine or alcohol ahead of time. “No? Here’s the phone number for next time.”

After we drove through a tunnel outside the fjord town of Hell, we passed more moose-crossing signs than we could count. This seemed to put the bus driver in a good mood. He began telling jokes and doing moose impersonations over the microphone, all the while steering the bus around hairpin mountain turns. The ladies put down their knitting to laugh in unison. After two hours on a one-lane road, the bus pulled up to a rinky-dink grocery store at a desolate crossroads. The calm courtesy evaporated and a mad rush for shopping carts ensued; surprised shopkeepers backed away as the ladies stormed the store.

We lost sight of our two helpers in the chaos and were left to fend for ourselves. A butcher brought out a box of two-foot salamis and was surrounded like a quarterback in a football huddle. Ladies emptied the box before he could get the salamis into the refrigerator case. One of our friends emerged from the huddle. Spying us, she hoisted her salami like a trophy and yelled, “Kjøtt!” (meat).Katy’s water broke at 11:10 p.m. on October 28th. The last bus had already left for the sykehus (hospital), an hour away. We had been told that this is actually very close for Norway; women in labor who live across the fjord must call to stop the ferry to carry them to the sykehus. Somehow this wasn’t comforting. We called a cab and paid the $150 fare.

Although the midwives (jordmor, or “earth mother,” in Norwegian) spoke nearly perfect English, they sometimes had to search for words. One gently asked Katy, “Can you move your, how do you say, ‘ass’? Can you move your ass?” Even when the midwives spoke speedy Norwegian—“du kan ikke ta en pause nå, men du må tresse hardt!”—somehow Katy understood in the heat of the moment. The jordmor ran the show, even when a doctor was called in because the umbilical cord had gotten wrapped twice around our baby’s neck. In our native country, fear of a lawsuit would likely have prompted a doctor to insist on a cesarean, but in Norway C-sections account for only 12.5 percent of births, compared to 26.1 percent in the U.S.

Our spectacular little cone-headed infant emerged with a full head of hair, and soon both mother and baby were rested. “Give him a good Norwegian name!” insisted one of the jordmor. “I know it seems strange to give him a big grown-up name, but you have to remember that he will someday be an old man with hair sticking out his ears and nose. He will someday be a great-grandfather and you can’t have him with a baby’s name!” Ole, Bjørn, and Thor are all overused. Many other popular names don’t translate well into English: The Swedish “Sven” is “Svein” in Norwegian, and pronounced too close to “swine”; “Dag” is pronounced “dog”; “Odd” just isn’t fair to a baby; and “Simon” is pronounced “semen.”

We considered “Loke,” the Nordic trickster god, which shocked our friend Knut. “What? That’s the devil. I know that even some Norwegian parents name their child ‘Loke,’ but imagine calling to your child on the playground, ‘Here, Satan!’”

After poring over lists of names, we finally settled on Eilif, after my great-grandfather from the Sognefjord. All of the jordmor approved. “A good Norwegian name!” one of them enthused. “We have three Eilifs in my family and three more in my daughter-in-law’s family and they all spell it differently. Ellef, Eileiv… That doesn’t matter, because it’s all the same name. His name must be approved by the government now.” Approved? “Yes, it shouldn’t be a problem, though. They now even accept most foreign names too.”

Ironically, with all this hospitality, plus the Norwegian government’s investment in making sure our son is taken care of, Eilif couldn’t get Norwegian citizenship because both Katy and I are American. (Babies born to foreign parents on U.S. soil, however, are automatically American citizens.)

After the birth, we were given a large room for all three of us with three meals a day, plus a snack and late-evening soup, delivered right outside the room. Many of the mothers, though, preferred their husbands to stay at home, so they could form a sort of girl’s club, happily pushing their babies around the hospital in their bassinets. And who could blame them, considering the warm wooden furniture, the cozy patterned comforters flung over the beds, and even a table filled with Legos for visiting children?

The jordmor told us that we should stay on at least three or four days to make sure that the breast-feeding was going well. In this beautiful room, with its view of the snow-capped mountains and all our meals delivered, why would we leave? We asked the head midwife, Sigrid, if she ever has trouble with mothers who settle in. “Sometimes if we have too many people having babies, we have to ask mothers who have been here for a long time, ‘So, how are things going? Do you have any plans?’” On our fourth day, when they served us a dinner of risegrøt (heavy rice gruel smothered in butter) and hard salami, we took it as a hint that maybe our time was up.

We planned to take the bus back to Trondheim, but the jordmor wouldn’t hear of it. Norway’s health insurance system would pay for our hour-long taxi drive and even reimburse us ninety percent of the fare we had paid to get to the hospital.

We soon realized why the Norwegian government helps families raise their children: While health care is free, basic necessities such as diapers easily run double the prices in the U.S. “Baby buggies can cost a thousand dollars in Norway, but they’ll last you a lifetime,” Rachel advised. Luckily, we had brought a stroller from Minnesota; why would we need one to last all our lives? Soon, however, we couldn’t help but notice the rugged eight-inch wheels on Norwegian prams, useful for climbing over snowdrifts, and the shock absorbers so baby Viking won’t feel a thing. They also come with complete insurance coverage against the worst blizzard.

Common courtesy calls for any able-bodied passenger to help load and unload these huge strollers from the bus, as the little prince or princess passenger looks on happily at the good service. But a local café, Erichsen Konditori, announced it would no longer allow space-hogging baby carriages inside. The sleeping children in their carriages must wait outside—a practice that is apparently common throughout Scandinavia. Recalling New York police’s arrest of a Danish woman, who trusted East Villagers not to snatch her baby while she was inside a café, I told Sissel, my Norwegian teacher, that this practice would never take hold in the U.S. Surprised, she asked, “Why not? What are you afraid of?”

Sissel explained that Norwegian children revel in what is called “en fri oppdragelse”—a free upbringing that means they are allowed to roam and to express themselves. “My husband is English, and when we were trying to decide where to raise our kids, it was very obvious that Norway is much more friendly to kids,” she said. “In England they really like to punish them. Norway, on the other hand, is a paradise for children.”

In fact, I’ve often seen very young kids out playing or walking down the sidewalk with no adult supervision—an unfortunately rare occurrence in the U.S. But Shannon, a Norwegian-Canadian mother, was more circumspect. “The ‘free-upbringing’ basically means that kids can do anything they damn please. Sometimes they’re a bunch of animals. I just wonder how they’ll be when they grow up. At the same time, it is a kind of paradise to have children here, since it’s so kid-friendly. Children are just part of everyday life here.”

Norwegian preschools, or barnehager, are considered among the best in the world. Many of them share a helsestasjon—health station—for the children in the neighborhood. Each health station hosts meetings for mothers with newborns to get together and chat over coffee about the challenges and joys of parenting, and pediatricians show up once a week for check-ups.

Aslaug, the nurse at our helsestasjon, has met with us once a week to make sure everything is going fine and to see if we have any questions about Eilif. One of her biggest concerns, oddly, is tran—cod-liver oil. “You must start at four weeks old and give him tran in every month with the letter R. First you start with a few drops on your finger that you put in his mouth. He will spit it out. If you do this every day, he will spit it out. But soon he will take two and a half teaspoons of tran and be a healthy baby.”

An Italian friend noted, “Mussolini did the same thing. His torturers fed dissidents a whole bottle of castor or cod-liver oil until they had diarrhea for a week.”

In Norway, apparently, the torture is necessary. Aslaug explained that babies need vitamin D because of the mørketid, or darkness of winter. In fact, during Eilif’s first weeks, the sun never made it over the crest of the big hill to the south of our house. The first thing our son tasted besides breast milk was cod-liver oil. When he finally saw direct sunlight for the first time in February, he squinted and cried.

Not only do we have Norwegian health care to thank for keeping our child free of rickets, but we learned that the government is automatically depositing 972 kroner (about $145) into our bank account every month—our child credit. This money, which is doubled for single parents, is to be put toward the expenses of raising the child and continues until he or she is eighteen years of age, or until we leave Norway.

A brochure from the Norwegian National Insurance Administration clarifies the strategy behind this welfare policy of pure pro-family socialism: “Child benefit is to help covering expenses related to having a child/children. It is also a redistributive device between families with children and those without and is intended mainly to even out differences in income to the advantage of families with children.”

“It’s not pure charity,” explained Knut. Because the system is founded on taxation, it’s vital to produce taxpayers in order to secure the system’s foundation—that is, a stable birthrate—and to give the households where both parents work the opportunity to have children without too much economic or career risk. Italy and England haven’t managed this; their birthrates are too low and so their welfare systems are at risk.”

Astrid, a student and single mom, weighed in: “I heard that people in the U.S. are embarrassed to take money from the government. What do they call it—‘welfare’? Is this true? I’m not ashamed because that is what it’s there for, to help children.” She sipped her coffee and smiled, purely bewildered at the thought.