Viking Economics by George Lakey Page B

poor with talent and grit found our country a land of opportunity, and that this was an important measure of freedom.
    In 2012,
The New York Times
reported on economist Markus Jantti’s studies of mobility. 36 Professor Jantti asked how different countries compare in giving young people the chance of upward mobility.
    To measure this, Jantti looked at the rates of sons and daughters moving in just one generation from their father’s spot in the income ladder to a higher spot for themselves. The most dramatic change, he reasoned, would be for children whose fathers were in the bottom fifth of earners to leap to the top fifth.
    Jantti found that in Norway, Denmark, and Sweden, the daughters and sons from the bottom fifth had a much better chance of making that leap than they do in the UK and the United States. 37 His finding lines up with equality studies comparing the OECD countries that found that the more equal a society is, the more mobility it has.
    It turns out that freedom (shown by mobility and innovation) and equality are not necessarily opposed. In fact, by thesemeasures,
equality supports freedom
. The track record suggests that the Nordic economic design has features that are synergistic: the more equality, the more freedom. 38
    One reason why Norway picked up quickly on the Danish model of flexicurity is because it increases an entrepreneur’s freedom. If the business you own can no longer compete in the world market, it’s fine with the Norwegian government for you to close it and lay off your workers. Flexicurity means the government has a social contract with those laid-off workers to do everything possible to help them land a new job that’s just as good or better for them. Your unproductive capital becomes available for a new start-up.
    Still another way that the government helps is to minimize the red tape for start-ups. According to a World Bank report published in 2012, the time it takes in Norway to establish a new company is seven days.
WOMEN AS LEADERS AND PRODUCERS
    Norwegian-American Susanne Kromberg told me that the gender dynamic is an important part of the Viking economic story. She asked me to consider what was happening in Norwegian villages a thousand years ago while men were “going Viking.” “The women,” she said, “had to have legal authority, to be able to defend themselves, and manage every aspect of life in the village without the men present.”
    Viking women could hold property and easily obtain a divorce in response to her husband beating her or for some other reason. 39
    That was then. By the nineteenth century, Norwegian women had fallen into a Victorian oppression that stirred Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen to rage against sexism in his plays.
    Sexism was still very much alive in the 1950s. When Berit graduated from the junior college in Skien that specializes in business administration, she placed first in her class. In that school, placing first marked the grad as CEO material. The college principal, however, told Berit’s mother in congratulating her that Berit would some day make a CEO a fine executive secretary!
    Since those days, Nordic women have gained more freedom and equality, tracking closely with the growing sophistication of the economic design. In 1986, newly elected Labor prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland made history by announcing a cabinet that was dubbed “the women’s government.” Eight of the eighteen ministers were women.
    The Nordic countries now have high women’s participation in their parliaments, an average of 40 percent, and most have had a woman prime minister. Norway became the first to adopt affirmative action for corporate boards of directors, requiring by law at least 40 percent women on the board. 40
    The descendants of the Vikings have the world’s highest employment rates for women. Over three-quarters of Norwegian women work outside the home, compared with 68 percent in the United States and 65 percent in the European