Travelling elsewhere in the region, he sharpens his gaze. He blames Iceland’s 2008 crash on “the classic small, tightly knit Nordic social model”—certain leaders and bankers were school chums—and the bingeing of a sheltered people loosed at the frat party of the American Dream. He points out that the Norwegians take pride in their doughty environmentalism, yet pump more than a million and a half barrels of oil a day and cede manual labor, such as the peeling of fruit, to foreigners (the banana thing); one-third of people of working age don’t work. Finnish leaders have repeatedly sought to portray their people as even drunker than they are, apparently to gain control of the booze industry. And the Swedes? Timid and tense, Booth says. Also, fixated on the character of Donald Duck.

When Booth is not taking the Scandinavians to task, he is being charmed by them, and when he is not doing that he is generalizing from their history. Denmark spent much of its past being bombarded or annexed. Booth writes, “It would be surprising if this long litany of loss and defeat had not had a lasting impact on the Danes, but I would go further. I suspect that it has defined the Danes to a greater extent than any other single factor.” This cigar-hour style of theorization turns up frequently; Booth’s Englishness defines his writing to a greater extent than any other single factor. (“ ‘Whoa, there,’ I said, placing my elderflower cordial on the table. ‘This is heading into fairly dodgy territory, isn’t it?’ ”) His approach to reporting tends to be to look up an expert, let him or her gas on at length, and quote enormous sections of the transcript, misremembered facts and all.

The low bar lets a lot in. Much is made, by Booth and many Scandinavians themselves, of what he calls “their Viking heritage.” He keeps returning to the idea that the Vikings—a rapey seafaring people who assimilated into northern European culture a millennium ago—are the cause of modern Scandinavia’s autonomy, egalitarianism, and restraint. (The Danish word for fair and moderate has origins in the Vikings’ term for passing mead around a fire.) The past casts a long shadow, no doubt, and family patterns die hard. But a thousand years? If there’s a connection between modern Nordic people and the Vikings, it is in the sense that pasta puttanesca from Rao’s probably owes a little to the cultural life of the Romans.

The indulgence of half-baked theories is a minor offense, though. Booth’s project is essentially observational; it aspires to a comic genre that might be called Euro-exotica. The form was well established by the time Twain published “The Innocents Abroad,” in 1869, and it has been carried through the twentieth century by writers as varied as S. J. Perelman and Peter Mayle. It usually involves a witty, stumbling narrator simultaneously charmed and bemused by the foreign nation he encounters. He is a naïf but not a boor: he wants to do everything right, but he is hamstrung by his ignorance of etiquette, by his squeamishness around unwelcome foods, and—this being Europe—by the daily, soul-crushing throes of bureaucracy. Euro-exotica is generally poured in a confectionery mold, light and tart, but its core is an assertion of the narrator’s cultural power. Change the balance of the recipe slightly—make it, say, about the bumbling adventures of a Guatemalan farmer in Florence—and the cookie hardens. Can you believe how these people do things? the Euro-exoticist asks, with the courage of his own convictions. In this sense, Booth’s book is as much about Anglo-American power as it is about the Nordic way.

By the measure of Viking time, Scandinavia’s current social model is new. Mary Wollstonecraft, visiting in the late eighteenth century, lamented “how far the Swedes are from having a just conception of rational equality,” and her complaint was fair for years afterward. Denmark began offering a state benefits program to old people only in 1891. Norway launched insurance for industrial accidents a few years later. Similar schemes proliferated in the early twentieth century, and by the postwar years the modern Nordic welfare state had its distinctive form. The model, crucially, interprets “welfare” to mean not just financial capacity but well-being. It might take into account that a woman forced to defer dreams of motherhood because of work, or vice versa, is hostage to her circumstances even if she’s able to pay her bills. And, rather than simply catch people on their way down, it aspires to minimize the causes of inequality—more climbing web than safety net.

Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish Nobel laureate, was an influential early theorist of the approach. As a young economist, he’d championed some demand-side policies. In his 1957 study “Economic Theory and Underdeveloped Regions” and elsewhere, he suggested that a Scandinavian-style model was not only good social policy but smart economics. Contrary to the premises of much classical theory, Myrdal argued, deregulated markets don’t tend to equilibrium. Decreased demand lowers wages and eliminates jobs. Poor people buy and invest little, dragging the market further off balance. Since rich regions attract both prosperous businesses and productive emigrants from poorer areas, the problem can intensify.

In many traditional free-market models, the wealthiest actors are the most productive, and the system is dragged down by anything that impedes them. Myrdal pointed out that this premise, even if true, is socially problematic: inherited advantage makes some people highly productive from the get-go, and—since their higher productivity makes them prosper—another vicious circle forms. You need certain controls to keep unbalanced socioeconomic cycles from accelerating over time, he thought; hence Sweden.

Myrdal’s thinking was shaped by years he spent studying the plight of black people in the United States. His best-known work, “An American Dilemma” (1944), explored a disconnect: Why was one group persistently at the bottom of the socioeconomic spectrum in a country that purported to give everybody an equal chance? In “Economic Theory,” he cited the United States as a cautionary tale. “The two forces balance each other,” he wrote. “White prejudice and the consequent discrimination against the Negroes block their efforts to raise their low plane of living; this, on the other hand, forms part of the causation of the prejudice on the side of the whites which leads them to discriminatory behavior.”

Myrdal seems to have been right. In those countries with social programs guided in part by his principles, inequality runs low, with few clear market costs. In the assessment of most Scandinavians, the system helps to impart freedom, too. How are you free to realize yourself, they ask, if your education depends on your parents’ wealth? Or if you’re loath to get divorced for fear of losing your standard of living? (The per-capita divorce rate in Scandinavia is notably high, which, depending on your notions about marriage, is either a healthy or an unhealthy sign.) According to Newsweek, Iceland is the best place in the world to be female, and gender equality in Denmark is so deeply rooted that it startles even some enlightened American women: checks on a first date are split, and door-holding is considered rude. Booth tells us that his Danish wife, during their courtship, took his chivalrous habit of walking on the outer edge of the sidewalk as a weird personal tic.