Philip Greenspun's Weblog

After a short trip to Denmark (photos) I’m beginning to formulate some theories on why Danes score high on world happiness surveys.

First, they don’t seem to have better answers than we do in the U.S. to the tough challenges. There are lots of jobs for competent, educated people. Danes who did not do well in school and who did not advance beyond high school are at home living with their parents. Danes are simultaneously admitting immigrants from Muslim countries and surrounding government buildings with concrete blocks to deter an attack from these guests whom they don’t fully understand.

Second, part of Danish happiness is predicated upon being willing to live at what for an American would be a fairly low material standard of living. Residential homes are not big or fancy. Furniture tends to come from Ikea.  A 10-year-old compact car with broken air conditioning is a perfectly fine (single/only) car for a family of three. A typical urban dweller won’t own a car at all, but will rely on a bicycle or public transport (maybe not too much fun in the cold wet winter!). If we compared Danes in Denmark to Danish-Americans in the U.S. it would certainly be clear who were the rich cousins. One upside of the whole country being somewhat poor is that very few people have the means to indulge in conspicuous consumption. Conspicuous consumption makes everyone in a society poorer and less happy. Consider the owner of the 10-year-old sedan that gets a family reliably to every necessary destination. Now  a neighbor buys a $50,000 SUV. The sedan owner wants to keep up with the Jones family and their pavement-melting SUV so he takes on a second job and cancels plans to take a nice summer vacation. Now he and everyone else in the neighborhood have $50,000 SUVs but for most of them it isn’t something they would have bought otherwise, which in turn means that they will derive less than $50,000 in value from having the new vehicle compared to the old. If the former sedan owner previously would have only paid about $10,000 to swap our his old car for the new SUV then he suffers a $40,000 loss as a consequence of conspicuous consumption. This may be one reason why people suffer a measured loss of happiness when neighbors get wealthier.

One way to be happy with less income is to not need a car, a $9,100/year sinkhole for American family wealth (source). Unless a transport service runs fairly frequently it cannot serve as a replacement for a car. The Danes run the Metro every six minutes even at off-peak times and keep it going 24 hours per day (the only U.S. city that comes close to this is New York). Trains that handle hour-long trips to outlying towns will run at least three times per hour all day. Roads almost everywhere have dedicated lanes for bicycles (see separate posting). These lanes are separated from the car lanes by a curb. So a Dane can always use a bicycle safely. He or she can always rely on the Metro. He or she can conveniently rely on train service. Possible lesson for the U.S.: either shut down public transit or beef it up to the point that people can get rid of cars (of course, we would probably want to reconsider running these services with government employees, who earn as much as $100 per hour (plus benefits) to drive a bus (see Boston Globe). Eliminating a $9,000/year after-tax expense is equivalent to giving an American family a $12,000 to $18,000 pay raise (depending on income level and combined city/state/federal income tax rate). Most families would be happy if the adults got a raise like that!

Another way to be happy with less income is to spend less time occupied with money. The smallest coin in general circulation is half a crown. This is worth about 9 U.S. cents. In other words, the smallest value coin that a Dane might conceivably handle is a dime. So people aren’t counting pennies. Sales tax is included in the published price so you don’t end up spending 10 percent more than expected, as you would in California, for example. Credit/debit cards are accepted everywhere for everything so you could spend months without handling cash.

Danish life seems to involve less uncertainty. You can be pretty sure that you aren’t going to strike it rich. There are only a handful of wildly successful enterprises in Denmark, e.g., Maersk and Novo Nordisk. At the same time you aren’t going to become destitute. So you can concentrate on stuff other than trying to earn more money, e.g., connections to family and friends, participation in community groups, hobbies, etc. These non-work items are the ones that happiness nerds say are the most important.

Divorce, a big potential source of unhappiness, is simpler, cheaper, and faster, as covered in a separate posting.

One element of certainty that not everyone will appreciate is the adherence to and enforcement of rules without exceptions. We spent a day with a guy who uses a wheelchair. We’d be stopped at the side of a country road trying to cross. In the U.S. it would be almost unimaginable for a car not to have stopped to let a wheelchair-bound person cross (imagine trying to explain to a passenger why you hadn’t stopped!). But in Denmark the cars would whiz by. They had the right of way under the rules and they were taking it, regardless of the fact that the pedestrian happened to be in a wheelchair. We parked at Hamlet’s castle, in an out-of-the-way town northeast of Copenhagen. The parking lot was only about one third full. Everyone parked there was buying $13/person tickets to see the castle. Yet we had to buy a timed ticket to park there until 3:03 pm. We were a little late getting back and discovered that at 3:08 pm the authorities had noticed our overtime parking and given us a $116 ticket (an effective rate of $1392/hour for those last five minutes). [Separate issue: why oh why can we not have a Singapore-style system where a transponder in the car and sensors in parking lots and on congested roads take the money out of our checking accounts without us having to pay constant attention?]

As has been pointed out by a commenter on a previous post, Danes may have more affection for their more-or-less unified government than Americans have for our dog’s breakfast of local, state, and federal governments. Taxes are high in Denmark but services are visible: fantastic parks and playgrounds, beautifully maintained public facilities of all kinds, paid-for education through college and graduate school, paid-for health care, etc. In the U.S. the government doesn’t provide that much to employed middle class families. We get a public school that was supposed to be for our kids but is often run for the benefit of school system employees instead. We get to drive on roads that are very poorly maintained compared to Danish roads and lacking in bicycle infrastructure. We have fire and police departments, of course, but ideally we don’t rely on them for hands-on assistance every day.

Having a smaller socially cohesive society yields substantial savings in time and money. Partly due to trust and partly due to having civil law (based on the Roman/Napoleonic Code) rather than common law, transactions can be very simple. I rented a $1000 bicycle in Denmark for a week without putting down any kind of security deposit, signing any liability waiver forms, or receiving a helmet (Danes do a huge amount of cycling but helmet use is uncommon compared to the U.S.). Museums had spent a lot less time writing out elaborate rules for what you could and could not do and employ very few guards by American standards. The Copenhagen airport doesn’t have the fancy X-ray scanners and you don’t take off your shoes to go through the metal detector (it is extremely uncommon to wait more than 10 minutes to get through security, according to locals). Office buildings spend much less on security. The U.S. per-capita GDP is much higher than Denmark, but much of the GDP is spent on writing and signing liability waivers, hiring security guards, paying TSA screeners and investing in fancy machines, running prisons to incarcerate people at the world’s highest rate (Wikipedia shows that Denmark has 1/10th as many prisoners per capita as the U.S.), etc. This is not to say that life in Denmark is perfect. The Louisiana Art Museum warns visitors about thieves breaking into cars in the parking lot. I helped a Canadian woman adjust a used bicycle that she had just bought because her previous bike had been stolen. Even in a country where all of the necessities can be obtained from the state, some people will decide to augment their material lifestyle through crime.

What about people stuck in low-wage service jobs? How happy are they? I asked a smiling young woman who was serving us ice cream ($6/cone) if she loved her job. “How would you like to do this for 8 hours per day?” she replied. “That girl was probably making about $22 per hour,” an American emigrant to Denmark pointed out. “And she’ll take home half of it after taxes. You will never get the kind of service in a restaurant that you expect in the U.S. because the waitstaff aren’t working for tips.” Mostly what I noticed was that there were fewer workers in many situations compared to the U.S. and more effort put into saving labor. For example, we went to a supermarket at about 2:30 pm on a weekday and a 15-person line had developed to wait for the single cashier. At the airport Icelandair had chosen to employ a staff of zero at the check-in desks. Passengers were expected to get a boarding pass from a machine and drop their bags at an SAS counter. Before going through security the Danes had a step to verify the validity of one’s boarding pass. Where in the U.S. this was done by a private security screener and then again by a TSA agent, in Denmark this is done with a self-service machine.

Finally… how about those prices? Is it possible to be happy in a country where McDonald’s charges for ketchup? Will a person be thrilled if the only available solution to thirst is a $4 bottle of water or trying to drink from the tap (museums don’t have drinking fountains)? For a visitor staying with a Danish host one answer is to live like a Muslim during Ramadan. Eat a big breakfast and drink a lot of tap water prior to heading out for a day of sightseeing. Try not to consume any food or drink until returning in the evening. Buy all souvenirs at the airport before departing so that you can get a 25% discount (the shops and prices are the same, but you won’t pay value-added tax if you can show a ticket back to the U.S.).

Some links:

• http://denmark.dk/en/meet-the-danes/work-life-balance-the-danish-way/happy-danes/
• http://www.culturechange.org/cms/content/view/865/1/
• http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikaandersen/2011/06/28/happy-in-denmark-how-come/

[Travel tips: Consider flying Icelandair. The flight attendants are friendly and enthusiastic. The planes are on time and not too packed. The stop in Iceland means that no leg is longer than five hours. There is no Heathrow-style 45-minute security line to change planes. You'll clear immigration in Iceland in about 5 minutes and won't be asked to show your passport again when you arrive in Denmark. They sell Angry Birds lollipops in the duty-free shop.]

More: See a few of my photos

Most old folks (like me!) remember the day care center sexual abuse trials (e.g., McMartin) of the 1980s and 1990s and the “Remembering Satan” New Yorker magazine article by Lawrence Wright about recovered memories, e.g., of animal and human sacrifices. To the best of my knowledge, My Lie: A True Story of False Memory, is the only book by a person (Meredith Maran) who, with the aid of therapists, recovered memories of abuse and subsequently decided that those memories were false.

It is an interesting book for anyone whose memories are beginning to get a little fuzzy. My main memory defect is that I have difficulty remembering whether or not I’ve seen movies from the 1980s. Did I just read a detailed review of the movie or did I actually see it? When I hear about the title and a quick plot summary it seems familiar but I’m not sure if the familiarity comes from seeing the movie.

The author was married to a man and the mother of two children when she decided that she wanted a divorce, was in love with a woman, and that her father had sexually abused her. Her accusations against her family caused a lot of family strife and her children lost out on eight years of a relationship with their grandfather.

Why is that anyone would want to claim that he or she was sexually abused? Elizabeth Loftus, a cognitive psychologist at University of Washington, explained it to the author:

“Seriously,” she continued, “people always look for an explanation for their dysfunctional thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Retractors like you came up with a good one. A colleague of mine called it ‘A-B-C’:“C: you’re crazy. No one likes that explanation for their behavior, so they go on to B. “B: you’re a bad person. No one wants that, either. “A: you were abused, so nothing is your fault. Needless to say, that’s the most popular explanation.”

Loftus described a plaintiff in a sexual abuse case:

“I can’t tell you what happened in Jennifer’s situation,” Loftus said, “but I don’t think she repressed and recovered it. Jennifer has gotten a lot of rewards for being a sex-abuse survivor. It’s her whole career now.”

Out hiking with a female friend, Maran describes the typical path to becoming an abuse rememberer:

“You started having strange dreams, crying jags, trouble with sex,” I went on. “You were seeing a therapist two or three times a week. Finally you remembered that your father had molested you.” “How did you know that?” Joanne asked. “I haven’t talked about it for fifteen years.”

Modern therapists who attributed problems to childhood sexual abuse were working within a tradition started in the 19th Century:

On April 21, 1896, forty-year-old Sigmund Freud delivered his first major address, “The Aetiology of Hysteria,” to the Vienna Society for Psychiatry and Neurology. In it he reported that more than a dozen of his patients were suffering from a strange array of symptoms: nervousness, insomnia, irritability, loss of appetite for food or sex, and “a tendency to cause trouble.”

Even the retraction of sexual abuse claim is an old tradition:

In 1933, Freud went public with the retraction that would alter the course of psychotherapeutic history—and would silence incest victims for generations to come. “Almost all my women patients told me that they had been seduced by their father,” he wrote. “I was driven to recognize in the end that these reports were untrue and so came to understand that hysterical symptoms were derived from phantasy and not real occurrences.”

Abuse claims were back in fashion by 1980:

Michelle Remembers was coauthored by Canadian psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder and Michelle Smith, the patient who later became his wife. The book introduced a new phrase into the lexicon: satanic ritual abuse. During the course of six hundred hypnosis sessions, Pazder wrote, he’d helped Smith remember the satanic rituals she was forced to attend as a child.

Statistical studies were less dramatic:

A new national study . . . examined substantiated cases of sexual abuse involving 1,639 children at 270 day care facilities across the country. The researchers estimated that for every 10,000 children enrolled at the centers, 5.5 were sexually abused each year. By contrast they calculated that for every 10,000 preschool children, 8.9 were sexually abused in their homes each year, based on confirmed cases reported to the Government. (New York Times 1988)

Maran’s personal path started with a job:

One of them knew someone who knew someone who knew that a hero of mine, whom I’ll call Dr. Roselyn Taylor, was looking for a freelance editor. Taylor had founded several feminist organizations and had authored an armful of feminist books. Her antimisogynist antics had earned her a special place in my own Hall of Feminist Fame.

Roselyn’s house was easy to find. The car in her driveway was a bumper-stickered homage to contemporary feminism. Women Unite to Take Back the Night. Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History. Porn Tells Lies About Women. I’d Rather Be Destroying Pornography. Pornography Violates My Civil Rights.

“More than one-third of American women were sexually abused as children,” Roselyn told me. I gulped, thinking of my beautiful five-year-old niece. “Thirty-eight percent, to be precise,” Roselyn said. “But the most commonly cited study still claims that incest only happens in one percent of the population.”

Maran sees a therapist regularly:

I brought my journal to my individual therapy with Angela and read her my latest incest dreams. When I finished she was perched on the edge of her seat, regarding me with the business end of her eyes. “What do you make of those dreams?” she asked. “I think I’m reading too many headlines. Watching too much TV”

“There could be an entirely different explanation,” Angela said.

Maran’s former husband facilitates Maran’s new life in Oakland, California: “My ex-husband bought me out of our San Jose house to cover the other half.” and then the guy moves there so as to be close to their children.

Maran finds her soulmate:

And so, although our relationship felt like a miracle to me—what were the odds I’d meet a lesbian who gave me the passion and intimacy I’d ached for in my marriage, a woman who loved my children as intensely as she loved me—Jane and I saw a lesbian-affirmative couple’s counselor once a week. “The issue between you two isn’t power,” the therapist said, looking from one of us to the other. “It’s trust.” “I’m an incest survivor,” Jane said. The therapist nodded, as if that explained everything, which I supposed it did. My turn. What to say? “I had an unhappy childhood,” I said.

And being in the Bay Area makes it easy to find other like-minded individuals:

In our last co-counseling class, Kathy instructed each of us to choose one of our classmates as our long-term counseling partner. Thank goddess, there was one person in the group whom I’d come to like and respect. Catherine and I had so much in common; there couldn’t have been a better-matched co-counseling couple than we two. Catherine and I were both in our late thirties, both moms, both in tumultuous relationships with women. Incredibly, both of us were journalists specializing in sexual abuse. …

“I’ll say.” Catherine laughed mirthlessly. “I can’t believe I joined a therapy cult to deal with the fallout from reporting on satanic cults.” She sighed. “When I was working on a feminist film project in L.A. last year,” she said, “the crew was kind of cultish, too. They were all incest survivors, and they’re the ones who got me thinking I’m one too.” “Sometimes I think that’s all life is,” Catherine said. “Trading in one belief system, one cult, for the next.”

Maran describes how co-counseling worked

“My father hurt me,” [Catherine] sobbed.

“Yes,” I said, validating her feelings. “He did.”

When it was my turn, I read her the list I’d been keeping. WHAT MAKES ME THINK I WAS MOLESTED 1. Croup – age 18 months – holding my breath til I turned blue; deciding whether to live or die 2. Nosebleeds – ages 4 on? – waking up in the night with blood everywhere 3. Constant nightmares and insomnia – always. The dream: a monster is in my bedroom, I run for the door, my feet are stuck to the floor, a scream is stuck in my throat… 23. He married a woman my age. 24. He had a terrible sexual relationship with and hated my mother. 25. The dreams

Maran’s partner spends a lot of time with paid therapists:

Jane added Rosen bodywork to her therapy schedule. She was seeing her individual therapist on Mondays, our couple’s counselor with me on Tuesdays, and her Rosen bodyworker on Thursdays. I’d asked Jane whether it was worth the two hundred bucks a week. She’d answered categorically. She couldn’t function without therapy, she said, so how would she earn a living if she stopped? “I can barely function even with it,” she’d said. I didn’t dare say so, but all that therapy didn’t seem to be helping. Jane was more fearful, more easily “triggered” than ever. Everything “brought up her memories” of being molested: a tiny earthquake, a fender-bender, Matthew and Charlie growing taller.

Maran’s mother expresses skepticism: ““Your father had his failings. But there’s no way he could have done something like that to you.” Maran’s answer?

I drove back across San Francisco Bay, back to Planet Incest, where the question was always incest and the answer was always incest and the explanation for everything was always incest, and no one ever asked, “Are you sure?”

Maran tries to kick the habit:

When Catherine moved to D.C., I put incest into a box and locked it and threw away the key. I stopped writing incest articles and reading incest books and writing in my incest journal and hanging out with incest survivors exclusively. I quit therapy cold turkey, got a regular job at a local firm, writing fundraising letters for nonprofits. I started doing regular things with regular people: shopping with old and new friends, cheerful friends; going out for drinks after work and to movies that made me laugh instead of cry. I sang along to Michael Jackson instead of the achy, angry wimmin’s music of Ferron and Holly Near. It worked—for me. No more incest dreams, no more sleepless nights, no more crippling depression—for me. There was just one thing about Planet Incest that I couldn’t avoid: my lover was still living there. As my nightmares and memories receded, Jane’s were becoming more graphic and disturbing. She upped her appointments with her incest therapist to two, three, sometimes four sessions a week.

The result of this extra therapy?

Shaking in my arms, Jane remembered being raped before she was five years old. She remembered men and women standing around a campfire in a forest, chanting in a strange language, wearing dark robes. She remembered them digging a deep hole. They might have killed a baby, she told me in a child’s tremulous voice, and buried it in the hole.

The way back for Maran turned out to involve therapy:

“I want to make up with my father,” I said. I was lying on Miranda’s table, face up, eyes closed, her hands cradling my head from behind. “Your body agrees with that,” Miranda murmured in that Rosen bodywork voice of hers.

The partner moves out:

Dust bunnies blew across the floor, tumbleweeds in a deserted Western-movie town. Her bed was gone, her dressers, her clothes. Her collections of incest books and lesbian anthologies and the gay-parenting book we’d written together.

The family regroups.

When you accused Stan of abusing you,” Gloria [the stepmother] interjected, “I started looking at him with totally different eyes. I couldn’t sleep at night. I thought, ‘Am I lying here next to a child molester?’ ” She gazed at me intently. “I almost left my husband,” she said. “I know,” I said, remembering our lunch a decade ago, when she’d asked me if she should. “I thought I knew him pretty well,” Gloria continued. “But there were all those stories in the paper at the time, mothers who didn’t know their husbands were molesting their daughters.”

“I don’t think I ever told you this,” Doug [the author's brother] added, “but after you accused Dad, I went to therapy to figure out if he’d molested me, too.” “You did?” He nodded. “The therapist said I showed signs of PTSD, but I decided it hadn’t happened. So I stopped seeing her.”

“Also, for a while I worried that if Grandpa did that to you,” Emmy [the author's niece] said slowly, “my dad would do it to me.” Knife in my heart. Since the day she was born I’d wanted to be a great role model for this girl, the only girlchild in our family. I’d been determined to lend her strength and joy and courage. I knew that I’d done that. And I knew, too, that by chasing the truth of my childhood, I’d stolen a piece of hers. “You know your dad loves you,” I said. “You know he’d never hurt you that way.” “Then why didn’t you know that about your dad?”

How about the accused dad? He more or less forgave his adult daughter.

More: Read My Lie: A True Story of False Memory

Some of my personal happiest times have been when riding a bicycle. Even more fun is riding a bike with a child. Using a bicycle for transportation in the U.S., however, entails a certain amount of risk. Even if there is a dedicated bicycle lane there is nothing to stop a mobile phone-using driver from driving over and hitting you from the left. On right side of the bicycle lane will be a row of parked cars, each one a potential source of a driver opening a door without looking (a common enough accident that the term “being doored” has made its way into our language). For many of the bike trips that I’ve enjoyed I wouldn’t be comfortable taking a child with me on a trailer bike or in a bike seat.

Despite its old cities and old road network, Danes invested heavily in dedicated bicycle lanes. Typically there is a curb separating the bike lane from the cars and one more curb separating the bike lane from the sidewalk. Nobody can hit anybody else without going over a curb, in other words. Rather seldom is it the case that parked cars are next to the bicycle lane. Sometimes the bicycle lane is separated from the road by a curb and grass median. If there are cars parked along the road then an opened door will sway into the grass, not into the paved bike lane.

One sees a lot of children riding in various forms of modified bicycles and tricycles, including one heavy-looking design where two or three kids can ride in a huge basket in front of the bike, with the parent pushing on the pedals from behind. The kids get an awesome view; the adult gets a lot of exercise. Fortunately Denmark is pretty darn flat.

Because a bicycle can be used safely on every segment of almost any trip it becomes much more practical to dispense with car ownership and its $9100 annual bleed (according to AAA). The 24-hour metro, excellent intracity buses, and frequent trains other parts of Denmark complement the utility of bicycles in situations involving miserable weather and/or long distances.

The wild popularity of bikes does have some drawbacks. It can be tough to find a secure parking spot for a bike. There are so many cyclists in the bike lanes in Copenhagen in the summer that bike-bike collisions seem like a realistic fear (though I didn’t see any).

The way that we have things set up in the U.S. contributes to our higher per-capita GDP, but it does not make us better off. For example, if you think that a trip by bicycle will be unsafe due to a lack of bike lanes and take a car, you will burn gasoline, maintenance, and depreciation on that car, thereby boosting the measured GDP compared to if you had used your muscle power (not figured into GDP). If you then sign up for a gym membership and personal training to get rid of the fat that you’ve accumulated during all of these car-instead-of-bike trips, that boosts GDP though at the end of the process you will be no thinner or fitter than if you had biked. If you get hit by a car the GDP can easily be boosted by $25,000. You will buy a new bicycle. The car will need bodywork. You may be concerned about your health and get an MRI done at one of the world’s most expensive MRI clinics. Your MRI will be read by one of the world’s highest paid radiologists. What the radiologist says will be read to you, for a GDP-boosting fee, by one of the world’s highest paid neurologists.

I attended a social gathering in Denmark hosted by a successful businessman with two teenage daughters. “Their mom didn’t want custody,” he explained, “so I’ve had them since the youngest was four years old”. The mother had initiated the divorce, but had not sought any contact with the kids other than an optional twice/month (every other weekend) visit. “It isn’t the life that I expected to live, but it is a good life.” The Americans at the party were shocked by this. What about the maternal instinct? Was it different in Denmark than in the U.S.? “Most middle class parents who divorce simply split the children 50-50,” explained a Dane. “Children aren’t cash cows in Denmark, except for lower class people with six children, for whom state subsidies and child support from the other parent can be a significant source of income. The previous government tried to limit this by paying only for the first two children. But they watched Muslim women in black burkas rioting across the bridge in Sweden [youtube] so the new government restored the benefits for an unlimited number of children.” Child support payments in Denmark can continue until a child turns 24 (if the kid is still in school, which of course he or she is likely to be in Europe, the original home of infinite adolescence). Our host’s income was easily high enough that in Massachusetts he would have been tapped by a divorce lawsuit plaintiff for $50,000 tax-free dollars per year in child support (roughly $1 million over 20 years; see worksheet). Could it really be the case that children who supposedly cost $1 million to rear in Massachusetts would yield only minimal child support in Denmark, where the cost of almost everything is far higher?

One of the nice things about Denmark is that it is small enough to support a lot of informal social links. Very quickly I was able to get the name of one of Denmark’s top divorce litigators, Sandra Moll, and she agreed to be interviewed. Ms. Moll had graduated from University of Milan in 1981 and from University of Copenhagen in 1990. She was licensed in both Italy and Denmark and specialized in divorce litigation and property law.

First we discussed what a divorce is in Denmark. In the U.S., a marriage starts with a simple administrative proceeding at a city hall (the marriage license application) and ends, in many states, in a standard civil lawsuit with a plaintiff and defendant (just as if two corporations had a dispute about a contract). Not so in Denmark. “You must start in an administrative proceeding,” explained Ms. Moll. “You go to the Statsforvaltningen and fill out some forms. The couple is then contacted to come in for a mediation session. People who don’t have enough money to have a lawyer will get one from the state. So the administration tries to get them to agree in order to save the government money. If the administrator can get the couple to agree, they sign some papers and are divorced within 6-12 months after the first papers were filed. Unfortunately there is some fine print on the form that says ‘valid only in Scandinavia,’ which creates a lot of problems when one person is living in a foreign country and wants to get remarried. Ultimately the couple may need to go to court to get something that is valid in a foreign country.”

What if the couple doesn’t agree? “Then the administration refers the case to a judge and the trial will be about three months later. Either party has the right to be separated even if the spouse disagrees. After six months of living apart, either party has the right to ask for a divorce because of the separation. That right becomes absolute after a year of separation.”

I asked how long the process would take under the assumption that the parties could not agree on anything. So the court would have to decide on custody, child support, division of property, and alimony. “If everything goes smoothly, it could be done in one year. The trial is just 1-2 hours and everything is decided on the basis of written reports rather than witnesses. For custody issues there will be a report from a psychologist who has spent a few hours with the child and each parent. There is a separate court for handling division of property. A party is not entitled to alimony in any marriage shorter than five years unless he or she needs to complete an educational program. Even if a party wasn’t working during the marriage, that is not relevant for determining alimony. If a person is able to work, he or she is expected to work rather than collect alimony.”

Is there an appeals process? “The first trial is in front of a single judge. There is a right to appeal to a three-judge panel, which will re-try all of the issues of both fact and law.” [U.S. comparison: most states provide divorce lawsuit defendants a trial with a single judge, whose decisions regarding facts cannot be appealed.]

In a society where Americans think that men and women have reached a much higher level of equality than in the U.S., what happens with custody? “There is no presumption of 50/50 custody, though that is what a lot of middle class parents will agree on. If the parents are unmarried, first of all, the single mother automatically gets custody. For married couples traditionally it is the mother who has been taking care of the children and spending more time with the children. Very few fathers take paternity leave though it is available to them. Partly this is because mothers do not allow the fathers to take it and partly because the fathers don’t want to. A custody dispute will be decided by the court based on the psychologist’s report, which is seriously flawed due to the limited time that the psychologist spends with the parents and children. Courts are also starting to take the childrens’ preferences into account when children are as young as 6 or 7. That has its own problems because a parent can bribe a child.”

What’s at stake financially with custody? Suppose that the non-custodial parent earns $500,000 per year working in finance. How much can the custodial parent collect? “The basic amount is just over 1000 kroner per month [about $180]. Depending on the non-custodial parent’s income and the number of kids, this can be multiplied or supplemented. the highest number that I’ve ever seen is 3X that basic amount in a case where the father was a banker. It is all worked out by the Statsforvaltningen based on a table, which you can find on their Web site.” [link in English; Danish version with more detail] So the absolute maximum that a person could collect in child support is about $8000 per year? “Yes,” replied Ms. Moll.

What if the parents who wins the kids has a high income? Can a person who makes $1 million per year collect an additional $8000 per year in child support payments? “Yes. The income of the custodial parent is not part of any of the calculations.”

How do people game the system? “It is mostly people with lower incomes who try to get extra money. Single parents get more money from the state for each child and therefore it is common for people to pretend not to be married to a second spouse. Mothers will accuse the father of being a child molester in order to get custody so that they can then collect both the state subsidies for single parents and child support from the father.” What if the father doesn’t have a job? “The state will pay on behalf of the father if the father cannot pay. The state pays for most of the consequences of failed marriages.”

[A Dane wrote to explain "In the Muslim communities there's a thing called a 'father hotel'. It's a one room apartment allegedly housing 18 men, divorced from their wives. In reality the men are living with their wives and kids enjoying the single mother benefits in spades. Visit http://denkorteavis.dk/2012/vi-bliver-snydt-sa-vandet-driver/ and ask Google to translate it.  Divorce is  a sound business decision for poor people with lots of kids."]

How much of a family’s wealth/the children’s inheritance is spent on litigation? “My fee is 2600 kroner per hour [about $465].  A normal divorce that goes to the administration and then straight to court will cost each party about 15,000 kroner [$2675].  If there are complicated international issues or unusual delays it could be 50,000 kroner [about $8900].”

Circling back to this month’s weblog theme of why Danes score higher on happiness surveys than do their wealthier American counterparts… For people who entered a marriage for the standard reasons of love, forming a life partnership, collaborating on rearing children, etc. a divorce is not going to be a happy event. Yet compared to divorced Americans that I’ve talked to, divorced Danes seem to have suffered much less trauma. The custodial parents had the self-respect that comes from supporting themselves through work rather than living off an ex-partner for decades. The custodial parents did not keep going back to court to try to get additional or extended child support or alimony payments. The non-custodial parents made payments that they generally considered fair and that did not amount to an additional income tax discouraging them from advancing their careers. Danish children from middle class families are much more seldom the subject of custody battles, are much more likely to benefit from substantial involvement by both parents (e.g., in a 50/50 time split), and their parents are substantially wealthier than divorced Americans who have gone through litigation (since what stops a lot of divorce lawsuits is that the couple runs out of assets to pay the lawyers). Even in the event of a complete lack of agreement on every issue, everyone involved is much more likely to be able to move on with their lives. To the extent that happiness surveys include divorced people, I would expect that Danish results would get a lift compared to American ones due to the fact that so much less money is at stake in a middle class divorce, which has the effect of greatly reducing the intensity of the fighting. The result is that both the time and cost of a divorce are lower.

The main flaw with the Danish system seems to be that wealth and income are transferred from those who behave with traditional middle class responsibility and respectability to those who do not [Danes complain about this, but the overall amount seems to be negligible compared to the amount that divorcing American families transfer to attorneys and other workers in the litigated divorce industry]. A couple who has put in the work necessary to stay married for 30 years and rear two children in a three-bedroom Copenhagen apartment will pay taxes to support single parent supplements [roughly $3,500 per year per child, but married couples also get supplements for having kids] to never-married and divorced parents. The married couple’s taxes will, in the event that a non-custodial parent can’t pay the roughly $2200/year minimum child support, be used to pay child support to a single parent. On the third hand, this is the same issue with every aspect of any Welfare State. If you take cash from workers and give it to people for doing something other than work, the result is a reduction in the number of hours that a group of people will work.

If you’re tired of carrying both a phone and a camera, the new Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom camera phone has been announced (dpreview.com). They glued an Android phone to the back of a basic compact camera. I’ve been wanting something like this for years, but probably not this particular device unfortunately. The sensor is 1/2.3″ or about 6.1×4.5mm in size. This is tiny compared to the sensor in everyone’s favorite point and shoot camera, the Sony DSC-RX100 (12.8×9.6mm). It is about twice the area of the sensor in an iPhone (1/3.2″ or 4.5×3.4mm) and about one third the area of the sensor in the Nokia 808 phone. [I guess it would be fatiguing to hold something as heavy as a Sony Rx100 up to one's ear for a long conversation. But that would be a good incentive to keep phone calls short!]

The optical image stabilizer will arguably allow for using lower ISO settings indoors. And of course the camera will perform much better when zoomed in since it is an optical rather than a digital zoom.

See http://www.gizmag.com/camera-sensor-size-guide/26684/ for some good comparisons of sensor size.

Is anyone out there excited by this device? Due to the small screen it would seem to be a much less useful phone than the standard Android phones today. Due to the small sensor it would seem to be a much less useful camera than the point and shoots that photography enthusiasts generally buy. So it would seem that the device won’t make phone nerds or camera nerds happy.

Folks:

I’ve written an article about a simpler yet more powerful interface for point and shoot (“compact digital”) cameras at http://philip.greenspun.com/business/point-and-shoot-camera-interface and would appreciate comments/suggestions. I think this is a great project for a master’s student who likes to code (or maybe a group of graduate students). The practicality of the project hinges on the fact that Samsung has released the source code for the software within two of its high quality cameras.

Thanks in advance for ideas to make this design better.

I went to the Copenhagen Sand Sculpture Festival exhibit today with the intent of taking a bunch of pictures to show some 3-5-year-old children back in the U.S. The exhibits starts with an enormous sandbox, which was filled with Danish children playing. Day care workers led groups of kids ages 3-7 around the place patiently explaining each sculpture. The sculptures looked a little off, though, not like the miniature village Christmas scenes I’d expected. The labels reminded me of the label affixed to the Cement Cuddler toys: “Unfortunate Child, do not mistake me for living thing, nor seek in me the warmth denied you by your parents. For beneath my plush surface lies a hardness as impervious and unforgiving as this World’s own indifference to your mortal struggle. Hold on to me when you are sad, and I will weigh you down, but bear this weight throughout your years, and it will strengthen your limbs and harden your will so that one day no man dare oppose you.”

Check the photos on Google+ to see the explanations of each sculpture that the teachers were reading and explaining to the kids.

Copenhagen has put out a fair number of banners marking Søren Kierkegaard’s 200th birthday. Danes, however, do not seem to be thronging the various Kierkegaard-related exhibitions. I’m wondering if they find his personal life less than inspiring. Kierkegaard inherited a modest fortune from his dad and, due to the lack of any need to work, found himself with a lot of time on his hands to brood and write. He fell in love with a 14-year-old girl (Regine Olsen) and then broke her heart. (Note that Elvis Presley also fell in love with a 14-year-old girl, Priscilla, but followed through with a marriage seven years later.)  This exposed Kierkegaard to ridicule from contemporaries, such as P.L. Møller who wrote “[Regine] cannot grasp the fact that I both want to be engaged and also to break up, that I both want to break up and also not break up, both get married and not get married. She cannot grasp the fact that my engagement is dialectical, in that it both represents love and an absence of love.”

Michael Frayn, the British playwright, has given us Skios, poking fun at the world’s big thinkers. A young exotic dancer named Bahama LeStarr marries an 81-year-old rich guy, Fred Topler, who has a heart attack six weeks later. The widow starts a foundation that pulls together the world’s most successful people to the Greek island of Skios to hear an annual lecture by a big thinker. It seems to have been inspired by the John Templeton Foundation with its emphasis on unifying science and spirituality:

“The John Templeton Foundation serves as a philanthropic catalyst for discoveries relating to the Big Questions of human purpose and ultimate reality. We support research on subjects ranging from complexity, evolution, and infinity to creativity, forgiveness, love, and free will. We encourage civil, informed dialogue among scientists, philosophers, and theologians and between such experts and the public at large, for the purposes of definitional clarity and new insights.”

The big thinker who shows up at the summer retreat covered by the novel turns out to be a playboy/idler impostor who knows nothing about science or mathematics and is making it all up as he goes along. Meanwhile the genuine academic genius (specialty: “The scientific management of science” a.k.a. “scientometrics” (a term also used by Scientologists)) is delayed and entangled due to his obsession with settling a score via email while waiting for his luggage at an airport baggage carousel.

The idea for the book could hardly be better and the first third-to-half is excellent, though it reads more like a script than a novel at times. However, the author can’t seem to figure out what to do with the characters once he has them suitably mixed up (i.e., he is not Shakespeare!). So my recommendation is to read the first third carefully, enjoying it as a short story, and then put it down and/or skim the remainder.

Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief, by Lawrence Wright, is a fascinating biography as well as a great way to learn about Americans in general. The 450 pages are never dull, partly thanks to L. Ron Hubbard’s quirky personality and partly due to the author’s skill in telling the story of Scientology and its followers.

What is probably toughest for a contemporary reader to understand is what a compelling individual Hubbard must have been. He does not seem to have been a likely leader of thousands. Hubbard claimed to have been wounded in action as a Navy officer during World War II and to have recovered from horrifying injuries with special techniques that would later become part of Scientology. However, it was pretty easy for journalists to discover that Hubbard had never served in combat. In fact, whenever he got close to being shipped off to a dangerous assignment he would develop a mysterious stomach ailment and require hospitalization. Due to the Navy’s desperation for experienced sailors, Hubbard was given command of a small ship (PC-815) for about 80 days but he stayed close to shore and had a couple of mishaps. On the very first excursion out into the ocean Hubbard, who had finished near the bottom of his class in SONAR interpretation, thought that he heard a Japanese submarine just off the coast of Astoria, Oregon. Depth charges were dropped, other Navy ships were called in, but no submarine was found (and Japanese records uncovered after the war indicated that no sub was in the area at the time). Hubbard also opened fire with the ship’s guns on (1) a log, (2) an island near Baja that he thought was owned by the U.S. and acceptable for target practice (in fact it was owned by Mexico and the Mexicans were not too happy about the incident).

Hubbard’s personal life did not go any better than his Navy career. There were multiple wives, sometimes at the same time, abandoned children, lawsuits, etc. When he did take care of children it wasn’t exactly what you’d expect a father of the time to be doing: “When the girls became old enough to start wearing makeup, Hubbard was the one who showed them how to apply it.” [Disclaimer: I painted a 2.5-year-old girl's toenails purple, but I don't think that puts me in Hubbard's league because I did so incompetently and would certainly not have suggested to anyone of any age that I possessed special knowledge regarding makeup.] Hubbard promised adherents of the new religion powerful tools to triumph over age and disease but Hubbard did not seem to be grappling with these foes any better than the average person:

Other members of the Sea Org were having a hard time coping with the blatant contradiction between Hubbard’s legend and the crabby, disconsolate figure howling in his stateroom. “If he is who he says he is, why does he have so little staying power?” Hana Eltringham wondered. “He has a motorcycle accident, he doesn’t recover quickly, and he doesn’t use Scientology techniques on himself.”

Hubbard was sixty-four years old in 1975, as the Apollo began its circumnavigation of the Caribbean. He weighed 260 pounds. He was still meticulously groomed, but his teeth and fingers were darkly stained from constant smoking. He was on the run from the courts, fearful of being discovered, marked by age, and visibly in decline. In Curaçao, he suffered a small stroke and spent several weeks in a local hospital. It was becoming clear that life at sea posed a real danger for a man in such frail health. His crew rationalized his obvious decline by saying that his body was battered by the research he was undertaking and the volumes of suppression aimed at him. “He’s risking his life for us,” they told each other.

There is an almost funny side to the book, mostly when talking about the various Hollywood stars who are members of the Church of Scientology. The church takes on the challenge of matching up Tom Cruise with a new wife (pre-Katie Holmes):

The Scientology search team came up with another aspiring actress, Nazanin Boniadi, twenty-five years old, who had been born in Iran and raised in London. Naz was well educated and beautiful in the way that Cruise was inclined to respond to—dark and slender, with large eyes and a flashing smile.

At one point during the intensive auditing and security checks, Wilhere informed her that she would have to break up with her longtime boyfriend in order for the project to proceed. She refused. She couldn’t understand why her boyfriend posed any kind of problem; indeed, she had personally introduced him to Scientology. Wilhere persisted, asking what it would take for her to break off the romance. Flustered, she responded that she would break up if she knew he had been cheating on her. According to Naz’s friends, the very next day, Wilhere brought in her boyfriend’s confidential auditing files and showed her several instances of his infidelities, which had been circled in red. Naz felt betrayed, but also guilty, because Wilhere blamed her for failing to know and report her boyfriend’s ethical lapses herself; after all, she had audited him on several occasions. Obviously, she had missed his “withhold.” She confronted her boyfriend and he confessed.

Cruise was charming. He said that he and Davis were headed over to the Empire State Building and then to Nobu for some sushi—why didn’t they join them? Afterward, they all went skating at Rockefeller Center, which was closed to the public while they were on the rink. It was beginning to seem a little too perfect. She spent that first night with Cruise in the Trump Tower, where he had taken an entire floor for his entourage.

Two weeks later, Jessica Feshbach told Naz to pack her things. Cruise was too busy to say good-bye. Naz’s last glimpse was of him working out in his home gym. Davis later explained to her that Cruise had simply changed his mind about the relationship,

In February 2005, Naz went to Clearwater [Florida; a center for Scientology] to take the courses. At first, she was treated like a VIP, but soon one of her friends noticed dramatic changes in her— she was weeping all the time. Naz confided that she had just gone through a wrenching breakup with Tom Cruise. The shocked friend immediately reported her to Ethics. Naz was assigned a condition of Treason and ordered to do reparations for the damages she had done to the group by revealing her relationship with Cruise. She was made to dig ditches and scrub public toilets with a toothbrush. Finally, in June, she worked her way back into good standing with the church, but she was ordered to stay away from the Celebrity Centre. Davis advised her to go live in some far corner of the world and never utter another word about Tom Cruise.

(Katie Holmes at least got a helicopter ride on her first date, according to the book.) We also learn about Tom Cruise’s fondness for monster SUVs:

Miscavige purchased another Excursion for Cruise to replace the one that had been botched. Meanwhile, Brousseau spent the next six months personally rebuilding the original Excursion. He ripped the vehicle down to its frame and installed handmade reclining seats and wood paneling fashioned from a burl of a eucalyptus tree that had been toppled in a storm.

Stepping back from the colorful anecdotes and the celebrities, Wright does give some consideration to what has made Scientology meaningful

SCIENTOLOGY WANTS TO BE understood as a scientific approach to spiritual enlightenment. It has, really, no grounding in science at all. It would be better understood as a philosophy of human nature; seen in that light, Hubbard’s thought could be compared with that of other moral philosophers, such as Immanuel Kant and Søren Kierkegaard, although no one has ever approached the sweep of Hubbard’s work. His often ingenious and minutely observed categories of behavior have been shadowed by the bogus elements of his personality and the absurdity that is interwoven with his bouts of brilliance, making it difficult for non-Scientologists to know what to make of it. Serious academic study of his writing has also been constrained by the vindictive reputation of the church. The field of psychotherapy is Scientology’s more respectable cousin, although it cannot honestly claim to be a science, either.

[Separately, if you are feeling any sadness about Mitt Romney's failure to unseat Barack Obama as president, reading this book will cheer you up a bit. Romney apparently identified Hubbard's Battlefield Earth as his favorite novel.]

If you’re a parent, portions of this book are very painful to read. According to Wright, Scientology has forced followers to divorce spouses, abandon children, have abortions, and do some less drastic things that yet deprive children of the right to have a normal childhood.

On balance it is a very interesting book. Despite the relatively small impact of Scientology on American society (due to the small number of members), the book is interesting because it covers a guy (Hubbard) who achieved far more than anyone could have predicted based on his family background and education. He lived out a kind of American Dream.

More: Read Going Clear