Viking Economics by George Lakey Page B

taxes, and abundant services create a productive and prosperous economy. The typical starting wage for a Norwegian graduate of the country’s upper high school, which is roughly the equivalent of a U.S. two-year community college, is $45,000.
    In that way, Norway’s economic “boat” is balanced for successful use in the turbulent global seas and the more peaceful domestic lakes, an economic feature that reminds me of those early Viking ships that were designed to serve well in both shallow rivers and deep water.
    Highly productive, unionized workers create more wealth. Workers are more likely to be productive if they are in jobs that are right for them. Family-support policies and quality vocational educationmatter, as does support for retraining and career change. Universal, single-payer health care prevents workers from being locked into jobs that bore them in order to keep employer-paid benefits. Productivity and equality-promoting services join to produce individual freedom in the labor market.

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FAMILY FARMERS AND COOPERATIVES: KEY PLAYERS IN THE NORDIC MODEL
    In the United States, the business news on television and the daily newspaper focuses on the excitement of corporate deal-making, the volatility of the stock market, and, occasionally, a union’s threat to strike. Rarely attracting media attention is the international network of cooperatives, which, in total, do business equal to the seventh-largest economy in the world. 57
    Cooperatives have played a significant role in building the Viking economic model. Cooperatives have been growing internationally in recent years. For example,
The Economist
reports that since the 2008 financial crisis, European cooperative banks have been increasing their market share. Germany’s
Bundesbank
(Central Bank) investigated the trend and found out why: co-op banks are financially more stable and less likely to fail than shareholder-owned institutions. 58
    Exceptions do exist. Even though a co-op’s board of directors—who are customer-members—is elected by the other customer-members, a board can fail to do due diligence and can allowmanagement to go off the rails. In Germany, the cooperative bank DZ lost one billion euros in 2008 because it had made high-risk investments.
    Nevertheless, a recent scholarly study of the 2008 crash showed that overall, co-ops were more resilient than shareholder-owned banks, since they aren’t driven by a need to make profits for investors and huge bonuses for managers. 59
    In Iceland, co-ops played a pivotal role in economic development for the first half of the twentieth century and then went into decline. Now they are growing again. In Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, cooperatives remained a dynamic part of economic life. A Danish financial services and insurance co-op,
Beierholm
, made the 2013 list of twenty-five “best large workplaces in Europe.” 60 The Oslo-based KLP Insurance is eighty-first in the top 300 co-ops in the world, with revenues of $3.9 billion. 61
    The Swedish co-op
Folksam
represents the overall growth trend. The 106-year-old insurance co-op grew by aggressively marketing to immigrants to Sweden, who make up one-fifth of the population. Folksam set up a multilingual call center over a decade ago that now handles calls in seventeen languages, including Somali, Farsi, Arabic, and Kurdish. Folksam claims the lion’s share of the insurance market in immigrant communities.
    The high productivity and efficiency of businesses organized on the co-op model also shows up in the United States. A study found that worker co-ops had only one-third the chance of failing compared with public companies. This might be related to their extraordinary ability to retain the people in their workforce. A 2013 study found annual turnover averaging 15 percent, compared with industry norms of 40 to 60 percent! 62
A LONG TRACK RECORD IN SWEDEN
    Starting early in the nineteenth century, Swedes organized co-ops for a variety of purposes. Now we