systems and individuals

Denmark has a sterling reputation as an environmentally-conscious wonderland of cyclists and minimalist design. And there is some truth to this! In Copenhagen, 64% of commuters travel by bicycle. Green initiatives such as disposable cutlery bans receive strong support, both in Denmark and in the rest of the EU. By 2035, Denmark is expected to meet greenhouse gas reduction targets of 78% under 1990 levels. Non-electric vehicles are taxed heavily, which encourages the purchase of electric vehicles - which you can hear and feel as you navigate the city: streets are quieter, and the air is noticeably fresher than North American cities of similar size.

(Though it should be noted that sales of Teslas are down over 50% in Denmark, which I will lose absolutely no sleep over.)

And yet: if you visit any park early on a summer morning, or after New Year's, or during graduation, you'll see something like the photo above. A chaos of trash - bottles, cans, pizza boxes, fireworks, takeout containers, cigarette butts - generously sprinkled across the landscape. I once saw a literal speedboat abandoned to the ravages of the sea and time at the bottom of a canal in Sydhavn, in what could quite possibly be the most impressive feat of public littering I'm ever likely to come across.

And yet: many supermarkets here still stock individually wrapped vegetables. Anecdotally, I'd say these wrappers make up a good 30-40% of our plastic recycling at home. Paper straws aside, takeout involves just as many containers and wrappers and thimble-sized plastic sauce cups as you'd get in Canada or the US. (Maybe with less styrofoam, at least.)

And yet: I still see op-eds in local newspapers decrying "fascist" cyclists for the crime of biking on the sidewalk during road maintenance closures. In fairness, it is illegal to use the sidewalk as a bike lane, and the city is usually quite good about preserving bike lanes during construction. Still, I thought I'd left this sort of hyperbolic rhetoric back in North America. Not so! There's also a neighbourhood association near our apartment up in arms about proposals to add a much-needed bicycle and pedestrian bridge in the area.

Despite what you've heard, Danes are not some mythical race of tree-huggers. They litter, bitch about bicycles, and buy their veggies in plastic packaging - just like people everywhere else...

...which leads me to an interesting observation. If Danes aren't fundamentally better than the rest of us, how are they able to have nice things?

You can certainly see that they have nice things. I've been a bit unfair to Islands Brygge in the photo at top, which usually looks a bit more like this:

Another piece of anecdata: the week my wife and I moved here, we were walking through Jorcks Passage downtown and saw the Danish standard of maintenance firsthand. Work crews were taking the spherical glass covers off the lights and meticulously scrubbing them clean of urban grime. Elsewhere on that same walk, we saw: street sweeping vehicles clearing trash out of bike lanes, gardeners tending planters in public parks, repaving on bike lanes and sidewalks.

Of course, these things also happen in North America. But it had never been so visible to us, nor had it been carried out with so much care. It reminded me of visiting Japan back in 2008-2009, where I saw the most tidy construction site I've ever laid eyes on: materials stacked neatly, machines parked in precise formations, not a single piece of gravel out of place.

The impression is of a system that still takes pride in itself, a system that is better than its component parts and not worse. A system that builds, maintains, and renews - rather than one that decays.

What's the result of such a system? Trust, for one. Here's the top countries as ranked by trust in government - Denmark is 6th:

Meanwhile, the US ranks much, much lower. Lest you think this is influenced by the current moment, note that the data for this survey was collected 2019-2022.

Perhaps coincidentally, no one here in Denmark is talking about deleting entire government agencies to give tax breaks to the wealthy. There's a virtuous cycle at work here: governments that visibly and effectively work in the public interest garner more trust; more trust makes it easier to continue being effective.

This has a number of positive effects - some immediately obvious, like cleaner streets and happier people. Other effects are more subtle. For instance: just as in North America, it's common in Denmark for government agencies to hold public consultations on large projects, such as new bike-pedestrian bridges. What's different is the tone.

In Canada and the US, public consultation starts from a standpoint of "we might do this thing, is there any reason we shouldn't?", which gives disproportionate veto power to small groups. Having worked in the public sector myself for a few years, I can say that public officials (in Toronto, at least) often feel backed into a defensive position: projects need to be secured against all imaginable interest groups and objections, as any sufficiently motivated detractor can stop the project. The result is unsuccessful inaction, which damages trust.

In Denmark, the starting point is more often "we're doing this thing, help make it better". The high level of trust becomes a resource that the government can cash in, giving it the political capital to push change through. Feedback is used to refine projects, and is only rarely used to justify stopping them. The atmosphere is more like a focus group or design brainstorm where good ideas can percolate, less like a heated confrontation. The result is successful action, which builds trust.

Never mind that much of the populist far-right action is chaos and self-destructive nonsense: a cult of action for action's sake. To people who are tired of rising inequality, stagnant wages, housing crises, climate change, regulatory capture, and a laundry list of other seemingly intractable problems, inaction feels like a greater sin than poorly-conceived action.

Yet poorly-conceived action does not solve these problems, and will never solve them. Instead, it often worsens or ignores them, offering only the thin gruel of simplistic, emotionally-satisfying clickbait wins in exchange.

When I talk about successful action above, it's important to spell out what that means. Successful action is:

• positive-sum: it creates results that refute "either I get nice things or you do", "us vs. them" thinking.
• data-informed: there are clear metrics of success, and clear indicators that the action has improved those metrics, while still allowing for intuition and qualitative validation.
• robust to nuance: edge cases are treated as important; the fallacy that complex problems can have reductive solutions is resisted. Tradeoffs are well-understood and taken deliberately.
• user-centered: those targeted or affected by the action are taken into account, and are consulted where possible.

Poorly-conceived action fails this litmus test: heedless of impacts, indifferent to any suffering that results, unaccountable to any metrics, and ignorant of the fine details.

We need to expand the capacity for well-conceived action: in the public interest, with input from the public and experts alike, to solve real problems. The Scandinavian example shows that it is possible, even with a population of imperfect, messy, trash-spewing humans. Agencies such as the Government Digital Service and the late 18F (see their last message) demonstrate how iterative, user-centred service design can help: at their best, these agencies create much-needed bridges between systems and the people they serve.

If we can do that, we can provide a positive vision for the future, one that is needed now more than ever. We can and must outcompete poorly-conceived action with a better alternative.