On a fall evening in 2015, I accepted — with some reluctance — an invitation to a gathering at the home of Nina Witoszek, a popular émigré writer and gadfly in Oslo. I did not know Nina well, though for years I had read her columns in Aftenposten, Norway’s largest newspaper. I had also seen firsthand how her acerbic, insider-outsider commentary on this or that object of Norwegian pride could drive her more patriotic readers to the point of an almost foaming apoplexy.

Nina was unafraid to ask big, difficult questions and offer a perspective that much of the public inevitably scorned — even as they eagerly awaited what she had to say next. And now she had fixed her aim on something truly sacred: the so-called Nordic model of welfare capitalism. Her plan was to recruit an interdisciplinary group of academics from Norway and abroad and set them to the task of determining, once and for all if, in a crisis-ridden world, the Nordics — Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, and Finland — did in fact offer a blueprint for common and sustainable prosperity.

What has stayed with me quite vividly from this gathering in Oslo is a single question that punctuated the evening as I, careful not to linger for too long, was preparing to leave. I had said my farewells and was collecting my things near the front door when Nina formally introduced me to a business professor. She told him that I was, oddly enough, an American cultural anthropologist who had come to Norway to conduct field research on the lives of the country’s unemployed.