Coming of Age in Utopia: Youth Unemployment, Social Democracy, and Reciprocal Becoming in Norway

ABSTRACT: In Norway, youth unemployment is not only a policy issue but a subject of popular concern. One sometimes hears that the country's young people, who have grown up in an exceedingly wealthy petro-state, lack the ethics, habits, and dispositions toward labor of their parents and grandparents. While these complaints hardly constitute an accurate representation of the youth, they do capture something important about the challenges of "coming of age" within the context of the twenty-first-century Nordic Model. In this article, based on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Oslo, I argue that social democracy, as a political-economic and moral order, propagates, but also requires, a productivist ethics of "reciprocal becoming"—that is, of building lives and livelihoods that involves reciprocating the security provided by the welfare system through taxes and the moderate use of benefits. Unemployment thus signals not only a young person's inability to make ends meet but their apparent refusal to build a life in which they would meet their obligations to this model society. Through examining the stories of various young people, however, I show that deviations from reciprocal becoming can largely be explained by examining the Nordic Model's own fraught becoming through neoliberal and social investment reform. Looking beyond Norway, this article advocates for future anthropological research that centers comparative political economy, bringing the heterogeneous becomings of both young people and contemporary capitalism into a shared frame.