10 ms·

The American Dream Isn’t Alive in Denmark

63 points by monort 10y ago

jonlandrum 10y ago
"Denmark’s economic philosophy seems to be that the market is an unfortunate socioeconomic lottery system" Exactly this. People born to wealthy families have literally won the socioeconomic lottery without trying.
- dnautics 10y ago
  Why is this limited to wealth? Why don't we consider that adeptness at accessing government benefits is a socioeconomic lottery system? As in, those who are particularly capable of extracting resources from public sources teach their children how to do this. I'm not referring to welfare, but rather, stimulus packages, bailouts, SBIRs, business development tax incentives, low interest goverment loans, etc.
  - woodpanel 10y ago
    Exactly. As for welfare: "adedptness at accessing" is what is also driving inequality within the group of welfare-recipients. While the college grad, that can't find a job has a rather easy time figuring out what forms to fill out how, the typical poor kid coming from a family of consecutive generational poorness, won't even know about the majority of services he could get from the government. It's why I find welfare-reactionaries (people who oppose welfare reform) often to be subconsciously devious: They oppose reforms that would simplify welfare, even if it means more money for those who are poorer than themselves.
- thisisbad 10y ago
  Good looking, tall people have literally won the genetic lottery without trying. Look at inheritance as a payment for providing happiness and support. If a wealthy man has a wife that makes him happy and supports him, then why would it be a problem if he leaves her 50% of his wealth? Children, especially your own, are a great source of happiness and motivation. Some people work mainly to leave wealth to their children and other family members - it's their main motivation. I don't understand people who have problems with other people giving their money to those they love (children, spouse, relatives, friends etc.). It's kinda funny - people who are for forced redistribution at a gunpoint, want to give people money just for existing. But, if someone wants to give their own children money for existing and making them happy, then it's a problem.
  - pjc50 10y ago
    There's a difference between leaving a modest family house/farm to your kids versus someone inheriting a business empire worth millions. Especially if that means the inheritor refuses to acknowledge that not everyone has it that easy. It's not so much the giving that's objected to as the receiving. Especially when there are other children suffering the effects of poverty in childhood that will give them lifelong disadvantages.
    - mac01021 10y ago
      Inheriting a modest family farm can also make it hard for you to acknowledge that not everyone has it that easy.
      - pjc50 10y ago
        I'm not quite sure where you're going with this, other than some sort of salami-slicing of easiness? (Ironically a small farm is one of the harder things to inherit, especially if you feel morally obliged to keep it running as a business)
    - thisisbad 10y ago
      There's a difference between leaving a modest family house/farm to your kids versus someone inheriting a business empire worth millions. What difference? Inheritance = payment for providing happiness and support in life. The amount can be whatever you want - millions, billions or nothing at all. If someone has a business worth millions and decides to leave it to his wife or children, then that would be a financial compensation for making his life better. It's up to them to decide what to do with the money they've made. It's not so much the giving that's objected to as the receiving. Who is objecting to other people receiving money from someone who wants to give it to them voluntarily? It's crazy what envy does to people. Beautiful people receive more positive attention and get compliments all the time. Should they mutilate themselves, so they don't receive attention anymore? Especially when there are other children suffering the effects of poverty in childhood that will give them lifelong disadvantages. So what? Why would wealthy people have an obligation to help poor people? There are ugly people, which doesn't mean beautiful people should mutilate themselves and make previously ugly people look better in comparison.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
flexie 10y ago
Yesterday I saw the same study mentioned in Washington Post and I got really bummed about how journalists always seem to miss the point or at least chose an angle that twists everything (1). This article from The Atlantic gives a more nuanced description of the study's findings. 1: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/08/03/theres-only-one-way-to-save-the-american-dream/?tid=sm_fb https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/08/03/there...
sveme 10y ago
Governments can only do so much to increase intergenerational social mobility. When I look at my peers and myself, it is obvious that it is extremely difficult to emancipate yourself from the role model that is your parents. They are not necessarily role models you follow consciously, but they determine the borders of your imagination. If your family comes from a worker's background, it is extremely hard to imagine that there might be another path in life for you - you simply follow what your kin has been doing in their lifes. The German society can be in principle classified into three social strata: workers (factory, craftsmen etc.), office employees and academics. This comes from the strong early selection into the three-parted school system, which determines at age ten or twelve whether you have the cognitive abilities to succeed in one of these three tracks. So at age ten or twelve, you are either selected to join Hauptschule, Realschule or Gymnasium. The first school prepares you to become a worker, car mechanic, hair dresser etc. The second school prepares you to become an office employee, the third prepares you for a life of an academic. Now the twist is, that it is generally your social stratum that decides which school you attend and therefore which track you will follow, thereby perpetuating this low intergenerational social mobility for a long time. Your parents often decide that you will be going to Realschule, which is what they themselves attended - or Gymnasium when your parents are academics. Escaping this track that was selected for you at a young age is much harder than just following it. An example: my parents followed both the second track: Realschule, then an Ausbildung to become office workers. My sisters both followed this track and had therefore lives nearly identical to that of our parents. I was the only one to follow the track to become an academic, and with the lack of role models in my vicinity, this was always accompanied by self doubt and simply a lack of being self-confident in the academic environment. Getting rid of the influence your social environment has on the borders of your imagination is the really hard part for any educational system.
- IkmoIkmo 10y ago
  All of that sounds very familiar, both the German system as your personal story. It's quite similar in the Netherlands, only that the academic class is mostly found in professional life as well, in which they occupy the traineeships, fast-track and management positions.
- wolfgke 10y ago
timwaagh 10y ago
they didn't mention where pretax social mobility is highest. that's something I'm interested in. Perhaps the american dream is most alive in a place we don't expect.
- jackcosgrove 10y ago
  Not sure about mobility across generations, but pre-tax income inequality is lowest in Taiwan and Poland. https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/ourworldindata_income-inequality-before-and-after-taxes-and-transfers-–-max-roser.png https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/ourwor...
gaius 10y ago
Any discussion of economics or social mobility in Denmark that doesn't mention Janteloven is missing the mark https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante
- fsloth 10y ago
  HN ftw once again - I live in Finland have never heard this articulated this clearly before. It's very much alive here as well (based on purely anecdotal evidence).
- toomanybeersies 10y ago
  In New Zealand, Tall Poppy Syndrome (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome)is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome)is very prevalent. There's a very strong thread of anti-intellectualism here, especially among the trades. I know a lot of people people who basically think that there's no point in learning anything that's not directly useful to them right now.
- cylinder 10y ago
  This isn't uncommon in many countries. It's not such a big deal, it keeps the big loudmouth egos in check, unlike in America. It also promotes skepticism of people who talk a big game. In addition, things are changing with the younger generation.
jernfrost 10y ago
Claiming it is all about taxes and transfers is severely twisting the facts. Look up the difference between the lowest paid workers and CEOs in nordic countries compared to the US. It is a huge difference. Our engineers make about the same as American engineers, our doctors and surgeons make significantly less and so does the CEOs. However the McDonalds workers, shop clerks etc make several times the hourly salary of an American McDonalds worker. So mobility from the bottom to the top might be no better, but the need to do move is far less as people make decent wages across the whole spectrum. It isn't purely about money either. The lower percentage of American have significantly more problems in terms of education, knowledge, health, government influence etc than their Nordic peers.
- exelius 10y ago
  > Claiming it is all about taxes and transfers is severely twisting the facts. Look up the difference between the lowest paid workers and CEOs in nordic countries compared to the US. It is a huge difference. But that's likely due to the system of taxes and transfers. The government subsidizes low-end jobs in the form of minimum wage laws; and it makes far less sense for a company to continue to hike the pay of its CEO when 75% of that money goes directly to the government in the form of taxes.
  - nerdponx 10y ago
    Sorry to nitpick, but a minimum wage isn't a subsidy, it's a price floor. Different things.
  - bjelkeman-again 10y ago
    FYI there are no minimum wage laws in the Nordic countries [1], including Denmark. But there are collective bargaining processes with unions which effectively set a minimum floor for a lot of jobs. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_wages_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_wages_by_count...
- NinjaViking 10y ago
  The socioeconomic divide in the Nordic countries is mostly between the property-owning elite and working people, not between different working classes.
aedron 10y ago
It may be that social heritage is a big factor in determining a person's life path, but that doesn't mean economic factors aren't. The fact remains that in Denmark, any kid, no matter how poor, who has talent and puts in the effort, has nothing stopping him from getting a degree from the top universities in the country. Tuition is free and s/he will even get paid a stipend to attend. Perhaps most working class kids will stay working class, but others, e.g. immigrants, or children of substance abusers, who have the talent but not the resources, can go straight to the top if they just do their homework. And it works. Examples are all over the place.
InclinedPlane 10y ago
I'll just butt in here to add a huge caveat that almost never gets brought up in these sorts of articles: Denmark is small, really small. It has a population of only 5.7 million, if it were part of the US it would fit in between the 11th and 12th largest cities (Atlanta and Detroit). So imagine, for example, reading an article about the state of things in Detroit, Atlanta, or Houston, and imagine the author attempting to make big, sweeping conclusions based on that data. I suspect you'd likely take any such conclusions with a grain of salt much more than you would when you hear about what's going on in Denmark, because we all know Denmark is a huge and important country. Denmark is neat and all, with plenty of reasons to justify people who don't live there finding it interesting, but it isn't necessarily a land that one can directly map onto the entire nation of America (across a gulf of about two orders of magnitude in population alone) and expect them to be comparable.
- maxxxxx 10y ago
  That's the old excuse: "America is so big, diverse or small (compared to China) so nothing from anywhere else can work here and nothing can be learned ". I hear that all the time and this attitude will kill the country in the long run. It's the excuse for having a dysfunctional health system , bad infrastructure, gun violence and lots of other problems.
- drabiega 10y ago
  I've heard this argument quite a bit but never quite understood what the problem was supposed to be. Could you articulate why you think the comparison is troublesome?
  - TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
    Culture, shared history. In a country of 5.7 million people where the capital has a metro population of around 2 million people I imagine it's a lot easier for people to want to care for each other. I imagine that the Danish fit the notion of 'nation'[1] much more closely than people from the US. Or at least, I think that's how the argument is supposed to go. Like another comment said, perhaps it's just an excuse. A case could be made that went something like "Look, if the Danish can do it so can we", or "Let's look at what the best in the world are doing then model and copy their behaviour where it makes senses for us to do so." 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation
Broken_Hippo 10y ago
The American Dream includes things like everyone having rights and opportunities to move towards being happy and successful, not necessarily whether or not they do better than their parents or not. It seems that it is more that they do, indeed, have the opportunity to do so. Instead most folks find themselves a victim of their circumstances which takes away from opportunity. I find the entire framing of the article to be misguided. And as a sidenote, I never felt that was possible living in the US. Then I moved to Norway. Similar to Denmark, with a lot of shared values and history, but of course there are differences. Even as an immigrant, if I work at it, I have the opportunity to become successful. The definition of success is a bit different, and it seems at the higher rungs it can take a bit more work to mirror what Americans found 'successful'. The term is very different. I most definitely have the opportunity for happiness, despite the monetary "success". It might be less important for everyone to go to college proper, even, due to some specialized training happening before folks reach 18. College depends more on if you do the work to meet the entry requirements, and if you didn't, there are still ways for you to go later on. It isn't a bad thing to work retail for the rest of your life - and you won't be as poor working such a job. A lot of this "socialism" folks complain about make it easier to reach a version of the American Dream even if you aren't 'successful' by american standards.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Best i recall, the by the time the concept was formulated, the condition for its existence was already on the way out of US society. At its core, it was reliant on the ability for anything to travel somewhere, build a house, farm the land, and then claim it as their own after a few years. This in contrast to the situation in Europe for the same time period, where most farmers rented the land they worked, and paid either in produce or by assisting the landowner during harvest etc.
  - Broken_Hippo 10y ago
    I believe you are correct. Conditions weren't great in Europe, and the states gave away land in some areas. Some meaning started to change during the 50's, I believe. Oddly enough, the American Dream and land of opportunity sort of thing still lives in the mind of some folks that have never visited, and it would seem so in comparison to their home country.
mrweasel 10y ago
It's always somewhat weird to compare countries, because mentality in each country is so very different. For instance: > But despite this far greater investment in young children and public colleges, Danish children of high-school graduates are still extremely unlikely to go onto college. While that may be true, it's not the point. The point is you should have the option to go to college, regardless of parents background or financial status. This bit is also a little over the top: >Based on this finding, the researchers conclude that welfare policies may reduce college enrollment. Denmark makes it more comfortable to be poor and less lucrative to be rich, so many young people decide to end their education after high school. The wording make it sound worse than it is. There's an extremely limited set of job you can hold in Denmark, with just a high school education. While there are certainly more "uneducated" young people in Denmark, than most of us believe, it not really a career path. It will almost certainly put you on unemployment benefits, which makes you poorer than most people care for. It should be noted that there are also other option after high school than just college.
- smallbag 10y ago
  Perhaps small difference in wages like in Denmark is a way to avoid UBI, or a better UBI, perhaps not universal but cover a lot of people. Countries where you work but can't pay for a good meal is another option.
  - mrweasel 10y ago
    One interesting thing people often neglect when talking about Danish wages is the fact that Denmark doesn't technically have a legally defined minimum wage. Wages are, traditionally, negotiated by the employers and the labour unions, with the government as a third party that could resolve disputes. It's a system that served Denmark extremely well for almost 100 years or so, and we're in the process of destroying it. First by removing the laws that bound specific trades to specific unions and now by workers leaving the unions in droves, just to save the union fees (which are rather high). Never the less, the union ensured that no jobs in Denmark where so badly paid that you couldn't afford a decent meal.
nerdponx 10y ago
> But Denmark’s economic philosophy seems to be that the market is an unfortunate socioeconomic lottery system, and so the country compensates the poor with generous transfers paid by high taxes on the rich. This to me is the heart of the Sanders economic philosophy as well. Everything else is an attempt to convince people that it's a _better_ philosophy.
IOT_Apprentice 10y ago
Wow. What titlegore. A different country has different culture?

63 points by monort 10y ago

"Denmark’s economic philosophy seems to be that the market is an unfortunate socioeconomic lottery system" Exactly this. People born to wealthy families have literally won the socioeconomic lottery without trying.

dnautics 10y ago
Why is this limited to wealth? Why don't we consider that adeptness at accessing government benefits is a socioeconomic lottery system? As in, those who are particularly capable of extracting resources from public sources teach their children how to do this. I'm not referring to welfare, but rather, stimulus packages, bailouts, SBIRs, business development tax incentives, low interest goverment loans, etc.
- woodpanel 10y ago
  Exactly. As for welfare: "adedptness at accessing" is what is also driving inequality within the group of welfare-recipients. While the college grad, that can't find a job has a rather easy time figuring out what forms to fill out how, the typical poor kid coming from a family of consecutive generational poorness, won't even know about the majority of services he could get from the government. It's why I find welfare-reactionaries (people who oppose welfare reform) often to be subconsciously devious: They oppose reforms that would simplify welfare, even if it means more money for those who are poorer than themselves.
thisisbad 10y ago
Good looking, tall people have literally won the genetic lottery without trying. Look at inheritance as a payment for providing happiness and support. If a wealthy man has a wife that makes him happy and supports him, then why would it be a problem if he leaves her 50% of his wealth? Children, especially your own, are a great source of happiness and motivation. Some people work mainly to leave wealth to their children and other family members - it's their main motivation. I don't understand people who have problems with other people giving their money to those they love (children, spouse, relatives, friends etc.). It's kinda funny - people who are for forced redistribution at a gunpoint, want to give people money just for existing. But, if someone wants to give their own children money for existing and making them happy, then it's a problem.
- pjc50 10y ago
  There's a difference between leaving a modest family house/farm to your kids versus someone inheriting a business empire worth millions. Especially if that means the inheritor refuses to acknowledge that not everyone has it that easy. It's not so much the giving that's objected to as the receiving. Especially when there are other children suffering the effects of poverty in childhood that will give them lifelong disadvantages.
  - mac01021 10y ago
    Inheriting a modest family farm can also make it hard for you to acknowledge that not everyone has it that easy.
    - pjc50 10y ago
      I'm not quite sure where you're going with this, other than some sort of salami-slicing of easiness? (Ironically a small farm is one of the harder things to inherit, especially if you feel morally obliged to keep it running as a business)
  - thisisbad 10y ago
    There's a difference between leaving a modest family house/farm to your kids versus someone inheriting a business empire worth millions. What difference? Inheritance = payment for providing happiness and support in life. The amount can be whatever you want - millions, billions or nothing at all. If someone has a business worth millions and decides to leave it to his wife or children, then that would be a financial compensation for making his life better. It's up to them to decide what to do with the money they've made. It's not so much the giving that's objected to as the receiving. Who is objecting to other people receiving money from someone who wants to give it to them voluntarily? It's crazy what envy does to people. Beautiful people receive more positive attention and get compliments all the time. Should they mutilate themselves, so they don't receive attention anymore? Especially when there are other children suffering the effects of poverty in childhood that will give them lifelong disadvantages. So what? Why would wealthy people have an obligation to help poor people? There are ugly people, which doesn't mean beautiful people should mutilate themselves and make previously ugly people look better in comparison.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

flexie 10y ago

Yesterday I saw the same study mentioned in Washington Post and I got really bummed about how journalists always seem to miss the point or at least chose an angle that twists everything (1). This article from The Atlantic gives a more nuanced description of the study's findings. 1: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/08/03/theres-only-one-way-to-save-the-american-dream/?tid=sm_fb https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/08/03/there...

sveme 10y ago

Governments can only do so much to increase intergenerational social mobility. When I look at my peers and myself, it is obvious that it is extremely difficult to emancipate yourself from the role model that is your parents. They are not necessarily role models you follow consciously, but they determine the borders of your imagination. If your family comes from a worker's background, it is extremely hard to imagine that there might be another path in life for you - you simply follow what your kin has been doing in their lifes. The German society can be in principle classified into three social strata: workers (factory, craftsmen etc.), office employees and academics. This comes from the strong early selection into the three-parted school system, which determines at age ten or twelve whether you have the cognitive abilities to succeed in one of these three tracks. So at age ten or twelve, you are either selected to join Hauptschule, Realschule or Gymnasium. The first school prepares you to become a worker, car mechanic, hair dresser etc. The second school prepares you to become an office employee, the third prepares you for a life of an academic. Now the twist is, that it is generally your social stratum that decides which school you attend and therefore which track you will follow, thereby perpetuating this low intergenerational social mobility for a long time. Your parents often decide that you will be going to Realschule, which is what they themselves attended - or Gymnasium when your parents are academics. Escaping this track that was selected for you at a young age is much harder than just following it. An example: my parents followed both the second track: Realschule, then an Ausbildung to become office workers. My sisters both followed this track and had therefore lives nearly identical to that of our parents. I was the only one to follow the track to become an academic, and with the lack of role models in my vicinity, this was always accompanied by self doubt and simply a lack of being self-confident in the academic environment. Getting rid of the influence your social environment has on the borders of your imagination is the really hard part for any educational system.

IkmoIkmo 10y ago
All of that sounds very familiar, both the German system as your personal story. It's quite similar in the Netherlands, only that the academic class is mostly found in professional life as well, in which they occupy the traineeships, fast-track and management positions.
wolfgke 10y ago

timwaagh 10y ago

they didn't mention where pretax social mobility is highest. that's something I'm interested in. Perhaps the american dream is most alive in a place we don't expect.

jackcosgrove 10y ago
Not sure about mobility across generations, but pre-tax income inequality is lowest in Taiwan and Poland. https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/ourworldindata_income-inequality-before-and-after-taxes-and-transfers-–-max-roser.png https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/ourwor...

gaius 10y ago

Any discussion of economics or social mobility in Denmark that doesn't mention Janteloven is missing the mark https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante

fsloth 10y ago
HN ftw once again - I live in Finland have never heard this articulated this clearly before. It's very much alive here as well (based on purely anecdotal evidence).
toomanybeersies 10y ago
In New Zealand, Tall Poppy Syndrome (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome)is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome)is very prevalent. There's a very strong thread of anti-intellectualism here, especially among the trades. I know a lot of people people who basically think that there's no point in learning anything that's not directly useful to them right now.
cylinder 10y ago
This isn't uncommon in many countries. It's not such a big deal, it keeps the big loudmouth egos in check, unlike in America. It also promotes skepticism of people who talk a big game. In addition, things are changing with the younger generation.

jernfrost 10y ago

Claiming it is all about taxes and transfers is severely twisting the facts. Look up the difference between the lowest paid workers and CEOs in nordic countries compared to the US. It is a huge difference. Our engineers make about the same as American engineers, our doctors and surgeons make significantly less and so does the CEOs. However the McDonalds workers, shop clerks etc make several times the hourly salary of an American McDonalds worker. So mobility from the bottom to the top might be no better, but the need to do move is far less as people make decent wages across the whole spectrum. It isn't purely about money either. The lower percentage of American have significantly more problems in terms of education, knowledge, health, government influence etc than their Nordic peers.

exelius 10y ago
> Claiming it is all about taxes and transfers is severely twisting the facts. Look up the difference between the lowest paid workers and CEOs in nordic countries compared to the US. It is a huge difference. But that's likely due to the system of taxes and transfers. The government subsidizes low-end jobs in the form of minimum wage laws; and it makes far less sense for a company to continue to hike the pay of its CEO when 75% of that money goes directly to the government in the form of taxes.
- nerdponx 10y ago
  Sorry to nitpick, but a minimum wage isn't a subsidy, it's a price floor. Different things.
- bjelkeman-again 10y ago
  FYI there are no minimum wage laws in the Nordic countries [1], including Denmark. But there are collective bargaining processes with unions which effectively set a minimum floor for a lot of jobs. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_wages_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_wages_by_count...
NinjaViking 10y ago
The socioeconomic divide in the Nordic countries is mostly between the property-owning elite and working people, not between different working classes.

aedron 10y ago

It may be that social heritage is a big factor in determining a person's life path, but that doesn't mean economic factors aren't. The fact remains that in Denmark, any kid, no matter how poor, who has talent and puts in the effort, has nothing stopping him from getting a degree from the top universities in the country. Tuition is free and s/he will even get paid a stipend to attend. Perhaps most working class kids will stay working class, but others, e.g. immigrants, or children of substance abusers, who have the talent but not the resources, can go straight to the top if they just do their homework. And it works. Examples are all over the place.

InclinedPlane 10y ago

I'll just butt in here to add a huge caveat that almost never gets brought up in these sorts of articles: Denmark is small, really small. It has a population of only 5.7 million, if it were part of the US it would fit in between the 11th and 12th largest cities (Atlanta and Detroit). So imagine, for example, reading an article about the state of things in Detroit, Atlanta, or Houston, and imagine the author attempting to make big, sweeping conclusions based on that data. I suspect you'd likely take any such conclusions with a grain of salt much more than you would when you hear about what's going on in Denmark, because we all know Denmark is a huge and important country. Denmark is neat and all, with plenty of reasons to justify people who don't live there finding it interesting, but it isn't necessarily a land that one can directly map onto the entire nation of America (across a gulf of about two orders of magnitude in population alone) and expect them to be comparable.

maxxxxx 10y ago
That's the old excuse: "America is so big, diverse or small (compared to China) so nothing from anywhere else can work here and nothing can be learned ". I hear that all the time and this attitude will kill the country in the long run. It's the excuse for having a dysfunctional health system , bad infrastructure, gun violence and lots of other problems.
drabiega 10y ago
I've heard this argument quite a bit but never quite understood what the problem was supposed to be. Could you articulate why you think the comparison is troublesome?
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
  Culture, shared history. In a country of 5.7 million people where the capital has a metro population of around 2 million people I imagine it's a lot easier for people to want to care for each other. I imagine that the Danish fit the notion of 'nation'[1] much more closely than people from the US. Or at least, I think that's how the argument is supposed to go. Like another comment said, perhaps it's just an excuse. A case could be made that went something like "Look, if the Danish can do it so can we", or "Let's look at what the best in the world are doing then model and copy their behaviour where it makes senses for us to do so." 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation

Broken_Hippo 10y ago

The American Dream includes things like everyone having rights and opportunities to move towards being happy and successful, not necessarily whether or not they do better than their parents or not. It seems that it is more that they do, indeed, have the opportunity to do so. Instead most folks find themselves a victim of their circumstances which takes away from opportunity. I find the entire framing of the article to be misguided. And as a sidenote, I never felt that was possible living in the US. Then I moved to Norway. Similar to Denmark, with a lot of shared values and history, but of course there are differences. Even as an immigrant, if I work at it, I have the opportunity to become successful. The definition of success is a bit different, and it seems at the higher rungs it can take a bit more work to mirror what Americans found 'successful'. The term is very different. I most definitely have the opportunity for happiness, despite the monetary "success". It might be less important for everyone to go to college proper, even, due to some specialized training happening before folks reach 18. College depends more on if you do the work to meet the entry requirements, and if you didn't, there are still ways for you to go later on. It isn't a bad thing to work retail for the rest of your life - and you won't be as poor working such a job. A lot of this "socialism" folks complain about make it easier to reach a version of the American Dream even if you aren't 'successful' by american standards.

digi_owl 10y ago
Best i recall, the by the time the concept was formulated, the condition for its existence was already on the way out of US society. At its core, it was reliant on the ability for anything to travel somewhere, build a house, farm the land, and then claim it as their own after a few years. This in contrast to the situation in Europe for the same time period, where most farmers rented the land they worked, and paid either in produce or by assisting the landowner during harvest etc.
- Broken_Hippo 10y ago
  I believe you are correct. Conditions weren't great in Europe, and the states gave away land in some areas. Some meaning started to change during the 50's, I believe. Oddly enough, the American Dream and land of opportunity sort of thing still lives in the mind of some folks that have never visited, and it would seem so in comparison to their home country.

mrweasel 10y ago

It's always somewhat weird to compare countries, because mentality in each country is so very different. For instance: > But despite this far greater investment in young children and public colleges, Danish children of high-school graduates are still extremely unlikely to go onto college. While that may be true, it's not the point. The point is you should have the option to go to college, regardless of parents background or financial status. This bit is also a little over the top: >Based on this finding, the researchers conclude that welfare policies may reduce college enrollment. Denmark makes it more comfortable to be poor and less lucrative to be rich, so many young people decide to end their education after high school. The wording make it sound worse than it is. There's an extremely limited set of job you can hold in Denmark, with just a high school education. While there are certainly more "uneducated" young people in Denmark, than most of us believe, it not really a career path. It will almost certainly put you on unemployment benefits, which makes you poorer than most people care for. It should be noted that there are also other option after high school than just college.

smallbag 10y ago
Perhaps small difference in wages like in Denmark is a way to avoid UBI, or a better UBI, perhaps not universal but cover a lot of people. Countries where you work but can't pay for a good meal is another option.
- mrweasel 10y ago
  One interesting thing people often neglect when talking about Danish wages is the fact that Denmark doesn't technically have a legally defined minimum wage. Wages are, traditionally, negotiated by the employers and the labour unions, with the government as a third party that could resolve disputes. It's a system that served Denmark extremely well for almost 100 years or so, and we're in the process of destroying it. First by removing the laws that bound specific trades to specific unions and now by workers leaving the unions in droves, just to save the union fees (which are rather high). Never the less, the union ensured that no jobs in Denmark where so badly paid that you couldn't afford a decent meal.

nerdponx 10y ago

> But Denmark’s economic philosophy seems to be that the market is an unfortunate socioeconomic lottery system, and so the country compensates the poor with generous transfers paid by high taxes on the rich. This to me is the heart of the Sanders economic philosophy as well. Everything else is an attempt to convince people that it's a _better_ philosophy.

IOT_Apprentice 10y ago

Wow. What titlegore. A different country has different culture?