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How is this different from any other country?

• morsch 13y ago
  The damned Scandinavians get to be best at stuff that matters. :)
• vidarh 13y ago
  In my opinion, it is massively different in tone. I'm Norwegian, and I live in the UK and have spent quite a lot of time in the US. While people in the UK and US will also complain loudly, the character is entirely different in that outside of Scandinavia the self-criticism is more "if we don't fix this things will go to hell", whereas in Scandinavia a lot of the self-criticism implies we're competing with war-torn third world countries about who gets to be the butthole of the world and are likely to win. The focus of self-criticism in Scandinavia seems to me to be hugely disproportionately focused on describing us as doing horribly compared to everyone else in a way that seems to indicate a huge inferiority complex, where self-criticism other places seems to in general be more internally focused. Of course there are exceptions.
  • ThomPete 13y ago
    I don't understand this. The claim of the article and many others implies that Denmark is near perfect system. That is what we are critiquing, not whether it's better or worse than other places. It's just not as rosy red as it's portrayed and some of the claims in that article are flat out wrong. I can say that both as someone who been an employee and an employer.
  • vacri 13y ago
    Sounds very much like Australia, too. Pick just about any quality-of-life measure, and the top 5 will usually be a smattering of scandinavia and Australia... yet the public perception is we're just terrible, the worst place in the world for -foo-. The funny thing is, referring to the inferiority complex, there's this amorphous mythical country in Europe that doesn't have a name and we can never measure up to - we're just provincials, unlike those cultured people over there, wouldn't life be so much better if... (oh, just don't look at quality of life measures!)
    • mseebach 13y ago
      It's not that we don't have great quality of life - we do. It's that we're not going to keep it for long: the baby boomers (the group currently aged ~58-68) are retiring from high-paying (high tax revenue) jobs with little demand on public services to little or no income and higher demands on public services. There will be decades of lower revenue combined with higher expenses, and we have a history of poor growth.
• pietro 13y ago
  It isn't. National pride is a bug.