The American Dream Isn’t Alive in Denmark
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
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.
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.
The "Teach First" scheme in the UK, similar to Teach for America, is powerful because it is potentially the first time school students in many poorer areas will come across someone who has been to a top flight university. Someone who can tell them "you can successfully apply, you will fit in and you will enjoy it". Education results in the UK aren't correlated with the amount spent on education, they're correlated with parental wealth.
I see your point, but remember that Denmark is an extremely small country. There are literally no high schools that don't have a history of sending people to college. Of cause there are relatively poor part of town in at least some cities, but mostly those cities aren't big enough that only student from one particular neighbourhood is present in a high school. The high schools will always have a mix rich and poor, highly educated parents and parents with little to no education. Areas of Copenhagen might be the only exception, but I don't honestly know.
The schools can of cause advise a student not to apply to college, but in the end they can't stop the student from applying for college.
>The wording make it sound worse than it is.
Absolutely, and it's BS...
As if most people that go into university in the US get "rich".
The Danish "poor" in the sense that the article mentions (e.g. working/middle class people with no university education) make a much nicer living/lifestyle that lots of US university graduates, and with much less debt as well.
In the US going to college is a lot like going all in on a hand of poker. It might turn out really well (good job, pay of debt quick), really poorly (no job, crushing debt, find work that doesn't require and isn't related to your degree) or somewhere in the middle. The better you are at what you do the more likely it is to turn out well. If you're not financially prepared to lose then losing is going to suck. When going college can be the difference between being running a really good HVAC business and sitting in an air conditioned office designing those components, and there's a huge quality of life difference between the two, going all in seems more worth the risk.
When you're in a society where it financially doesn't matter which career path you pick, you're completely free to pursue a career that will make you happy. I'm not forced to "gamble" on college. I'm free to choose to go to college, if that will make me happy. The only limitations are my abilities, and the quotas on certain educations, because we really don't need that many lawyers or people with degrees in "French 19th century painters".
You equating success with money, and that's not really the case when you're ensured, well almost, that what ever you do, you will pay well enough.
Of cause there are poor people in Denmark, of cause there are people who absolutely hate their job, and there a tons of people that would rather have a well paying miserable job, than a fun low paying job. Denmark is not a countries filled with hippies, where everything is perfect and everyone gets their fair share. There's people who have be extremely careful about how they spend their money, if they don't want to live of pasta the last week of every month. BUT their children, if they have the abilities and the desire, have the option, for free (plus 800USD per month to help pay for food, rent and books), to go to college... or become a well paid carpenter.
Reminds me of the time I lived in a "gentifying" neighborhood in Chicago. Half the block was young professionals and the other half unemployed/unemployable people who seemed to have an endless party lifestyle of little to no responsibility. I'd be pulling up from work stressed and beaten up and they'd be partying in their yards everyday. Their properties not too different from mine, but rentals as opposed to condos. They had decent enough cars and lifestyles (always had nice shoes and phones) and from the few I befriended were almost 100% on welfare or had jobs that were adult daycare jobs programs and closer to 75% welfare. Hell, we had a bunch in public housing where city workers came by and mowed their lawns and shoveled their snow for them. It was bizarre. Society treated them like children and, of course, they welcomed it and refused to grow up.
Welfare makes for perverse incentives. This is something liberals have trouble admitting because they don't have a moral position out of it. Cut welfare and going against the welfare state is not something liberals want to do, regardless of real world outcomes. Meanwhile Chicago is seeing real population losses as businesses and those with options move away from the crime (leisure party/drug/gang lifestles leads to serious crime) and high taxes. For the record, my property taxes went up 30% this year and this is just one of the promised tax hikes on the way.
When social safety nets become too cushy, people just opt out of work and causes a great deal of social harm. I wouldn't dismiss it as nothing as it has real consequences. Not the least of it being a more competitive society produces more innovations and raises the quality of life of everyone. All the nordic people I know buy US products and learn English and consume US media and US innovations, including medical, almost constantly.
Nordic "law of Jante"[1] is great from the artist-bohemian "fuck you" lifestyle, but when it comes to economies and innovations its so anti-achievement and anti-exceptional that its closer to something like a Harrison Bergeron-esque dystopia. These are nations with unusually high rates of depression, anti-depressant use, and suicides. Obviously, self-reporting "happiness" is meaningless if everyone is offing themselves or eating four prozacs a day to make it through the work day. Seems to me, that forced equality doesn't really work and will introduce novel problems of its own, often worse than the problems its trying to fix.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante
The ten rules state:
You're not to think you are anything special.
You're not to think you are as good as we are.
You're not to think you are smarter than we are.
You're not to convince yourself that you are better than we are.
You're not to think you know more than we do.
You're not to think you are more important than we are.
You're not to think you are good at anything.
You're not to laugh at us.
You're not to think anyone cares about you.
You're not to think you can teach us anything.Lets compare to USA: Sweden has less suicide and less depression. Norway and Denmark rank higher in HDI. Pretty much all nordics rank better in Gini ratios. Norway has higher GDP and rest of the nordics are not far off. All nordics rank higher in innovation index.
The safety nets aren't doing so bad in my mind.
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.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_wages_by_count...
The recent post A Swede Returns to Silicon Valley from Beijing said it well:
"My first experience of the States and of Silicon Valley was absolutely soul-crushingly disappointing. I landed in San Francisco and felt like I had traveled back in time. Far from the expected glass towers of a technological utopia, what I found was a surprisingly run down city that reminded me of traveling in Eastern Europe. It seemed to be all pot and potholes"
Also, Norway is one of these lucky countries with a lot of oil and not a lot of people :-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report
(Yay Switzerland for giving a little competition to the Nordics)
2. The UN index is really more of a "quality of life" index, with very strange/subjective criteria. For example, if you sort by the "Freedom to make life choices" column, Uzbekistan comes out on top, with Cambodia in third place. NOt buying it.
3. Another view (from a left-leaning newspaper, typically sympathetic to the Nordics)
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/27/scandinavian-m...
For example, over 9% of the residents of the country were not born in a European country.
Regarding the piece from The Guardian, consider this quote: "A spokesman for the Sweden Democrats (currently at an all-time high of close to 10% in the polls) insisted to me that immigrants were "more prone to violence"."
SD is an anti-immigrant party in Sweden. I find it odd that the speaker chose a source which is most likely to give a negative portrayal of immigrants. But I needn't explore that in any depth as the commenters to that piece have done so for me.
FWIW, there was a followup at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/05/scandinavian-m... . The author writes (about the piece you linked to):
> In trying to make myself heard above the clamour of pro-Nordic propaganda in the British (indeed, global) media, and shake a few people out of their decade-long Scandi-trances, I hereby plead guilty to a selective, provocative slant on the region.
Most industries not related to oil in some way is basically at a standstill, because oil exports are driving the NOK and thus making our other exports expensive.
Also, the oil companies can outbid just about anyone else for employees.
The recent oil price drop has been a boon for many companies that was desperate from engineers etc. Now they can take on projects that were on ice because they didn't have the staff and such.
This is not accurate. I've occasionally researched positions in Europe, and while I haven't looked at Denmark specifically, mid/senior-level software developer salaries tend to be around $45,000/year (or even less), which, before taxes, is about half of what's typical here in the Boston area, and a quarter of what's typical in the SF Bay Area.[0] Many European developers emigrate to America; next to no American developers emigrate to Europe.
I don't know what Danish fast food employees and store clerks earn, but I doubt they make more than software developers ($45,000/year is about $22/hour), so they definitely don't make "several times" what their American equivalents do.
Depending on the local job market and cost of living, a typical American entry-level salary for a new employee is about $10 (9 EUR)/hour, while a junior manager or semi-skilled worker would make $15-$25 (13.50-23.50 EUR), and a senior hourly manager or skilled worker would make at least $20 (18 EUR). Unionized and/or government employees make substantially more (especially factoring in benefits), although those positions are a lot harder to come by.
Keep in mind that the tax rates are far lower, possibly even negative depending on credits,[1][2] prices are also much lower, and, contrary to European popular belief, there actually are extensive federal and state social welfare programs for the low-income, including free healthcare.[3]
Now, I wouldn't say that people in those positions are making what I as an upper-middle-class professional consider a "good" living, but it's fairly comparable to other first-world countries. There's a reason the only Americans working in Europe are rich expats, not migrant workers sweeping floors and waiting tables.
Relatively speaking, the main socioeconomic problems in America are not so much that any of the people who have jobs are uniquely poorly-compensated, so much as chronic unemployment, downwards social mobility, the factors that contribute to those,[4] and that middle-class families must now take on a small fortune in real estate and college debt to raise children to the same middle-class standard of living.[5]
[0] The only place I've looked at that's even somewhat competitive salary-wise is Switzerland, the one country in Western Europe that's even more capitalist than America is. Also the only country I've ever visited where (driving 175 km or so) I never saw any visible poverty at all (or anywhere that didn't appear to be both prosperous and growing).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earned_income_tax_credit
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_tax_credit#United_States
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicaid
[4] Globalization/deindustrialization/automation, crime, broken families, drugs, etc.
[5] And it's still more difficult for those lower on the ladder, who can't take on that much debt.
"I don't know what Danish fast food employees and store clerks earn, but I doubt they make more than software developers ($45,000/year is about $22/hour),"
McDonald's in Denmark pays about $20/hour. Quoting http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/28/business/international/liv... :
> ... he earns the equivalent of $20 an hour — the base wage for fast-food workers throughout Denmark and two and a half times what many fast-food workers earn in the United States. ... a study from the University of California, Berkeley found. American fast-food workers earn an average of $8.90 an hour.
You also wrote: "I've occasionally researched positions in Europe, and while I haven't looked at Denmark specifically, mid/senior-level software developer salaries tend to be around $45,000/year (or even less),"
http://www.payscale.com/research/DK/Job=Software_Developer/S... says "A Software Developer [in Denmark] earns an average salary of $66,385 per year. Most people with this job move on to other positions after 20 years in this field."
http://www.daxx.com/article/it-salaries-software-developer-t... says: "Quite predictably, the US and the EU are the areas where software developers earn a lot. The highest paying country is Switzerland, with an average annual software developer salary reaching $104,200. Switzerland is followed by Norway with programmer’s wages of $81,400 per year, the United States with $76,000, Denmark with $71,500, and Israel with an average of $70,700 per year."
P.S. You also wrote "the only Americans working in Europe are rich expats". Just how many Americans do you know in Europe? Because the ones I know (I am a US citizen who lives in Sweden) are not rich. (FWIW, I prefer the term "immigrant", not "expat.")
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.
I also know some people who just got bored of their worker or office job and went to evening school to get their Abitur later. Again this requires being diligent and hardworking, but it is quite possible.
So I don't see the problem in the three tracks per se. Instead it is a fact that if you want to move up (or do academic studies) you better love to work very hard. And this is a behaviour that is drilled much more into the minds of children of academic families than children of working-class families.
The basic question is, where did your father get his wish to become an academic from? How did he manage to maintain the belief in himself despite having no academic role models?
"diligence and hard work" is just scratching the explanatory surface.
I doubt whether he even explicitly had the wish to become an academic when he was in school. I know what kind of person my grandfather was (very obsessed on learning; also for himself) and this would answer the question. So let's imagine that my grandfather was a quite different kind of person. But in this case because he was so hardworkind (by his nurture) and sufficiently good in school about any teacher would have persuaded my grandfather into letting my father study because anything else would have been a waste.
Thus he would have given no other option. If not from my grandfather then from his teachers. And because of the latter I still stand by the point that my father made: He has yet to see a hardworking child from a working-class family that will not get a recommendation letter for Gymnasium (or a hardworking child from a working-class family that is very good in school for which the teachers would not try very hard to convince the parents to let them study).
> How did he manage to maintain the belief in himself despite having no academic role models?
I can't even imagine why the US-Americans are so obsessed on role models (in Germany this is a word that hardly anyone uses). I had no role model: I studied mathematics and computer science and I know no person in the extended family of which I claim that he or she has an above average talent in empirical or structural sciences, is working in this area or has studied something in this direction. I studied it since I was very good in mathematics and computer science and loved these areas.
My father and my sister also had no role model (and particularly for my sister I'm very sure about it).
The experience of your father came from your grandfather's hardworking ethos. What would have happened if your grandfather would not have instilled this in your father? What would have happened if your father would not have instilled this in you? Anyone's parent influences their kid's educational pathway in myriads of ways: are there books at home? What kinds of books? Is it mostly the TV that acts as a nanny? Are there computers, or are they computer-illiterate? Do your parents make you believe that you can choose your own path, or are they instilling you with the belief that what they have is good enough for you as well?
You have experienced examples of the first kind: a family that creates a learning environment, with the experience of your father that social strata are permeable. I have a different experience which made it much harder for me.
Maybe role model is the wrong word - instead ask yourself what kind of mental, imaginative boundaries have been nurtured by your family in you (few!) and what kind of mental boundaries have been nurtured in others, that are living the same lives as their parents despite maybe being pretty smart?
That you pose this question rather shows that you don't understand my argument: I wanted to document that it is not that important from what class you come, but rather that hardworking, intelligent children from any class can move up.
In other words: In any class it is possible to live an acceptable life (#), thus many parents from non-academic class don't consider it as so much necessary for their child to move up in society (and (#) is actually quite good news!) in opposite to the strict necessity that my fatherly grandfather saw for his children to move up in society.
Then there's the third track of the purely private schools.
The problem I have with this is: one of these is not like the others. The mental ability needed to be a good mechanic is much greater, I think, than what you need to be a factory worker or a hairdresser. This is especially true with modern cars, which are really technological marvels and highly complex systems. There's a reason they're calling these people "automotive technicians" now instead of just "mechanics". Here in the US, you generally need to go to a rather expensive trade school to learn to be a certified mechanic, and then you have to get the certification (from ASE usually). Most regular office workers would not be able to handle it, I think. Even a lot of scientists and engineers seem to have trouble understanding details of how cars work. It's certainly a more hands-on and dirtier job than the office worker and academic roles, but it's not something you can do if you're a complete idiot, whereas any moron can be trained for a simple factory job, or to wash peoples' hair, or flip burgers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Exactly this. People born to wealthy families have literally won the socioeconomic lottery without trying.
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.
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.
Especially when there are other children suffering the effects of poverty in childhood that will give them lifelong disadvantages.
(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)
There's a difference between leaving a modest family house/farm to your kids versus someone inheriting a business empire worth millions.
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.
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.
> Why would wealthy people have an obligation to help poor people?
Well, this is a whole question of what a "society" is and the nature of mutual obligation towards both other members of our society and other humans in general. If one day I should find you collapsed in the street, remind me that we don't have any obligations towards each other.
There's no need to make the Harrison Bergeron argument
It all comes down to: > Why would wealthy people have an obligation to help poor people?
It also comes down to:
> Why would beautiful people have an obligation to help ugly people?
Nobody is making the argument that beautiful people should mutilate themselves to make ugly people look better in comparison, right? But, why not? Beauty, wealth, fame, intelligence etc. are all examples of privilege. So, why focus on money? Why does it all come down to money?
Well, this is a whole question of what a "society" is and the nature of mutual obligation towards both other members of our society and other humans in general.
If one day I should find you collapsed in the street, remind me that we don't have any obligations towards each other.
Even if it were true, so what? If someone needs money to live, how does that imply that money should be taken from those who have it and be given to those who don't?
You might need positive attention to feel good about yourself (since you're ugly). Does that mean that the attention beautiful people receive should be directed towards ugly people (by mutilating beautiful people)?
In that case, shouldn't inheritance be taxed as income?
I don't understand people who have problems with other people giving their money to those they love
The problem I have is that some people receive large fortunes effectively tax-free that they have done literally nothing to deserve. I have no objections to people donating their wealth to whomever they choose, just as long as those who receive are taxed like everyone else.
But it was taxed as income already. I literally don't see any reason to tax it as such again. And there's plenty of people to get money they don't "deserve" - I would argue a lot of us software programmers don't deserve to be paid what we get paid and yet, we are. If I want to leave my child money that I earned and paid tax on - who are you to say if my child deserved that money or not?
I didn't express myself clearly when I talked about deserving money. What I meant was that you don't pick your parents. Weather you are born to wealthy or poor parents has enormous impact on your opportunities in life. You may not agree, but I believe society should strive to ensure that we all have the same opportunities in life. Only when the playing field is level, can one person's success in life really be labeled deserved.
Because inherited wealth creates idle aristocrats, who traditionally have contributed little to society, and pretty much all societal progress since the Middle Ages has been how to limit the power and wealth of aristocrats. You seem to be big on providing motivation for people to work. Well, not having an inheritance is an excellent one.
>>They didn't inherit enough money to not work?
And yet.....they still don't work?
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.
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."
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.
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/there...
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.
https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/ourwor...