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Comment by cskau | Hacker News Reader

> Most people don't work.

Now that's just absurdly wrong. Come on, you can do better than that.

Denmark have an unemployment rate of 6% which is not good, but certainly better than many European countries - and better than the US, as far as I can tell. Furthermore, Denmark have a comparatively large workforce because it has relatively few stay at home parents (which doesn't count in employment numbers).

The "most people don't work" statement may be true if you count every living person, including newborn babies, kids, students, retired people, disabled and so on.

Click 2013. In the red municipalities less than 50% are employed. http://www.dr.dk/Nyheder/Indland/2013/01/26/103754.htm

Technically correct, but also very misleading in a discussion concerning sustainability of the welfare system. Obviously a working couple with three kids is not a problem in the same way that e.g. three unemployed people per two working.

Are they seriously counting children as unemployed? It would make sense to count students, since studying is often an alternative when young people find themselves out of work.

Well, the link in the parent is to a TV-channel new item, so it is not intended as serious statistics. It is probably intended to highlight a legitimate problem ("baby boom"-generation getting retired and life expectancy increasing, leading to a smaller part of the population working), but lumping kids together with unemployed and retired is just uninformative.

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