Denmark Country Quotes

Farewell, farewell," said the swallow, with a heavy heart, as he left the warm countries, to fly back into Denmark. There he had a nest over the window of a house in which dwelt the writer of fairy tales. The swallow sang "Tweet, tweet," and from his song came the whole story.

...and I want you all to remember-that you must not dream yourselves back to the times before the war, but the dream for you all, young and old, must be to create an ideal of human decency, and not a narrow-minded and prejudiced one. That is the great gift our country hungers for, something every little peasant boy can look forward to, and with pleasure feel he is a part of-something he can work and fight for." Surely that gift-the gift of a world of human decency-is the one that all countries hunger for still. I hope that this story of Denmark, and its people, will remind us all that such a world is possible.

Most people living in rich, stable developed countries have no idea how Denmark itself got to be Denmark—something that is true for many Danes as well. The struggle to create modern political institutions was so long and so painful that people living in industrialized countries now suffer from a historical amnesia regarding how their societies came to that point in the first place.

It’s no wonder Danes are so happy. They have an obscenely good quality of life. Yes, it’s expensive here. But it’s Denmark – it’s worth it. I don’t mind paying more for a coffee here because I know that it means the person serving me doesn’t a) hate me or b) have a crappy life. Everyone is paid a decent wage, everyone is looked after, and everyone pays their taxes, just as I pay mine. And if we all have marginally less money to buy more stuff that we don’t really need anyway as a result, well I’m starting to think it’s a deal worth making.

There is not truly bad weather, just bad clothes.

To emphasize how truly backward our society is...let's finish with a little quiz. Let's do it like Jeopardy. In 1990, this government required companies to give a new mother a year's leave at 90% pay. Answer: What was Sweden? This country provided nurseries for most children over eighteen months. Answer: What was Sweden? Nearly half of the children under three in this country were in publicly financed nurseries, and nearly 95% of children three to six were (and are). Answer: What is Denmark? In this country, 95% of children aged three to five are in preschool. Answer: What is France? This country provides care for one quarter of children under three in wholly or partially subsidized nurseries. Answer: What is France? In 1984, this country gave workers twelve weeks of maternity leave with pay. Answer: What is Brazil? (Yes, Brazil!) This country mandated eight weeks of maternity leave WITH PAY. Answer: What is Kenya? (You heard us, Kenya!) This country provided none of these things; instead, to help mothers and small children, its magazines featured profiles of rich celebrity moms who could show women how to do it all. Answer: What was the United States?

You’re more likely to be able to get on in life, get educated, and get a good job, regardless of who your parents are and what they do in Denmark than anywhere else. It turns out that it’s easier to live ‘The American Dream’ here than it’s ever likely to be in the US.

secular countries such as Denmark and the Czech Republic aren’t more violent than devout countries such as Iran and Pakistan.

think, for example, has a higher suicide rate: countries whose citizens declare themselves to be very happy, such as Switzerland, Denmark, Iceland, the Netherlands, and Canada? or countries like Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain, whose citizens describe themselves as not very happy at all? Answer: the so-called happy countries. It’s the same phenomenon as in the Military Police and the Air Corps. If you are depressed in a place where most people are pretty unhappy, you compare yourself to those around you and you don’t feel all that bad. But can you imagine how difficult it must be to be depressed in a country where everyone else has a big smile on their face?2 Caroline Sacks’s decision to evaluate herself, then, by looking around her organic chemistry classroom was not some strange and irrational behavior. It is what human beings do. We compare ourselves to those in the same situation as ourselves, which means that students in an elite school—except, perhaps,

learn better skills; and the next year, because they are in the higher groups, they do even better; and the next year, the same thing happens, and they do even better again. The only country we don’t see this going on is Denmark. They have a national policy where they have no ability grouping until the age of

Unlike in the US and the UK, where already stressed out and underpaid women were being told to ‘lean in’ and do more, it looked like you could pretty much lean any way you fancied in Denmark and still do OK. Oh, and women weren’t handed sticks to beat themselves with if they weren’t ‘having it all’. This, I decided, was refreshing.

But one of the main reasons why Denmark does so well in international happiness surveys is the welfare state, as it reduces uncertainty, worries and stress in the population. You can say that Denmark is the happiest country in the world or you can say that Denmark is the least unhappy country in the world. The welfare state is really good (not perfect, but good) at reducing extreme unhappiness. Universal and free health care, free university education and relatively generous unemployment benefits go a long way towards reducing unhappiness.

. . and I want you all to remember—that you must not dream yourselves back to the times before the war, but the dream for you all, young and old, must be to create an ideal of human decency, and not a narrow-minded and prejudiced one. That is the great gift our country hungers for, something every little peasant boy can look forward to, and with pleasure feel he is a part of—something he can work and fight for.   Surely that gift—the gift of a world of human decency—is the one that all countries hunger for still. I hope that this story of Denmark, and its people, will remind us all that such a world is possible.

In the country inns of a small corner of northern Germany, in the spur of land connecting Schleswig-Holstein to Denmark, you can sometimes hear people talking in what sounds eerily like a lost dialect of English. Occasional snatches of it even make sense, as when they say that the “veather ist cold” or inquire of the time by asking, “What ist de clock?” According to Professor Hubertus Menke, head of the German Department at Kiel University, the language is “very close to the way people spoke in Britain more than 1,000 years ago.” [Quoted in The Independent, July 6, 1987.] This shouldn’t entirely surprise us. This area of Germany, called Angeln, was once the seat of the Angles, one of the Germanic tribes that 1,500 years ago crossed the North Sea to Britain, where they displaced the native Celts and gave the world what would one day become its most prominent language.

Perhaps it is not the belief of God that makes us happier but belief in something, anything. How else to explain the fact that the happiest countries in the world--Denmark, Iceland, Switzerland, the Netherlands--are hardly religious at all?

Hyggelige as the Danes may be, there is one serious drawback to being crazy about candles: the soot. Studies show that lighting just one candle fills the air with more microparticles than traffic in a busy street. A study undertaken by the Danish Building Research Institute showed that candles shed more particles indoors than either cigarettes or cooking. Despite Denmark being a highly regulated country, we have yet to see warning labels on candles. Nobody messes with the hygge fanatics.

His mother walks in and greets us. She’s traded her green gloves for a T-shirt that says Denmark. Lucio tells her she’s picked the wrong country. His mother explains that she’s trying out a system invented by Dag that involves announcing one’s mood with T-shirts. Denmark is, logically, bad news.

A devastating, a traumatic defeat, [to Germany] and the Danes might well have fallen into a Treaty of Versailles mentality. Mysteriously, they did not. Instead they redirected their aims and will; they did turn inward. They changed their agriculture from grain to dairy products, they set up cooperatives, gave their attention to social and economic advancement, chose a neutral policy, developed an altogether new kind of adult schooling. It was a chain reaction, but the links gradually forged themselves into a virtuous circuit. It has turned out well. [from "Portrait Sketch of a Country: Denmark 1962"]

The distinctive features of the world's civilisations are not simply and solely the giraffe and the city of Rome, as the children may perhaps have been led to imagine on the first evening, but also the elephant and the country of Denmark, beside many other things. Yes, everyday brought its new animal and its new country, its new kings and its new gods, its quota of those tough little figures which seem to have no significance, but are nevertheless endowed with a life and a value of their own, and may be added together or subtracted from one another at will. And finally poetry, which is grater than any country ; poetry with its bright palaces.

The Danes are so full of joie de vivre that they practically sweat it. In a corner of Europe where the inhabitants have the most blunted concept of pleasure (in Norway, three people and a bottle of beer is a party; in Sweden the national sport is suicide), the Danes’ relaxed attitude to life is not so much refreshing as astonishing. Do you know how long World War II lasted for Denmark? It was over in a day – actually less than a day. Hitler’s tanks crossed the border under cover of darkness and had taken control of the country by dawn. As a politician of the time remarked, ‘We were captured by telegram.’ By evening they were all back in the bars and restaurants.

By the time the war ended, Iceland was a changed country. Not least among the changes, in 1944 it had negotiated full independence from Denmark. Now it was free to negotiate its own relations with the rest of the world. Because of cod, it had moved in one generation from a fifteenth-century colonial society to a modern postwar nation.

War and the threat of war begin when all is not well at home. Countries that solve their own problems are no problem to others. How did it all come about; how did the Danes get that way? Why are they what they are? Was the country particularly favored? Did they try to keep the peace in the past? Did they practice religious tolerance? The answers are no. Is it then all hit or miss? As People holding a territory poor rather than rich, with a history as long, mixed, and disturbed as the next country's–are these facts that must be fed into the computer, and what might the computer's answer be? Portugal? Switzerland? Prussia? – "Portrait Sketch of a Country" (Denmark 1962)

Denmark recently became the first country to pay worker compensation to women who had developed breast cancer after years of night-shift work in government-sponsored jobs, such as nurses and air cabin crew. Other governments—Britain, for example—have so far resisted similar legal claims, refusing payout compensation despite the science.

Islam will aim to establish itself as the majority in France, Germany, Austria, Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Any country, in which they successfully establish themselves will serve as their primary base for the invasion of neighbouring countries (such as Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Denmark, Hungary and the Mediterranean)

Children started to be encouraged to think and go against authority if they didn’t agree with what they were being told – this became a priority after the German occupation of Denmark and was something Danes were very conscious of. We wanted citizens who were democratic and could have their own ideas, so self-development is a big part of learning in Denmark.

The ones with the most generous social provisions are the northern European countries: Germany, Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Norway. These are export-oriented, surplus economies with sound fiscal balances and strong social safety nets. The claim that Europe’s fiscal mess is the result of overly generous social welfare systems simply cannot be substantiated.

Back in Afghanistan, when snipers from the other countries’ Special Operations teams were asking Osman and me over to debrief them after Zhawar Kili, I’d befriended a very sharp Danish sniper named Henning, from the Danish Frogman Corps. Now Henning was running the sniper training in Denmark, and he flew over to the States, went through our advanced courses, then took what he’d learned and implemented it in Denmark.

Architecture without pain, art looked at in undiluted pleasure, enjoyment without anxiety, compunction, heartache: there is no beggar woman in the church door, no ragged child or sore animal in the square. The water is safe and the wallet is inside the pocket. There will be no missed plane connection. We are in a country where the curable ills are taken care of. We are in a country where the mechanics of living from transport to domestic heating (alack, poor Britain!) function imaginatively and well; where it goes without saying that the sick are looked after and secure and the young well educated and well trained; where ingenuity is used to heal delinquents and to mitigate at least the physical dependence of old age; where there is work for all and some individual seizure, and men and women have not been entirely alienated yet from their natural environment; where there is care for freedom and where the country as a whole has rounded the drive to power and prestige beyond its borders and where the will to peace is not eroded by doctrine, national self-love, and unmanageable fears; where people are kindly, honest, helpful, sane, reliable, resourceful, and cool-headed; where stranger–shyly–smiles to stranger. "Portrait Sketch of a Country: Denmark 1962

The 10 countries with the most people (over 100 million each) are, in descending order of population, China, India, the U.S., Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Russia, Japan, Bangladesh, and Nigeria. The 10 countries with the highest affluence (per-capita real GDP) are, in descending order, Luxembourg, Norway, the U.S., Switzerland, Denmark, Iceland, Austria, Canada, Ireland, and the Netherlands. The only country on both lists is the U.S.

Bjørnskov, an expert in the fields of social trust, subjective well-being, and life satisfaction, told me about some other, highly revealing experiments that had been carried out in the field. “Back in the nineties there was an experiment done [in 1996, by Reader’s Digest] where wallets were left around in various cities and they counted how many were returned. And the cool thing is that in the places where more people say they can trust others, the more wallets were returned. I think they did an experiment with about forty wallets and the only two countries where all forty were returned were Norway and Denmark. I thought it was too good to be true, but TV2 [a Danish TV channel] did the same experiment again four years ago in Copenhagen Central Station, and they literally could not even leave the wallets—people would instantly pick them up and come running after them, so they had to give up!

The proportion of the Danish population considered to be below the poverty line has almost doubled, from 4 percent to 7.5 percent, over the last ten years. A recent report by think tank Cevea revealed that, in Denmark, the wealthiest 1 percent owns almost a third of the country’s combined wealth: that’s still below the OECD average, but hardly what you would call “equality.” The elite are increasingly congregating in residential enclaves, almost all of them in and around Copenhagen.

Other countries must be laughing their heads off at us. Our “family reunification” policies mean that being related to a recent immigrant from Pakistan trumps being a surgeon from Denmark. That’s how we got gems like the “Octomom,” the unemployed single mother on welfare who had fourteen children in the United States via in vitro fertilization; Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who bombed the Boston Marathon, killing three and injuring hundreds, a few years after slitting the throats of three American Jews; and all those “homegrown” terrorists flying from Minnesota to fight with ISIS. Family reunification isn’t about admitting the spouses and minor children of immigrants we’re dying to get. We’re bringing in grandparents, second cousins, and brothers-in-law of Afghan pushcart operators—who then bring in their grandparents, second cousins, and brothers-in-law until we have entire tribes of people, illiterate in their own language, never mind ours, collecting welfare in America. We wouldn’t want our immigrants to be illiterate, unskilled, and lonesome.

In the country inns of a small corner of northern Germany, in the spur of land connecting Schleswig-Holstein to Denmark, you can sometimes hear people talking in what sounds eerily like a lost dialect of English. Occasional snatches of it even make sense, as when they say that the “veather ist cold” or inquire of the time by asking, “What ist de clock?” According to Professor Hubertus Menke, head of the German Department at Kiel University, the language is “very close to the way people spoke in Britain more than 1,000 years ago.

But one of the main reasons why Denmark does so well in international happiness surveys is the welfare state, as it reduces uncertainty, worries, and stress in the population. You can say that Denmark is the happiest country in the world or you can say that Denmark is the least unhappy country in the world. The welfare state is really good (not perfect, but good) at reducing extreme unhappiness. Universal and free health care, free university education, and relatively generous unemployment benefits go a long way toward reducing unhappiness

Their greatly reduced circumstances bound the Danes together more tightly as a tribe than any of the other Nordic countries. As historian T. K. Derry writes (about the accession of Norway to Sweden), “The Danish king and people resigned themselves to the loss … as a common misfortune which drew them together in a desire to avoid all further changes.” The territorial losses, sundry beatings, and myriad humiliations forced the Danes to turn their gaze inward, instilling in them not only a fear of change and of external forces that abides to this day, but also a remarkable self-sufficiency and an appreciation of what little they had left. No longer the great European power it had once been, Denmark withdrew, mustered what few resources remained within its much-reduced boundaries, and decided never again to have ambitions in that direction. What followed was a process of what you could call “positive parochialization”; the Danes adopted a “glass half full” outlook, largely because their glass was now half full, and it is an outlook that, I would argue, has paved the way for the much trumpeted success of their society to this day.

There is little doubt, Denmark is becoming a two-tier country. More and more Danes who can afford it are turning to private health care—850,000 at the latest count—and poll after poll shows that, though they have the largest per capita public sector in the world, the Danes’ satisfaction levels with their welfare state are in rapid decline. It is probably true that they have especially high expectations given the amount of money they contribute to it, but in one survey by management consultants Accenture only 22 percent of Danes thought their public sector did a good job.

That day in Chartres they had passed through town and watched women kneeling at the edge of the water, pounding clothes against a flat, wooden board. Yves had watched them for a long time. They had wandered up and down the old crooked streets, in the hot sun; Eric remembered a lizard darting across a wall; and everywhere the cathedral pursued them. It is impossible to be in that town and not be in the shadow of those great towers; impossible to find oneself on those plains and not be troubled by that cruel and elegant, dogmatic and pagan presence. The town was full of tourists, with their cameras, their three-quarter coats, bright flowered dresses and shirts, their children, college insignia, Panama hats, sharp, nasal cries, and automobiles crawling like monstrous gleaming bugs over the laming, cobblestoned streets. Tourist buses, from Holland, from Denmark, from Germany, stood in the square before the cathedral. Tow-haired boys and girls, earnest, carrying knapsacks, wearing khaki-colored shorts, with heavy buttocks and thighs, wandered dully through the town. American soldiers, some in uniform, some in civilian clothes, leaned over bridges, entered bistros in strident, uneasy, smiling packs, circled displays of colored post cards, and picked up meretricious mementos, of a sacred character. All of the beauty of the town, all the energy of the plains, and all the power and dignity of the people seemed to have been sucked out of them by the cathedral. It was as though the cathedral demanded, and received, a perpetual, living sacrifice. It towered over the town, more like an affliction than a blessing, and made everything seem, by comparison with itself, wretched and makeshift indeed. The houses in which the people lived did not suggest shelter, or safety. The great shadow which lay over them revealed them as mere doomed bits of wood and mineral, set down in the path of a hurricane which, presently, would blow them into eternity. And this shadow lay heavy on the people, too. They seemed stunted and misshapen; the only color in their faces suggested too much bad wine and too little sun; even the children seemed to have been hatched in a cellar. It was a town like some towns in the American South, frozen in its history as Lot's wife was trapped in salt, and doomed, therefore, as its history, that overwhelming, omnipresent gift of God, could not be questioned, to be the property of the gray, unquestioning mediocre.

If observing Trump’s schoolboy act in relationship to North Korea felt like watching a disaster movie, then witnessing his Greenland bid and subsequent tantrum was more like seeing a guest at a fancy dinner party blow his nose in an embroidered napkin and proceed to use a silver fork to scratch his foot under the table. But not only did most journalists cover the debacle with restraint—many also provided historical and political context. Explanations of the strategic and economic importance of the Arctic proliferated; many media outlets noted that President Harry S Truman had also wanted to buy Greenland. Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum, a consistent Trump critic, tried the opposite approach and wrote a piece explaining why the United States needs a tiny country like Denmark to be its ally. The media were doing what media should do—providing context, organizing relevant information, creating narrative—and this too had a normalizing effect, simply by helping media consumers to absorb the unabsorbable. It was as though the other dinner guests had carried on with their polite conversation and even handed the disruptive, deranged visitor a clean fork so that he wouldn’t have to eat dessert with the utensil he had stuck in his shoe.

No,’ he says very firmly. ‘It doesn’t matter how good a drummer, singer, or trombone-mimer you are, bragging about anything is bad form. They have a mantra in the business – “Lego over ego” – and people follow it.’ He tells me that he and his fellow non-Danes have been guided towards the writings of a 1930s Danish-Norwegian author, Aksel Sandemose, for a better understanding of how best to ‘integrate’ into the workplace in Denmark. Sandemose outlines ten rules for living Danishly (otherwise known as ‘Jante’s Law’) in his novel, A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks. These, as far as Google Translate and I can make out, are: 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 us You’re not to convince yourself that you are better than us You’re not to think you know more than us You’re not to think you are more important than us 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 ‘Crikey, you’re not to do much round here, are you?’ ‘Oh, and there’s another, unspoken one.’ ‘Yes?’ ‘“Don’t put up with presenteeism”. If anyone plays the martyr card, staying late or working too much, they’re more likely to get a leaflet about efficiency or time management dropped on their desk than any sympathy.

The national curriculum for the Swedish preschool is twenty pages long and goes on at length about things like fostering respect for one another, human rights, and democratic values, as well as a lifelong desire to learn. The document's word choices are a pretty good clue to what Swedish society wants and expects from toddlers and preschoolers. The curriculum features the word "play" thirteen times, "language" twelve times, "nature" six times, and "math" five times. But there is not a single mention of "literacy" or "writing." Instead, two of the most frequently used words are "learning" (with forty-eight appearances) and "development" (forty-seven). The other Scandinavian countries have similar early childhood education traditions. In Finland, formal teaching of reading doesn't start until the child begins first grade, at age seven, and in the Finnish equivalent of kindergarten, which children enroll in the year they turn six, teachers will only teach reading if a child is showing an interest in it. Despite this lack of emphasis on early literacy, Finland is considered the most literate country in the world, with Norway coming in second, and Iceland, Denmark, and Sweden rounding out the top five, according to a 2016 study by Central Connecticut State University. John Miller, who conducted the study, noted that the five Nordic countries scored so well because "their monolithic culture values reading.

Einstein wrote to Bohr, using his real name, in care of Denmark’s embassy in Washington, and somehow the letter got to him. In it Einstein described his worrisome talk with Stern about the dearth of thinking about how to control atomic weapons in the future. “The politicians do not appreciate the possibilities and consequently do not know the extent of the menace,” Einstein wrote. Once again, he made his argument that it would take an empowered world government to prevent an arms race once the age of atomic weaponry arrived. “Scientists who know how to get a hearing with political leaders,” Einstein urged, “should bring pressure on the political leaders in their countries in order to bring about an internationalization of military power.”31 Thus

The blitzkrieg is one of the best-known examples of a “military technical revolution”—and one of the most misunderstood by the general public. It is commonly assumed, based on the ease with which German armies overran Poland, Norway, Denmark, the Low Countries, and France, that they possessed a big technological and numerical edge over their adversaries. Nothing could be further from the truth; Hitler actually fielded fewer tanks and aircraft than the British and French, and the quality of the Allied weapons was in many cases higher than the Germans’. The German edge lay in their superior ability to coordinate their forces, and in their high quality of leadership, training, and morale. They figured out how to make the best use of the technology of the day; the Allies did not.

We teach children to think and decide for themselves, not just pass exams,’ she says first off. ‘Education here is about developing the social and cognitive competencies of a child and experience-based learning. We encourage them to be critical towards the system.’ She tells me that education and democracy have been tied together in Denmark since the Second World War: ‘Children started to be encouraged to think and go against authority if they didn’t agree with what they were being told – this became a priority after the German occupation of Denmark and was something Danes were very conscious of. We wanted citizens who were democratic and could have their own ideas, so self-development is a big part of learning in Denmark.’ ‘So Hitler drove the Danes to teach their schoolkids to question authority?’ ‘Pretty much.

WILLIAM H. JOHNSON —a letter home, circa 1933   Forgive this letter covered in paint. There are no rags around me. I cannot tell you where I am, but where I ain’t.     I am not where the color of my skin taints Everything. Remember the way folks looked at me When I walked through Florence covered in paint?     There, I was less than nothing. I took a train To Harlem; a ship to Denmark to be free. I can only tell you that here, I ain’t     Who I used to be. I am a Negro who has lain With a white woman in a foreign country. Momma, forgive this letter covered in paint.     I ain’t coming back. Here, no one complains When Holcha & I kiss in the street. Color doesn’t tells us what we are & what we ain’t     Never going to be. I have left my name On the walls of a dozen museums & galleries. I have covered my face in paint. I cannot tell you who I am, but who I ain’t.

Many irreligious societies like Canada, Denmark, and New Zealand are among the nicest places to live in the history of our kind (with high levels of every measurable good thing in life), while many of the world’s most religious societies are hellholes.87 American exceptionalism is instructive: the United States is more religious than its Western peers but underperforms them in happiness and well-being, with higher rates of homicide, incarceration, abortion, sexually transmitted disease, child mortality, obesity, educational mediocrity, and premature death.88 The same holds true among the fifty states: the more religious the state, the more dysfunctional its citizens’ lives.89 Cause and effect probably run in many directions. But it’s plausible that in democratic countries, secularism leads to humanism, turning people away from prayer, doctrine, and ecclesiastical authority and toward practical policies that make them and their fellows better off.

To observe the kingdom of Scotland in 1513 in terms of the strength of the Crown, its relations with its magnates, the quality and administration of its justice, its economy, foreign relations, culture and religious life, is to see a community at some remove from the leaderless country inherited by James I in 1424; yet it is also to see a country still strongly tied to its ancient traditions, customs and ethnic divisions which it either could not, or would not, abandon. By 1513 the Crown was strong, popular, its position in society unassailable. It had both sought and obtained the co-operation of its nobility who were themselves closely bound together by bonds of alliance, and whose status in society was recognised by the strength and closeness its kin groups. It had introduced some useful, constructive statutes and had strengthened its legal procedures. It had sought to inform its legal officers of the body of the law. New and more efficient methods of land registration and of royal revenue collection had been the direct result of the reorganisation of the Chancery, the Exchequer, and of the Secretariat of the Privy Seal. Its economy was buoyant enough to enable a protected merchant class to trade modestly with the Baltic states through Denmark, with Southern Europe through its Staple in Flanders, with England and France. Through its many embassies abroad it pursued, as far as possible, constructive peace treaties with the major European powers.

with the exception of England, every other industrialized democracy has higher levels of income equality than the United States. Data from the OECD shows one consistent, general principle: The higher the taxes in a given country, the less inequality. This makes obvious and intuitive sense. Taxation is the primary method for redistribution, and as a general rule, the more taxation, the more redistribution; the more redistribution, the more equality. The United States collects a far smaller share of the national income in taxes than nearly every other industrialized democracy, and in recent years that rate has been dropping. Total tax revenue as percentage of GDP in the United States is at 24.8 percent, down from 29.5 percent in 2000. You can compare that to Denmark, which has the highest level of tax revenue as a percentage of GDP (48.2 percent) and the most equality out of any OECD country.15 Over the last thirty years or so we’ve seen rising inequality in pre-tax income, which means that before the government even starts its taxing, spending, and redistribution, there has been a profound and accelerating gap between high income earners and everyone else. The rich are earning more, while the non-rich’s earnings stagnate or decline. But these pre-tax earnings are run through the redistributive mechanisms of the state. And during the same time that pre-tax inequality has been growing, our tax system has grown less redistributive, further amplifying inequality rather than mitigating it. This

One of the few entry points to the Baltic Sea, the Kattegat passage is a busy and treacherous waterway. The entire region is a maze of fractured islands, shallow waters and tricky cur-rents which test the skills of all mariners. A vital sea route, the strait is used by large container ships, oil tankers and cruise ships alike and provides a crucial link between the Baltic coun-tries and Europe and the rest of the world. Navigating is difficult even in calm weather and clear visibility is a rare occurrence in these higher latitudes. During severe winters, it’s not uncommon for sections of the Baltic Sea to freeze, with ice occasionally drifting out of the straits, carried by the surface currents. The ship I was commandeering was on a back-and-forth ‘pendulum’ run, stopping at the ports of St Petersburg (Russia), Kotka (Finland), Gdańsk (Poland), Aarhus (Denmark) and Klaipėda (Lithuania) in the Baltic Sea, and Bremerhaven (Ger-many) and Rotterdam (Netherlands) in the North Sea. On this particular trip, the weather gods were in a benevolent mood and we were transiting under a faultless blue sky in one of the most picturesque regions of the world. The strait got narrower as we sailed closer to Zealand (Sjælland), the largest of the off-lying Danish islands. Up ahead, as we zigzagged through the laby-rinth of islands, the tall and majestic Great Belt Bridge sprang into view. The pylons lift the suspension bridge some sixty-five metres above sea level allowing it to accommodate the largest of the ocean cruise liners that frequently pass under its domi-nating expanse.

Then it was time for dessert: another plate, full of big, white larvas from the palm nut tree. And I do mean big—each one was longer and thicker than my thumb, and had been lightly fried in its own fat. But I wondered, had they been too lightly fried? Because they seemed to be moving. The villagers were proud to offer us such a delicious treat. Remember, I am a sword swallower. I should be able to push anything down my throat. And I am not usually a fussy eater: I had even once eaten porridge made from mosquitos. But no. This, I couldn’t do. The heads of the larvas looked like little brown nuts and their thick bodies like transparent wrinkled marshmallows, through which I could see their intestines. The villagers gestured that I should bite them in two and suck out the insides. If I tried I would puke the rat back up. I did not want to offend. Suddenly, an idea. I smiled softly and said regretfully, “You know what, I am sorry, but I can’t eat larvas.” Thorkild turned to me, surprised. He already had a couple of larvas hanging out of the corners of his mouth. He really loved those larvas. He had previously worked as a missionary in Congo, where they had been the highlight of every week for one whole year. “You see, we don’t eat larvas,” I said, trying to look convincing. The villagers looked at Thorkild. “But he eats them?” they asked. Thorkild stared at me. “Ah,” I said. “You see, he comes from a different tribe. I come from Sweden, he comes from Denmark. In Denmark, they love eating larvas. But in Sweden it’s against our culture.” The village teacher went and got out the world map and I pointed out the water separating our two countries. “On this side of the water they eat larvas,” I said, “and on this side we don’t.” It’s actually one of the most blatant lies I have ever told, but it worked. The villagers were happy to share my dessert between them. Everyone, everywhere knows that people from different tribes have different customs.

They killed everyone in the camps. The whole world was dying there. Not only Jews. Even a black woman. Not gypsy. Not African. American like you, Mrs. Clara. They said she was a dancer and could play any instrument. Said she could line up shoes from many countries and hop from one pair to the next, performing the dances of the world. They said the Queen of Denmark honored her with a gold trumpet. But she was there, in hell with the rest of us. A woman like you. Many years ago. A lifetime ago. Young then as you would have been. And beautiful. As I believe you must have been, Mrs. Clara. Yes. Before America entered the war. Already camps had begun devouring people. All kinds of people. Yet she was rare. Only woman like her I saw until I came here, to this country, this city. And she saved my life. Poor thing. I was just a boy. Thirteen years old. The guards were beating me. I did not know why. Why? They didn't need a why. They just beat. And sometimes the beating ended in death because there was no reason to stop, just as there was no reason to begin. A boy. But I'd seen it many times. In the camp long enough to forget why I was alive, why anyone would want to live for long. They were hurting me, beating the life out of me but I was not surprised, expected no explanation. I remember curling up as I had seen a dog once cowering from the blows of a rolled newspaper. In the old country lifetimes ago. A boy in my village staring at a dog curled and rolling on its back in the dust outside a baker's shop and our baker in his white apron and tall white hat striking this mutt again and again. I didn't know what mischief this dog had done. I didn't understand why the fat man with flour on his apron was whipping it unmercifully. I simply saw it and hated the man, felt sorry for the animal, but already the child in me understood it could be no other way so I rolled and curled myself against the blows as I'd remembered the spotted dog in the dusty village street because that's the way it had to be. Then a woman's voice in a language I did not comprehend reached me. A woman angry, screeching. I heard her before I saw her. She must have been screaming at them to stop. She must have decided it was better to risk dying than watch the guards pound a boy to death. First I heard her voice, then she rushed in, fell on me, wrapped herself around me. The guards shouted at her. One tried to snatch her away. She wouldn't let go of me and they began to beat her too. I heard the thud of clubs on her back, felt her shudder each time a blow was struck. She fought to her feet, dragging me with her. Shielding me as we stumbled and slammed into a wall. My head was buried in her smock. In the smell of her, the smell of dust, of blood. I was surprised how tiny she was, barely my size, but strong, very strong. Her fingers dug into my shoulders, squeezing, gripping hard enough to hurt me if I hadn't been past the point of feeling pain. Her hands were strong, her legs alive and warm, churning, churning as she pressed me against herself, into her. Somehow she'd pulled me up and back to the barracks wall, propping herself, supporting me, sheltering me. Then she screamed at them in this language I use now but did not know one word of then, cursing them, I'm sure, in her mother tongue, a stream of spit and sputtering sounds as if she could build a wall of words they could not cross. The kapos hesitated, astounded by what she'd dared. Was this black one a madwoman, a witch? Then they tore me from her grasp, pushed me down and I crumpled there in the stinking mud of the compound. One more kick, a numbing, blinding smash that took my breath away. Blood flooded my eyes. I lost consciousness. Last I saw of her she was still fighting, slim, beautiful legs kicking at them as they dragged and punched her across the yard. You say she was colored? Yes. Yes. A dark angel who fell from the sky and saved me.

One possible bright spot is Scandinavian-style Social Democracy, which has undoubtedly produced some of the most significant green breakthroughs in the world, from the visionary urban design of Stockholm, where roughly 74 percent of residents walk, bike, or take public transit to work, to Denmark’s community-controlled wind power revolution. And yet Norway’s late-life emergence as a major oil producer—with majority state-owned Statoil tearing up the Alberta tar sands and gearing up to tap massive reserves in the Arctic—calls into question whether these countries are indeed charting a path away from extractivism.

Geography lessons go virtual: Danish government creates Minecraft version of ENTIRE country to help teachers Geography lessons go virtual: Danish government creates Minecraft version of ENTIRE country to help teachers Entire country was recreated by government's mapping department Minecraft lesson plans for teachers also created in bid to make education more accessible By Mark Prigg Published: 22:06 GMT, 25 April 2014 | Updated: 23:01 GMT, 25 April 2014 The Danish government has recreated the entire country in the hit computer game Minecraft. The first country to be fully transplanted into the blocky Minecraft games, the government hopes it could help make lessons more fun for students. It has even produced a series of lesson plans for teachers to help them navigate the virtual version of their country. Scroll down for video Denmark's Ministry of the Environment has created a full-scale model of the country in Minecraft for players to explore. The downloadable model consists of 4,000 billion blocks and requires one terabyte of storage space.

​Denmark to ban sex with animals .. The absence of a law on bestiality led to a growth in animal sex tourism industry in the country.

Moreover, these changes occurred when most American households actually found their real incomes stagnant or declining. Median household income for the last four decades is shown in the chart above. But this graph, disturbing as it is, conceals a far worse reality. The top 10 percent did much better than everyone else; if you remove them, the numbers change dramatically. Economic analysis has found that “only the top 10 percent of the income distribution had real compensation growth equal to or above . . . productivity growth.”14 In fact, most gains went to the top 1 percent, while people in the bottom 90 percent either had declining household incomes or were able to increase their family incomes only by working longer hours. The productivity of workers continued to grow, particularly with the Internet revolution that began in the mid-1990s. But the benefits of productivity growth went almost entirely into the incomes of the top 1 percent and into corporate profits, both of which have grown to record highs as a fraction of GNP. In 2010 and 2011 corporate profits accounted for over 14 percent of total GNP, a historical record. In contrast, the share of US GNP paid as wages and salaries is at a historical low and has not kept pace with inflation since 2006.15 As I was working on this manuscript in late 2011, the US Census Bureau published the income statistics for 2010, when the US recovery officially began. The national poverty rate rose to 15.1 percent, its highest level in nearly twenty years; median household income declined by 2.3 percent. This decline, however, was very unequally distributed. The top tenth experienced a 1 percent decline; the bottom tenth, already desperately poor, saw its income decline 12 percent. America’s median household income peaked in 1999; by 2010 it had declined 7 percent. Average hourly income, which corrects for the number of hours worked, has barely changed in the last thirty years. Ranked by income equality, the US is now ninety-fifth in the world, just behind Nigeria, Iran, Cameroon, and the Ivory Coast. The UK has mimicked the US; even countries with low levels of inequality—including Denmark and Sweden—have seen an increasing gap since the crisis. This is not a distinguished record. And it’s not a statistical fluke. There is now a true, increasingly permanent underclass living in near-subsistence conditions in many wealthy states. There are now tens of millions of people in the US alone whose condition is little better than many people in much poorer nations. If you add up lifetime urban ghetto residents, illegal immigrants, migrant farm-workers, those whose criminal convictions sharply limit their ability to find work, those actually in prison, those with chronic drug-abuse problems, crippled veterans of America’s recently botched wars, children in foster care, the homeless, the long-term unemployed, and other severely disadvantaged groups, you get to tens of millions of people trapped in very harsh, very unfair conditions, in what is supposedly the wealthiest, fairest society on earth. At any given time, there are over two million people in US prisons; over ten million Americans have felony records and have served prison time for non-traffic offences. Many millions more now must work very long hours, and very hard, at minimum-wage jobs in agriculture, retailing, cleaning, and other low-wage service industries. Several million have been unemployed for years, exhausting their savings and morale. Twenty or thirty years ago, many of these people would have had—and some did have—high-wage jobs in manufacturing or construction. No more. But in addition to growing inequalities in income and wealth, America exhibits

In the succeeding two centuries, however, some countries evolved in a very different direction. Prussia, Denmark, the Netherlands, Britain, and other European countries followed France in the development of centralized bureaucracies organized along Weberian lines. The French Revolution had, moreover, unleashed not just demands for popular political participation but also a new form of identity by which a shared language and culture would be the central source of unity for the new democratic public. This phenomenon, known as nationalism, then prompted the redrawing of the political map of Europe as dynastic states linked by marriage and feudal obligations were replaced by ones based on a principle of ethnolinguistic solidarity. The levée en masse of the French Revolution represented the first coming together of all these trends: the revolutionary government in Paris was able to mobilize a significant part of the available able-bodied male population to defend France. Under Napoleon, this mobilized expression of state power went on to conquer much of the rest of Europe.

Many feel a civic obligation to pay church tax, up to 1.5 per cent of their salary depending on the municipality, as though this is just another tax that must be paid to keep Denmark the great nation that it is. As a result, the country has a Lutheran state church financed via taxes, but only 28 per cent of Danes believe in any kind of life after death, according to a survey by the country’s Palliative Knowledge Centre (in the US it’s 81 per cent). Just 16 per cent believe in heaven (the figure rises to 88 per cent in the US).

I Google ‘new country, Denmark, culture shock’ on my phone and drink coffee furiously. I learn that Danes drink the most coffee in Europe, as well as consuming eleven litres of pure alcohol per person per year. Maybe we’ll fit in just fine after all.

guided towards the writings of a 1930s Danish-Norwegian author, Aksel Sandemose, for a better understanding of how best to ‘integrate’ into the workplace in Denmark.

In Libya in 2011, fourteen NATO members and four partner countries prevented Muammar Qaddafi from carrying out a promise to slaughter tens of thousands of his own people—and then they removed him from power. France, Britain, Italy, Canada, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, and others struck 90 percent of all NATO targets. Spain, the Netherlands, Turkey, Greece, and Romania enforced an arms embargo at sea. Sweden, not a NATO member, contributed naval and air force personnel and equipment. The United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Jordan, and Morocco also contributed.18 There was not a single U.S. casualty.19 The point is not that Washington should persuade others to do all the heavy lifting. NATO jets were able to hit their targets only because U.S. cruise missiles had already wiped out Libya’s air defenses. When Europeans ran short on precision-guided missiles, Washington sent them more.20 Without the United States, there would have been no mission. Critics carp that while NATO rid the world of a dangerous monster, it hasn’t created a stable Libya. That charge misses the point. From a Moneyball perspective, the goal was not to bomb Libya into democracy, start a war, or launch another improvisational bout of nation-building. It was to give Libyans a chance to escape the fate Qaddafi intended for them, and to enable them to begin the long-term process of building their own future.

If you reach the age of thirty-seven in a country like Denmark, and have regular intervals free of pharmaceuticals, haven’t committed suicide, and haven’t completely sold out the tender ideals of your childhood, then you’ve learned a little about facing adversity in life.

and I want you all to remember—that you must not dream yourselves back to the times before the war, but the dream for you all, young and old, must be to create an ideal of human decency, and not a narrow-minded and prejudiced one. That is the great gift our country hungers for, something every little peasant boy can look forward to, and with pleasure feel he is a part of—something he can work and fight for. Surely that gift—the gift of a world of human decency—is the one that all countries hunger for still. I hope that this story of Denmark, and its people, will remind us all that such a world is possible.

great art and design can even induce the same brain activity as being in love – something Denmark cottoned on to 90-odd years ago.

at the country level, there is a strong correlation between the size in the cuts in top tax rates between 1970 and today, and the increase in inequality. Germany, Sweden, Spain, Denmark, and Switzerland, where top marginal tax rates stayed high, did not experience sharp increases in top income shares. In contrast, the United States, Ireland, Canada, the UK, Norway, and Portugal cut the top tax rates significantly and experienced large increases in top income shares.

In the countries with the best maternal and infant outcomes—the Netherlands, Sweden, and Denmark—women and babies benefit from lifelong universal healthcare, but that care is markedly different: obstetricians attend only high-risk pregnancies. The vast majority of laboring women get individual support from a midwife, are free to move about and birth in whatever position feels best, and are rarely induced, anesthetized, or cut.

Whether you look back at Tulsa’s wealthy “Black Wall Street” of the early twentieth century or the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s or the Sellers family in Denmark circa 1950s and 1960s, black people and black power always meant being able to have economic self-sustainability and access to the ballot box.

But we have to be honest that autocratic industrial socialism has been a disaster for the environment, as evidenced most dramatically by the fact that carbon emissions briefly plummeted when the economies of the former Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s. And Venezuela's petro-populism is a reminder that there is nothing inherently green about self-defined socialism. Let's acknowledge this fact, while also pointing out that countries with strong democratic-socialist traditions (like Denmark, Sweden, and Uruguay) have some of the most visionary environmental policies in the world. From this we can conclude that socialism isn't necessarily ecological, but that a new form of democratic eco-socialism, with the humility to learn from Indigenous teachings about the duties to future generations and the Interconnection of all life, appears to be humanity's best shot at collective survival.

The arrival of the virus was like an examination of state capacity. A handful of Western countries passed. Germany was an outstanding performer in Europe, while Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, and, surprisingly, Greece did well. New Zealand and Australia were champions on the Pacific rim. But most Western countries, particularly America and Britain, failed the test, humiliatingly so when compared with countries in Asia.

THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER THE Royal Physician’s Visit PER OLOV ENQUIST Translated from the Swedish by Tiina Nunnally Set in Denmark in the 1760s, The Royal Physician’s Visit magnificently recasts the dramatic era of Danish history when Johann Friedrich Struensee, a German doctor from Altona, student of Enlightenment philosophers Diderot and Voltaire, and court physician to mad young King Christian, stepped through the aperture history had opened for him and became for two years the holder of absolute power in Denmark. Dr. Struensee, tall, handsome, and charismatic, introduced hundreds of reforms, many of which would become hallmarks of the French Revolution twenty years later, including freedom of the press and improvement of the treatment of the peasantry. He also took young Queen Caroline Mathilde—unsatisfied by her unstable, childlike husband—as his mistress. He was a brilliant intellectual and brash reformer, yet Struensee lacked the cunning and subtlety of a skilled politician and, most tragically, lacked the talent to choose the right enemies at court, a flaw which would lead to his torture and execution. An international sensation sold in twenty countries, The Royal Physician’s Visit is a view from the seat of absolute power, a gripping tale, vividly and entertainingly told. Enquist’s talent is in full force as he brilliantly explores the connections that will always run between political theory and practice, power, sex, love, and the life of the mind. “A great book, a powerful book—it effortlessly and self-confidently surmounts the standard works of fiction.” —Die Zeit “Incomparably exciting in its uncompromising lucidity and at the same time unsettling.” —Suddeutsche Zeitung “Time and time again the story takes to the air on the wings of fantasy … a magnificent adventure.” —Upsala Nya Tidning “The erotic scenes are among the most beautiful I have read in modern literature.” —Kvällsposten

FOR MONTHS FOLLOWING THE AMERICANS’ DEAL WITH DARLAN, European exiles gathered at the White Tower, York Minster, and other favored restaurants and pubs in London to smoke endless cigarettes and discuss the agreement’s implications. The Free French were the ones most directly affected, of course. But the other émigrés—Norwegians, Poles, Czechoslovaks, Belgians, and Dutch—were also worried about what the deal might mean for the future. The Nazis had invaded and occupied their countries, too. When the time came for those nations to be liberated, would the Americans cooperate with traitors like Darlan? Most of the Europeans meeting over wine-stained tablecloths that winter had escaped to London in the chaos-filled spring of 1940, when German troops conquered Norway and Denmark, then rolled through France and the Low Countries. Every other day, it seemed, George VI and Winston Churchill had been summoned to one of the city’s train stations to welcome yet another king, queen, president, or prime minister. As the only country in Europe still holding out against Hitler, Britain was, as Polish troops put it, the “Last Hope Island” for émigrés who wanted to continue the fight. And London, which housed de Gaulle’s movement and six governments-in-exile, had become the de facto capital of free Europe. The

But one of the main reasons why Denmark does so well in international happiness surveys is the welfare state, as it reduces uncertainty, worries, and stress in the population. You can say that Denmark is the happiest country in the world or you can say that Denmark is the least unhappy country in the world. The welfare state is really good (not perfect, but good) at reducing extreme unhappiness. Universal and free health care, free university education, and relatively generous unemployment benefits go a long way toward reducing unhappiness. This has particular significance for those who are less well off, a segment of society who is happier in Denmark than in other wealthy countries.

Pew’s Economic Mobility Project reports, “Germany is 1.5 times more mobile than the United States, Canada nearly 2.5 times more mobile, and Denmark 3 times more mobile.”58 They find that the only other country with similarly low levels of mobility is our sibling in meritocracy, the birthplace of the word itself, the United Kingdom. And

World War II, alternately known as the Second World War, began with the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939 and ended on September 2, 1945 with the formal surrender of Japan. World War II involved countries from all over the world, known as the Axis powers, Germany, Japan, Italy, Romania, Hungary, Finland and Bulgaria, and the Allies, made up of Great Britain, France, the United States, Soviet Union, China, Poland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, South Africa, Yugoslavia, Greece, Denmark, Norway, Netherlands, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Brazil, and the Philippines.

Denmark and the Netherlands are among the countries with the fewest people who seldom enjoy life or rarely feel calm and relaxed.

The Greek GDP spiked 25% when statisticians dove into the country’s black market in 2006, for instance, thereby enabling the government to take out several hefty loans shortly before the European debt crisis broke out. Italy started including its black market back in 1987, which swelled its economy by 20% overnight. “A wave of euphoria swept over Italians,” reported the New York Times, “after economists recalibrated their statistics taking into account for the first time the country’s formidable underground economy of tax evaders and illegal workers.”4 And that’s to say nothing of all the unpaid labor that doesn’t even qualify as part of the black market, from volunteering to childcare to cooking, which together represents more than half of all our work. Of course, we can hire cleaners or nannies to do some of these chores, in which case they count toward the GDP, but we still do most ourselves. Adding all this unpaid work would expand the economy by anywhere from 37% (in Hungary) to 74% (in the UK).5 However, as the economist Diane Coyle notes, “generally official statistical agencies have never bothered – perhaps because it has been carried out mainly by women.”6 While we’re on the subject, only Denmark has ever attempted to quantify the value of breastfeeding in its GDP. And it’s no paltry sum: In the U.S., the potential contribution of breast milk has been estimated at an incredible $110 billion a year7 – about the size of China’s military budget.

Sweden’s position of neutrality during World War II put the country in the position of not defending its neighbors against German invasion. This was not forgotten in Norway and Denmark and caused animosity in the past, but the nations have put the past behind them. Some

Danes are blunt and direct and trusting and secure

The Democrats like to talk about how wonderful European socialism is, cherry-picking a few statistics from categories where they can show supposedly better results. But what they don’t tell you is that along with their larger welfare states, most of those countries have much less regulated economies. Denmark, for example, scored a 93.9 in the business freedom category in the Heritage Foundation’s 2016 Index of Economic Freedom. The United States scored 84.4. The United States has fallen to seventeenth in the world overall on that index. In 1995, we were fourth.

The full-on Townsend-Moon hooter. She only ever found this problematic in males who hadn’t become pop musicians; it seemed, then, in some weirdly inverted way, affected. It looked, to her, as though they’d grown large noses in order to look like rock musicians. More weirdly, perhaps, they all tended—certified accountants, radiologists, or whatever—to the flopping forelock that had traditionally gone with it, back in Muswell Hill or Denmark Street. This, she’d once reasoned, must be due in one of two ways to hairdressers. Either they saw the rock mega-nose and dressed the hair above it out of a call to historical tradition, or they weighed the issue in some instinctive, deeply hairdresserly way, arriving at that massive slash and heft of eye-obscuring forelock through some simple sense of balance.

As I’ve said, there are left-wing believers in nonexistent conspiracies and other fantasies, but they’re not nearly as numerous or influential. During the 2016 Democratic primaries, after Bernie Sanders did better in some election-day exit polls than he did in the voting, some of his supporters were convinced a conspiracy had falsified the results. (In fact, exit polls always tend to oversample younger voters.) And while you might have considered Sanders’s leftism unrealistic or its campaign rhetoric hyperbolic (“the business model of Wall Street is fraud”), the campaign wasn’t based on outright fantasies. You may not want democratic socialism, but Denmark is a real country.

I think as a writer or just as an entrepreneur I have more possibilities in Denmark than I would have in other countries. I’m very grateful for that. I think public funding can help artists do something that they would not have done if they were by themselves.

The welfare state is the most important innovation of any country in the postwar period. Before it, Denmark was split between 25 percent with the highest income, 25 percent at the bottom: now we have 4 percent at the top and 4 percent at the bottom.

There were never any Nazi plans for a “Westland” province. In Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, however, Hitler did create an “Ostland” (Eastland) province, and countries and institutions alike across the region were mercilessly uprooted and demolished by the Nazis. Hitler couldn’t imagine a Europe without Denmark or Belgium, but he did create a Europe without Poland or Estonia.

Comparisons between America and the Scandinavian countries typically focus on the top marginal tax rate. In America, it’s around 46 percent when you combine federal and state income taxes. This compares with Norway at 39 percent, Sweden at 56 percent and Denmark at 60 percent. Norway’s top marginal income tax rate is actually lower than that of the United States. Sweden and Denmark’s rates are substantially higher. But

CCP analyst Jichang Lulu has explored the localisation of united front influence activities in the Nordic countries, where local officials with considerable decision-making power are targeted for ‘friendly contact’ because they are insulated from strategic debates in the capital cities and do not have the expertise to understand Beijing’s intentions and tactics.1 He notes that Beijing has been actively cultivating political influence in Greenland, which Beijing sees as important for resource supply and for being an Arctic state. The strategy includes investments, an attempt to acquire a derelict naval base, and political work on Greenland’s elites, activities that have rung alarm bells in Denmark.

in June 2020, researchers Supriya Garikipati (University of Liverpool) and Uma Kambhampati (University of Reading) confirmed the finding statistically,12 arguing that female-led countries, such as Germany, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, and indeed New Zealand, did better than most in responding to the pandemic.

The only country we don’t see this going on is Denmark. They have a national policy where they have no ability grouping until the age of ten.” Denmark waits to make selection decisions until maturity differences by age have evened out.

It was not possible for a vaccine maker, or a society, to adapt to an evolving virus without genomic information. And yet nearly a year into the pandemic, in February 2021, the number of genomes being sequenced in the United States was trivial—less than a third of 1 percent of the virus in people who tested positive. (The UK was by then sequencing 10 percent of its positives; Denmark had set a goal of sequencing all of them.) The United States was sequencing fewer of its genomes than any other industrialized country, and the only reason it was sequencing as many as it was is that a bunch of nonprofits had stepped in to do it, haphazardly, for free.

Whenever the Democratic Socialist points to a nation where Socialism has succeeded, he invariably ignores the elephants in the room of China, Russia and Nazi Germany, and references only the tiny Nordic states of Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark and Norway. These are odd choices since none of them is actually Socialist. Not in the slightest. In fact, they all fall far to the right on today’s American political spectrum. Their economic system is the same as that of the United States – free-market capitalism. They are proud Nationalists who love their country, respect the borders of their neighbors and expect their borders to be respected by others.

Rasmussen wasn’t addressing middle school students who, understandably, might not have known this simple fact; he was addressing the best and the brightest products of the Supremacy at the Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. That those who are militating for turning America into Denmark don’t know the first thing about that country’s economic model, governing system or culture speaks volumes about the purpose of those charged with “educating” them in the first place.

The use of antidepressants like Paxil, Prozac, and Celexa is rising in countries all over the world, with the United States topping the list. Greater than one in ten Americans (110 people per 1,000) takes an antidepressant, followed by Iceland (106/1,000), Australia (89/1,000), Canada (86/1,000), Denmark (85/1,000), Sweden (79/1,000), and Portugal (78/1,000). Among twenty-five countries, South Korea was last (13/1,000).

Americans across the worldview spectrum succumb to their basest survival instincts under such circumstances. So, it seems, do people the world over. Europe, like the United States, recently has seen the rise of right-wing populist leaders railing against immigration, European integration, and open borders. And sure enough, the same four parenting questions that reveal so much about Americans’ political preferences also explain a lot about what is happening on the other side of the Atlantic. Worldview was central to the Brexit vote in Britain. It is also central to support for right-wing parties like France’s National Front and the Alternative for Germany (AfD) Party. The same is happening in places as diverse as Hungary, Poland, Austria, and Denmark. Whether the influx of immigrants is objectively more like a trickle or a torrent, citizens of all these places perceive a flood pouring into their countries with the potential to change their culture, a dynamic that heightens the appeal of any leader who promises to Make (insert country name) Great Again.

India and Pakistan have nuclear bombs now and feel entirely justified in having them. Soon others will, too. Israel, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Norway, Nepal (I’m trying to be eclectic here), Denmark, Germany, Bhutan, Mexico, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Burma, Bosnia, Singapore, North Korea, Sweden, South Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan … and why not? Every country in the world has a special case to make. Everybody has borders and beliefs. And when all our larders are bursting with shiny bombs and our bellies are empty (deterrence is an exorbitant beast), we can trade bombs for food. And when nuclear technology goes on the market, when it gets truly competitive and prices fall, not just governments, but anybody who can afford it can have their own private arsenal—businessmen, terrorists, perhaps even the occasional rich writer (like myself). Our planet will bristle with beautiful missiles. There will be a new world order. The dictatorship of the pro-nuke elite. We can get our kicks by threatening each other. It’ll be like bungee jumping when you can’t rely on the bungee cord, or playing Russian roulette all day long. An additional perk will be the thrill of Not Knowing What to Believe. We can be victims of the predatory imagination of every green card–seeking charlatan who surfaces in the West with concocted stories of imminent missile attacks. We can delight at the prospect of being held to ransom by every petty troublemaker and rumormonger, the more the merrier if truth be told, anything for an excuse to make more bombs. So you see, even without a war, we have a lot to look forward to.

The markets in Israel and Denmark would have allowed Better Place to reach a sustainable commercial scale within a manageable geographic scope. But as excitement around the company grew and scores of government delegations from around the world came to explore what Better Place might do in their own countries and regions, management attention shifted. Yielding to the temptation of fast, global growth, Better Place launched pilots and spent resources across the world from Australia to the Netherlands, Hawaii to Japan, China to California to Canada.

The next day was Christmas Eve. In some countries, Christmas Eve is a bigger celebration than Christmas Day. In Canada, Sweden, and Denmark, families open their presents on Christmas Eve. In Italy, they have the Feast of Seven Fishes, during which they eat a lot of fish. Seven, I'd imagine. The French delight in making Buche de Noel, which is a sponge cake frosted and decorated to look exactly like a log. It's a mystery why a dessert masquerading as the limb of a tree would be delightful and appetizing, but they seem to like it. In Russia, on Christmas Eve, they make Kutya, a gloopy mixture of grains, nuts, seeds and honey that is eaten from a communal bowl as a display of unity and a blatant disregard for hygiene. In China, Christmas Eve is the biggest shopping day of the year and they hand each other apples wrapped in cellophane.

Just as London is not really England, Copenhagen is not, I am reliably informed, ‘the real Denmark’.

In 2017, with oil and gas vanishing from its business, Ørsted took its new name in honor of the Danish physicist Hans Christian Ørsted, who discovered electromagnetism. Two years later, Anders Eldrup’s “impossible” 85/15 plan was achieved. It hadn’t taken a generation; it had taken ten years.[42] Again that was better than expected and a full fifteen years ahead of schedule, unheard of for conventional Big Energy projects. Over the same ten years, the percentage of Denmark’s electricity generated by fossil fuels fell from 72 percent to 24 percent, while the share contributed by wind power soared from 18 percent to 56 percent.[43] Some days, Danish wind turbines produce more electricity than the country can consume. The surplus is exported to neighboring nations.

Dee warned “neither France, Denmark, Scotland, Spain, nor any other country can have such liberty for invasion,

When he puts it like this, it sounds surprisingly sensible. Danes have a collective sense of responsibility – of belonging, even. They pay into the system because they believe it to be worthwhile. The insanely high taxation also has some happy side effects. It means that Denmark has the lowest income inequality among all the OECD countries, so the difference in take-home wages between, for instance, Lego’s CEO and its lowliest cleaner, isn’t as vast as it might be elsewhere. Studies show that people who live in neighbourhoods where most people earn about the same amount are happier, according to research from San Francisco State University and the University of California Berkeley. In Denmark, even people working in wildly different fields will probably have a similar amount left in the bank each month after tax. I’m interested in the idea that income equality makes for better neighbours and want to put it to the test. But since I live in what is essentially a retirement village, where no one apart from Friendly Neighbour works, there isn’t much of an opportunity in Sticksville. So I ask Helena C about hers. She tells me that the street she lives in is populated by shop assistants, supermarket workers, accountants, lawyers, marketers and a landscape gardener. ‘Everyone has a nice home and a good quality of life,’ she says, ‘it doesn’t matter so much what you do for work here.’ Regardless of their various careers and the earning potential that this might afford them in other countries with lower taxes, professionals and non-professionals live harmoniously side by side in Denmark. This also makes social mobility easier, according to studies from The Equality Trust on the impact of income equality. So you’re more likely to be able to get on in life, get educated and get a good job, regardless of who your parents are and what they do in Denmark than anywhere else. It turns out that it’s easier to live ‘The American Dream’ here than it’s ever likely to be in the US.

I call up the happiness economist Christian Bjørnskov who I spoke to at the start of my adventure to ask for his perspective. He confirms that this level of trust is key to keeping Danes so damned happy. As he told me before I started my quest, ‘life is so much easier when you can trust people’, and this is regardless of whether you’re actually about to get your bank account wiped or have your house burgled. ‘So if I feel safe and trust the people around me, I’m less likely to feel stressed or anxious. I have the headspace to be happy?’ ‘Exactly,’ he tells me. ‘And countries with a major welfare state tend to be high-trust countries, though the high levels of trust in Denmark aren’t necessarily caused by the welfare state.

(ha!) or what to wear (hello London wardrobe) can feel like a burden rather than a benefit. Danes specialise in stress-free simplicity and freedom within boundaries. 6. Be proud Find something that you, or folk from your home town, are really good at and Own It. Celebrate success, from football to tiddlywinks (or crab racing). Wave flags and sing at every available opportunity. 7. Value family National holidays become bonding bootcamps in Denmark and family comes first in all aspects of Danish living. Reaching out to relatives and regular rituals can make you happier, so give both a go. Your family not much cop? Start your own with friends or by using tip #3 (the sex part). 8. Equal respect for equal work Remember, there isn’t ‘women’s work’ and ‘men’s work’, there’s just ‘work’. Caregivers are just as crucial as breadwinners and neither could survive without the other. Both types of labour are hard, brilliant and important, all at the same time. 9. Play Danes love an activity for its own sake, and in the land of Lego, playing is considered a worthwhile occupation at any age. So get building. Create, bake, even draw your own Noel Edmonds caricature. Just do and make things as often as possible (the messier the better). 10. Share Life’s easier this way, honest, and you’ll be happier too according to studies. Can’t influence government policy to wangle a Danish-style welfare state? Take some of your cake round to a neighbour’s, or invite someone over to share your hygge and let the warm, fuzzy feelings flow.