Nina Schmidt, Danish professor in economics, calculated recently that every Danish baby girl born now, is expected to cost the government almost 300,000 dollars over her lifetime, and that every baby boy born, will contribute with merely 110,000 dollars.
<a href="https://www.mm.dk/kvinder-er-en-underskudsforretning" rel="nofollow">https://www.mm.dk/kvinder-er-en-underskudsforretning</a> (in Danish).<p>The Danish government is running huge deficits on the budget and it is hard to see how that will change in the coming years. Had it not been for the oil and gas in the North Sea, which peaked in 2004 and 2000 respectively, we would have been in a much worse situation.<p>The Danish version of the Nordic model is not sustainable. Not sure how it is in the other Nordic countries.
Leading the article with Britain under Thatcher as - presumably - a good example (of Government reform).. Not their brightest move to anyone British that grew up in the 80's and not in the "elite" classes. I was not compelled to read further, which is a pity, since the Economist can have some quite incisive articles sometimes.<p>But then again, I guess I'm not their target audience. I'll try and read it again, once I've stopped gnashing my teeth :/
It might be so that there's a lot of clever Swedes living in London, but as far as I know Stockholm has a rather strong entrepreneurial scene. In my view, the main reasons why a Swedish entrepreneur wouldn't settle in Sweden is because of the high expenses when it comes to housing and consumption; not because of a high tax rate or other directly politically controlled factors per se.<p>Swedish entrepreneurs get many things in return as well. First of all, because the government covers most of the financing of studies, they don't get out of university with a significant study debt. This is great, because debt inhibits taking risks (i.e. becoming an entrepreneur.) Also, where most startups fail, an 'unfortunate' Swedish entrepreneur has a decent safety net he can count on.<p>Providing the example that Sweden is cutting on its government expenditure, in order to convince readers of the idea that small government is good is just wrong. Due to the differences in welfare state, a baby born in Sweden has a much greater probability of having good prospects than a baby born in the US or the UK.
I started writing a comment about this article, but it got too big, read it here:
<a href="http://lazyfairyecon.tumblr.com/post/42208462291/the-economist-magazine-no-analysis-and-cowardly" rel="nofollow">http://lazyfairyecon.tumblr.com/post/42208462291/the-economi...</a><p>tl;dr: The Economist magazine - no analysis and cowardly opinion. Centrism and charts without context instead
The Nordic Model is horrid in the long term.<p>A better name would be the cut rose model.<p>Take a demographic that has little more than one child per woman fertility rates, then, with per capita debt double what you have in the US achieve spectacularly glowing vital statistics (happy, healthy, literate people).<p>Again you have almost two adults per child, their spending plus the spending of the state which, overall (despite recent belt tightening) is twice per capita what you have in the US. Throw in a culture that's been largely mono-ethnic and with a population level that looks like a single relatively small State in the US and you have something that looks pretty right now but is completely unsustainable and will collapse a la Greece or worse as the present demographic of youth come into the workforce with massive debt obligations yet with none of the options their parents had.
The full special report (1720 words) is a worthy read. <a href="http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21570840-nordic-countries-are-reinventing-their-model-capitalism-says-adrian" rel="nofollow">http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21570840-nordic...</a>
Fifth post I've seen this week from the Economist and nordic countries' economy.<p>What's the agenda? And what's with the astroturfing of articles here on HN?
But OH NOES, they are teh socialist!!11oneeleventy And we all know that socialism always fails because socialist governments go bankrupt; at least, that's what rags like the Economist have been telling me for the last 30 years.<p><sarc>This is why free-market, no-social-services USA has such a low public debt/GDP ratio, whereas quasi-socialist (public health: boo!) Australia has high debt/GDP, and socialist hell-holes like Denmark have off-the-scale debt/GDP ratios.</sarc><p>Just look at the numbers in my (highly debatable and somewhat cherry picked) loosely ranked list of least to most socialist countries.<p>Debt to GDP ratios (2010)
USA: 73%
UK: 86.8%
Australia: 30%
Canada: 83%
Germany: 82%
Japan: 208%
Finland: 49%
Sweden: 38%
Denmark: 46%
Norway: 49%
Singapore: 118.2%
France: 86%<p>DERP. Oh dear, the numbers appear to have little correlation with with how socialist the country is, but may be more related to how 'innovative' a country's banking sector is, how many 'state owned enterprises' there are, national demographics, corporate political capture, and how distorting the tax system is.<p>Even the neo-liberals at the Economist are starting to understand that government provided social services, transport, health, and education aren't the primary factor that sends countries broke. Perhaps one day they'll notice the elephant in the room: the banking sector.