• Fox News Trish Regan compares Denmark to Venezuela
  
• Sweden is a disaster (former UKIP leader Nigel Farage on Fox)
  

Quote:In report after report, the Netherlands tops OECD countries for high life satisfaction among its young people. Researchers compiling this year’s Health Behaviour in School-aged Children (HBSC) study, a four-yearly analysis on 48 countries, say Dutch children’s happiness scores are up again. It contrasts starkly with the picture in countries like Britain, where depression and anxiety are on the rise among teenagers, and the US, where the number of young people taking their own lives has risen sharply.

Quote:One French tech entrepreneur has described America's edge this way: "The confluence of a large pool of capital, world-class talent, vibrant support infrastructure, and a risk-loving culture has bred a self-fulfilling cycle of innovation and entrepreneurship."

Don't skip over that bit about culture. A European Commission study found Europeans more skeptical of entrepreneurship than Americans, and possessing a higher level of uncertainty avoidance. The churn of American society — companies starting and dying, workers switching firms — is also key to America's innovative capacity.

In a new analysis, San Francisco Federal Reserve economist John Fernald notes that America's "economic fluidity and dynamism" helps spread ideas throughout the private sector. It's why Europe invested a lot in computers in the 1990s but never got a tech boom that boosted productivity, Fernald explains.

That's the real challenge for the next American president: Making sure policy is supportive of an ecology — taxes, trade, regulation, intellectual property — that promotes dynamism and churn. It must guarantee the U.S economy remains open to competition, whether from within or from abroad. That's a big part of what this election should be about. SHARE!

Quote:Do I need to pay tuition fees in Finland?

• currently, no tuition fees are charged in regular degree programmes - regardless of your nationality
  
• tuition fees for non-EU/EEA students will however be introduced from autumn 2017 onwards
  
• you must independently cover your living expenses - think carefully about how you will finance your studies in Finland
  
• see section How to apply for advice on admissions
  

Tuition fees for non-EU/EEA students
The Finnish Government has decided to introduce a tuition fees for non-EU/EEA students, starting from August 2017. This means that non-EU/EEA students who start their studies in autumn 2017 or after that, are subject to tuition fees. The tuition fees concern Bachelor's or Master's degree programmes offered in English. Doctoral level studies, ordegree programmes offered in Finnish or Swedish, will not charge tuition fees.
Each university/UAS defines their fees independently. The annual fee can vary even within one individual institution, depending on the degree course.
The universities/UAS's will also introduce new scholarship schemes for non-EU students admitted to fee-charging Bachelor's or Master's degree courses.
For more information, please see section Tuition fees 2017

Quote:These two Scandinavian countries shed light on a challenge for all advanced economies: how to implement responsible social policies that reduce carbon emissions and provide for the poor while also innovating to expand the economy. Both Sweden and Denmark have high tax rates that support successful social policies and still leave room for innovative industries. It’s the Danish example in particular that demonstrates how social challenges like climate change can offer great opportunities for new and expanding economic activity. The goal here is to explain what factors were central to Denmark’s success.

We argue that Denmark’s cleantech development has been led by legacy manufacturing companies that were founded decades before “cleantech” was even discussed. These corporate actors, who pivoted toward cleantech during a period of economic crisis, are the missing puzzle piece; when paired with government demand-pull and (more importantly) technology-push policies, they transformed into globally competitive cleantech firms. And this phenomenon could recur elsewhere—legacy manufacturing regions in the U.S. Rust Belt could become cleantech hubs. The lesson is that cleantech hubs require far different ingredients than those required to develop a software-led innovation economy.

Quote:At one extreme is Italy, which experienced a severe economic contraction in the recession after the 2008 financial crisis and has had a very weak recovery since. There, real market incomes were flat or falling for virtually the entire population. At the other extreme is Sweden, where only 20 percent of the population had flat or falling market incomes.

• which might people less fearful of change, as there is a safety net. If people lose their jobs they still have a decent income, and (unlike the US pre-Obamacare) health insurance. 
  
• It might also prepare more people for retraining and finding employment in other sectors. 
  

Quote:Despite a minimum wage not far below $20 an hour and some of the world’s steepest taxes, unemployment is almost the lowest in Europe.

Quote:[b]Compared with New York, London, and even Stockholm, Copenhagen real estate is still a bargain: $500,000 buys a decent two-bedroom. If Berg is correct, that’s largely because the country regulates the housing market to a degree unimaginable in the U.S.[/b] It’s nearly impossible for a foreigner with no connection to Denmark to buy property, preventing inflows of overseas money. Banks apply stringent financial criteria to mortgages for buy-to-let properties; it’s hard for Danes to purchase homes they don’t intend to live in. Regulatory guidelines require minimum down payments of 5 percent and stress tests of borrowers’ finances against runups in rates. With the encouragement of regulators, banks have hiked fees on flexible-rate loans, nudging buyers into fixed-rate mortgages. The rules are even tighter for properties in Copenhagen.

Quote:Where does innovation mostly come from? Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson and Thierry Verdier, the academics whom Drezner cites,argue that it disproportionately comes from economies where "incentives for workers and entrepreneurs results in greater inequality and greater poverty" . . . i.e., the United States. Those innovations, however, don't make just us more productive; they filter out to the rest of the world.

Now, you can quarrel with the academics' model, and indeed, many people have. But even if you think they are wrong about needing inequality-producing incentives to drive innovation, there remains a kernel of truth: When it comes to growth, Scandinavia's economic policy simply doesn't matter as much as U.S. economic policy, so it's hard to draw good lessons from it for other, larger countries.

Quote:Viennese-born Helena Hartlauer, 32, said she was not surprised at her city’s top position. The municipality’s social democratic government has a long tradition of investing in high-quality social housing, making Vienna almost uniquely affordable among major cities.

Quote:American capitalism has always been distinct from continental European capitalism.We’ve had more entrepreneurial creativity but less security.
...
It’s possible that entrepreneurs, company founders and others would pay these [higher tax] rates without changing their behavior, but I wouldn’t count on it.When you make risk-taking less rewarding, you get fewer risk-takers, which is exactly what you see across the Atlantic.

In reality, the Nordic countries are more entrepreneurial than the US. The most common measure of entrepreneurial activity is the birth rate of employer enteprises, which is defined as the percentage of enterprises in a given year that are brand new. Here is the enterprise birth rate of the US and the Nordics in 2007 (Norway didn't have data):

Perhaps because of its high level of enterpreneurialism, the Nordic countries are among the most innovative in the world. They regularly score near the top of (admittedly flawed) innovation indexes. Stockholm is home to the hottest tech sector in the world after Silicon Valley (which is itself located in tax-loving California). 

Quote:American values have always been biased toward individualism, achievement and flexibility — nurturing disruptive dynamos like Bell Labs, Walmart, Whole Foods, Google and Apple — and less toward dirigisme, order and economic equality.

Quote:Our system has favored higher living standards for consumers while theirs has favored stability for employees and producers.
...
Middle classes across Europe bear a much higher tax load than the American middle class. As Austan Goolsbee, a former economic adviser to President Obama, has noted, you really can’t have a Swedish-style welfare state without a broad high tax burden. That means less spending power for most Americans, and fewer resources to choose one’s own lifestyle.

This is a wildly misleading picture of the actual distributive bargain being struck in the Nordic countries. The higher tax revenue in Nordic countries does not get flushed down the toilet, but is instead shot back out to the populace in transfer income and universal services.
To see what the actual distributive bargain is, this graph of Danish income as a percent of US income across each country's income distribution is helpful:

In Denmark, the lower class has a lot more disposable income and has free/subsidized health care, child care, and education. For them, the Nordic model is a total win.

Quote:It’s amazing that so many young people want to mimic a continent that has been sluggish for decades. It’s amazing that so many look to the future and want a country that would be a lot less vibrant.

There's nothing sluggish about the economies of the Nordic countries. Just like any other country, they go through recessions and times of trouble. For example, the Soviet Union's collapse was brutal on the Nordic countries, Sweden and Finland especially. For another example, Finland has been having troubles lately because its paper industry is becoming less relevant, global cell phone giant Nokia has stumbled, and the Russian sanctions are hurting their exports. But overall the Nordic countries have kept their productivity growing very well for decades.
 
In fact, all four Nordic countries have seen their productivity grow faster than the US since 1970:
 

 
This doesn't show up as strikingly in the per capita GDP growth because the Nordic countries are more likely to use productivity growth to buy more leisure time. But even in per capita GDP growth, they've done quite well for themselves:
 

 
Conclusion
 
I could go on but I've probably already gone on too long. The basic point here is David Brooks is simpy wrong. The Nordic model that he says young people are foolishly flocking too performs very well in all the areas he says it doesn't. It has high rates of entrepreneurialism, high rates of innovation, and high rates of growth. It's struck an incredibly good distributive bargain for its lower classes and a very decent distributive bargain for its middle classes. It respects individualism and indeed touts individual flourishing as one of its main animating goals.
 
Part of me feels like David Brooks is simply behind the times when it comes to the hip right-wing talking points about the Nordic countries. In the past, the right-wing line was to say that the countries weren't very successful. These days, the right-wing line is to say that they are very successful but only because they are actually super-duper secret libertarian capitalists. I don't think that line is correct either, but at least it doesn't deny the underlying empirical indicators of Nordic economic success.

• More than four in ten U.S. children are living close to the poverty line. In 2014, 44 percent of children under age 18 (31.4 million) lived in low-income households and 21 percent lived in poor families (15.4 million). This is still much higher than at the start of the Great Recession in 2008, when 39 percent of children were considered low income and 18 percent lived in poor households.
  
  
  
• Children remain more likely than adults to live in poverty. While 44 percent of children live in low-income households, only one-third of adults between 18 and 64 years of age live in these households. In addition, children are more than twice as likely as adults 65 years and older to live in poor families.
  
  
  
• America's youngest children are still those most likely to live in low-income or poor households. Some 47 percent of children age 5 years or younger live in low-income families, compared to 45 percent of children age 6 to 11 years (10.8 million), and 40 percent of children age 12 to 17 years (9.7 million).
  
  
  
• Disparities in child poverty persist along racial lines. More than 60 percent of black, Hispanic, and Native American kids live in low-income families, compared to 30 percent of Asian and white children -- a dynamic largely unchanged since 2008.
  
  
  
• Many children living in poverty have parents with some higher education, and many live in two-parent households. While higher parental education decreases the likelihood that a child will live in a low-income or poor household, nearly half of children living in poverty (48 percent) have a parent with at least some college education. Though data shows that children who live with married parents are much less likely to be poor or low income compared to children who live with a single parent, nearly half of children (47 percent) in low-income families and 36 percent of children in poor families (5.5 million) live with married parents.