[sidstling]

We actually have some internal problems with those measures in Scandinavia. I live in Denmark and politically we’re made up of 98 municipalities, some are urban, some are rural. Because we share the economic task of welfare, richer municipalities send some of their money to poorer municipalities.

A part of the calculation for this process is build around the size of your bourse, which made good sense 15-20 years ago before urbanization really took off, but makes very little sense today.

It used to be that a country manor was much more expensive than a small downtown apartment. In fact most urban areas with small apartments used to house the lower working class, while country manors used to belong to the upper class.

Today that has switched around. Poor people can literally not afford to live in our largest cities while the most rural manors are now so inexpensive that my three room apartment in our second largest city could by me two-three country manors in the cheapest parts.

We’re changing the way we calculate “citizen net worth”, but in a democracy such a thing takes a long time, so it’ll probably be a few years, and we’ve already been at it for four. And that’s in a country of 5.6 million people, just imagine how slow it’d be in the WTO.