[viandante]

When I was in Denmark I found really irritating the pay Danish students get for University (600 euros net). You can put it any way you want, but that creates all sort of bad incentives and crappy education (which I did see. VIA, anybody?).

Most of those "free" things are not really free also. You will pay them with extremely "unfair" taxes (180% of tax on the value of a new car, anybody?) and a State that believes is fine to dictate the proper way of doing things.

No thanks.

[Loic]

DTU is providing extremely good education.

You consider taxes as unfair, but if they are still in play, after getting left and right governments, it is maybe because in fact, Danish people are happy with them.

[digitalengineer]

Yes, Danish people are happy with them. Don't know for how long though. The population of Denmark is aging rapidly and already a very small minority of working people is paying for everyone. But because they are a minority it's like 2 wolfs and a sheep 'voting' what's for dinner...

<Quote> Denmark has an entire population of 5,350,000 people. Of them, 1,150,000 are below 18 years old. Of the remaining 4,200,000 people, 2,214,000 people receive government transfer payments (not counting 260,000 students that receive public scholarships of $550 per month).

From taxing their citizens into poverty to forcing them to endure the highest electricity rates in the world due to the cult like obsession with lowering carbon emissions (god forbid it actually warms up a bit in Denmark!), the Danish State takes top marks for keeping the prisoners down.

I thought I might share with you a few of the observations and thoughts I had on the worker’s paradise of Denmark. http://www.dollarvigilante.com/blog/2012/3/21/denmark-social...

</quote>

[_delirium]

Ah yes, "taxing their citizens into poverty". Have you looked up what a typical after-tax income is in Denmark? It is a very well-off kind of poverty, if it's poverty!

More generally I'd suggest that 30 seconds of Googling and some quotes from a blog run by gold-bugs doesn't really constitute an educated opinion about Denmark...

[paulhauggis]

"Have you looked up what a typical after-tax income is in Denmark?"

Your higher income doesn't matter if everything else is many more times expensive to buy.

If the US raises the minimum wage, those people that got that minimum wage most likely will have the same buying power because the raise in costs will be pushed through by companies (rightfully so) to the consumer (their costs will have increased).

It also has to do with the perceived value of a dollar and it's less when everyone has more of them.

The other thing is that Danish citizens have no choice. You don't have a choice to opt-out of all of these government-run programs. When it's described above, it reminds me of organized crime tactics. They give you something for free, but everything comes at a price.

You can keep telling us that Denmark's situation is great, but one thing is obvious: Startups and business owners avoid it like the plague. Great government benefits don't really help you in the long-run when you end up giving 60%+ of your profits to the government. This doesn't even include the strict rules about hiring and firing people. The Danish government doesn't like businesses. It's because they would rather have all the control.

I remember there was an article about how great Sweden was for startups last year (a country very similar to Denmark). Almost everyone in the article mentioned how they wanted to get out of the country.

With rules like these, it really only gives you two choices: work for the government or a large corporation. I don't ever want to do either..no mater how much free sub-par education and medical care you throw at me.

[aspelund]

But the main reason that swedish startups wants to leave is because of the small market. Or as Zennström says: "Sweden is a great test market. But it isn't a real market."

[paulhauggis]

This doesn't make any sense. Many of the Swedish companies I saw had sites in English and catered to non-Swedish citizens. The Internet allows you to run a website anywhere and have international customers/users.

[moonchrome]

Isn't Sweden a part of the EU ? Doesn't that mean you have access to the EU market like any other country/without tariffs/simplified regulation ?

[digitalengineer]

I felt it was relevant because I have noticed it is how a large majority of Americans view Denmark.

Of course the question is how long this can continue now even mario dragi (head of the European Central Bank) stated the Welfare State Model is dead: ""the old welfare state is dead, because it could not survive without debts"

http://www.agi.it/latest-news/news/201203221050-epp-rt10068-...

[viandante]

Yes, but for 1 DTU there are plenty of other Universities aiming only at big numbers of students. Also, degrees are so inflated that companies keep asking for a Master even after 2 or 3 years of experience.

I am not sure Danish are happy. Are they? And also, will they be? Jobs in Copenhagen are extremely few and hard to get (especially if you are a foreigner...). I know Danish people easily find jobs now, but what about in 10 years? or 20? or 30?

I just can't see the sustainability of this system. Taxes are way too high and the State wants way too much control over things.

[_delirium]

> Taxes are way too high

As an American who's moved to Denmark, I really don't see this, at least for anyone in the middle class. I make a middle-class professional income, and my overall effective tax rate is about 40% (incl. payroll taxes). I moved from California, where the overall effective state+federal tax rates on the same income would be around 35% (also incl. payroll taxes). A 5% difference isn't really enough for me to care much; the two countries differ in so many other ways that a 5% tax difference is way down on the list of why I would choose to remain in Denmark or return to the US. I'll probably eventually return to the U.S., but mostly because it feels more culturally like "home" (I'm American and not Danish, and that's something relatively difficult to change), not because I feel oppressed by taxes here.

[moonchrome]

Don't they also have a 25% VAT ? And higher living expenses because of it, so even with a 60,961 nominal GDP/per capita (5th in the world) when you correct for PPP it's 37,585$ (17th).

[_delirium]

Living expenses vary in a lot of complex ways, yeah, depending on your lifestyle. I find cost of living here overall cheaper than in the SF Bay Area for my own lifestyle though, mostly due to transportation and healthcare. I was able to sell my car, ditch my gasoline/insurance expenses, and no longer have to pay co-pays or employee contributions for my health insurance. People with other lifestyles may find it more expensive, especially if you want to buy a car (which has its own separate, very high taxes).

I'm not sure VAT is a big component of the difference. I think housing costs and high wages are the biggest factor. Grocery prices are slightly higher (perhaps due to VAT), but we're talking differences there that add up to maybe 1% of my income annually. Eating out is much more expensive, mainly because everyone employed in the restaurant is making at least a lower-middle-class salary (~$40k or so... nobody's working for $7/hr). Rental housing in Copenhagen is more expensive than most of the Bay Area, but cheaper than SF proper or NYC. Housing to purchase is actually quite cheap; you can get a 2bd in reasonably central Copenhagen for $200k, which is completely impossible in SF or NYC.

I suppose the PPP comparison is made against the U.S. as a whole, in which case cost of living is definitely higher than, say, the midwest or Texas. But I don't think it's particularly high compared to coastal US prices. If you want to buy housing, if anything CoL is considerably lower.

[psykotic]

> Yes, but for 1 DTU there are plenty of other Universities aiming only at big numbers of students.

Plenty? There aren't more than a handful of Danish universities in total. The only one that isn't at a high international level is Roskilde, and its student population is the smallest in the country by a wide margin. The two largest by number of students, Aarhus University (where I went) and Copenhagen University, are well into the world's top 50 on international rankings, and climbing. DTU is lower in overall rank but near the top in engineering. Aalborg is still under-ranked internationally, as you can tell by the fact that it's jumped a hundred spots on average each year in the QS rankings for the last several years, but everyone in Denmark knows it's a great school for engineering, rivaling and possibly surpassing DTU in education if not yet in research. SDU is in a solid third place after AU and KU as a well-rounded university; its departments are smaller in size, but many are packed with strong faculty.

[_delirium]

> Most of those "free" things are not really free also.

That's true in everything, if you want to be pedantic; every "free" service, like Dropbox's claim to have a "free" tier, is misleading because actually someone is paying for it (in that case, through a hidden "tax" on Dropbox's paying subscribers, some of whose funds go to pay for resources used by the free tier).

[pgmcgee]

That's actually an incorrect way to think about it. Actually, Dropbox is paying for the free accounts, in an attempt to convert people to paying accounts.

Dropbox is simply offering a product which is priced around where supply and demand meet. I'm sure if Dropbox believed that they could make more money by increasing or lowering the price, they would. By paying for Dropbox, you're not paying for the free tier, you're paying the price that you think Dropbox is worth. It just so happens that Dropbox can make a good profit at that price point, even with the cost of the free accounts.