My Take | Getting to Denmark, not the United States
- The US is exactly the wrong country to look up to if what you want is peace, stability, prosperity, relative equality and freedom rather than pervasive violence at home and endless wars abroad
“The United States from its inception has been a nation blind to itself – its past, its present and, its future. Intellectually underdeveloped … no industrialised people confronts reality so ill-prepared in terms of ideas and insights to cope with the problems before it.” – Gabriel Kolko
The great leftist historian wrote these words in his 1976 masterpiece, Main Currents in Modern American History . They are truer today than ever. (Incidentally, if you want to know how industrial policy and federal regulatory regimes – the bete noire of American conservatives – helped propel the US into the front rank of industrialised nations, study this book.)
The US has been among industrialised states of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development that score the lowest in terms of the global human development index – Hong Kong was fourth last year and the US 15th. That may be why its current leadership is so obsessed – and obsessively defames – our city and another country that usually ranks high – Denmark (11th).
Fox has compared Demark to Venezuela; and claimed that no one wants to work in Denmark because of its welfare state; “nobody” graduates from university because it’s free; and high-schoolers aspire to no more than starting a shop selling cupcakes. Sure enough, a recent report released by the Trump White House criticises the “Nordic socialism” of Denmark, and claims US living standards are 15 per cent higher than the Danes because of their high taxes. Really!
“This myopia,” wrote Kolko following the quote above, “is the consequence of the pervasive self-satisfied chauvinism which characterised the United States”.
It’s particularly glaring that Trump and Fox picked on Denmark. In 2002, two World Bank social scientists, Michael Woolcock and Lant Pritchett, published an influential paper titled, “Getting to Denmark”, which tries to explain how political and economic institutions achieve and maintain peace, stability, freedom, prosperity and inclusiveness “like Denmark”.
