I included health insurance in my calculation, and public schools in Mississippi are just as free in the US as they are Denmark.
Cost of living is much higher in Denmark, so making that adjustment isn't going to help your argument.
If you assume Danish university education is comparable to paying full freight at Harvard (which no one with a median Mississippi income would have to do) or some other heavy weighting on things that are private in the US, you might get close.
Certainly one can argue there's a large intangible benefit to not having to think about health insurance, and I for one place a large premium on having the opportunity to bike everywhere. I'm not arguing life in Denmark is bad.
No doubt there are many public services in Denmark that make transfer payments to the bottom quintile difficult to measure, but I just have never seen a credible argument that in terms of disposable consumer surplus, the median adult does better in Denmark than Mississippi, accounting for all reasonable costs.
And, of course, most Americans are richer than the median Mississippian.
It seems great to argue about the value of things Denmark is good at, but having a large consumer surplus just doesn't strike me as being one of those things. It's also not a value I think the median Dane agrees should be weighted that high, which is fine.
Cost of living is much higher in Denmark, so making that adjustment isn't going to help your argument.
If you assume Danish university education is comparable to paying full freight at Harvard (which no one with a median Mississippi income would have to do) or some other heavy weighting on things that are private in the US, you might get close.
Certainly one can argue there's a large intangible benefit to not having to think about health insurance, and I for one place a large premium on having the opportunity to bike everywhere. I'm not arguing life in Denmark is bad.
No doubt there are many public services in Denmark that make transfer payments to the bottom quintile difficult to measure, but I just have never seen a credible argument that in terms of disposable consumer surplus, the median adult does better in Denmark than Mississippi, accounting for all reasonable costs.
And, of course, most Americans are richer than the median Mississippian.
It seems great to argue about the value of things Denmark is good at, but having a large consumer surplus just doesn't strike me as being one of those things. It's also not a value I think the median Dane agrees should be weighted that high, which is fine.