The homework everyone refuses to copy
Denmark’s unemployment rate in 2024 was 2.7 percent. Its median household income, adjusted for purchasing power, exceeded America’s. Danish workers average 1,380 hours per year; Americans average 1,811. Fifty-two weeks of paid parental leave between parents. No Dane has ever started a GoFundMe for chemotherapy.
These are outcomes from a country with private ownership, profit-seeking firms, a stock exchange, and billionaires. We find American resistance to copying what works genuinely baffling.
We do not want to abolish capitalism. We want to do what the Nordic countries did: accept that markets are powerful engines and build institutions that keep the engine from running over the people it serves. Strong unions. Universal services. Progressive taxation. Collective bargaining above 80 percent. Every country that outperforms the United States on life expectancy, child poverty, and social mobility maintains these. While running competitive GDP per capita.
Why nobody has tried
The Chicago school asks if it can scale. Denmark has 5.9 million people. The question is reasonable. The answer is that nobody has tried, and the reason is not demographics — it is political economy. The wealthy have a shock absorber. They use it to absorb the political shocks that might redistribute the economic ones. American union density peaked at 35 percent in 1954. The divergence between productivity and wages tracks almost perfectly with the decline in membership. Someone spent $4.1 billion in lobbying in 2022 to keep it that way.
You cannot call a system irreformable when the reforms were working and someone spent four billion dollars a year to undo them.
Where we concede ground: Sweden’s school vouchers produced declining PISA scores. Denmark’s immigration politics turned restrictive.
What would change our mind: A major economy restoring union density above 30% with Nordic-level services that fails after a full business cycle.
Read the full synthesis: Is capitalism broken?