The recent post A Swede Returns to Silicon Valley from Beijing said it well:

"My first experience of the States and of Silicon Valley was absolutely soul-crushingly disappointing. I landed in San Francisco and felt like I had traveled back in time. Far from the expected glass towers of a technological utopia, what I found was a surprisingly run down city that reminded me of traveling in Eastern Europe. It seemed to be all pot and potholes"

Also, Norway is one of these lucky countries with a lot of oil and not a lot of people :-)

Most industries not related to oil in some way is basically at a standstill, because oil exports are driving the NOK and thus making our other exports expensive.

Also, the oil companies can outbid just about anyone else for employees.

The recent oil price drop has been a boon for many companies that was desperate from engineers etc. Now they can take on projects that were on ice because they didn't have the staff and such.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report

(Yay Switzerland for giving a little competition to the Nordics)

2. The UN index is really more of a "quality of life" index, with very strange/subjective criteria. For example, if you sort by the "Freedom to make life choices" column, Uzbekistan comes out on top, with Cambodia in third place. NOt buying it.

3. Another view (from a left-leaning newspaper, typically sympathetic to the Nordics)

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/27/scandinavian-m...

For example, over 9% of the residents of the country were not born in a European country.

Regarding the piece from The Guardian, consider this quote: "A spokesman for the Sweden Democrats (currently at an all-time high of close to 10% in the polls) insisted to me that immigrants were "more prone to violence"."

SD is an anti-immigrant party in Sweden. I find it odd that the speaker chose a source which is most likely to give a negative portrayal of immigrants. But I needn't explore that in any depth as the commenters to that piece have done so for me.

FWIW, there was a followup at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/05/scandinavian-m... . The author writes (about the piece you linked to):

> In trying to make myself heard above the clamour of pro-Nordic propaganda in the British (indeed, global) media, and shake a few people out of their decade-long Scandi-trances, I hereby plead guilty to a selective, provocative slant on the region.

But that's likely due to the system of taxes and transfers. The government subsidizes low-end jobs in the form of minimum wage laws; and it makes far less sense for a company to continue to hike the pay of its CEO when 75% of that money goes directly to the government in the form of taxes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_wages_by_count...

This is not accurate. I've occasionally researched positions in Europe, and while I haven't looked at Denmark specifically, mid/senior-level software developer salaries tend to be around $45,000/year (or even less), which, before taxes, is about half of what's typical here in the Boston area, and a quarter of what's typical in the SF Bay Area.[0] Many European developers emigrate to America; next to no American developers emigrate to Europe.

I don't know what Danish fast food employees and store clerks earn, but I doubt they make more than software developers ($45,000/year is about $22/hour), so they definitely don't make "several times" what their American equivalents do.

Depending on the local job market and cost of living, a typical American entry-level salary for a new employee is about $10 (9 EUR)/hour, while a junior manager or semi-skilled worker would make $15-$25 (13.50-23.50 EUR), and a senior hourly manager or skilled worker would make at least $20 (18 EUR). Unionized and/or government employees make substantially more (especially factoring in benefits), although those positions are a lot harder to come by.

Keep in mind that the tax rates are far lower, possibly even negative depending on credits,[1][2] prices are also much lower, and, contrary to European popular belief, there actually are extensive federal and state social welfare programs for the low-income, including free healthcare.[3]

Now, I wouldn't say that people in those positions are making what I as an upper-middle-class professional consider a "good" living, but it's fairly comparable to other first-world countries. There's a reason the only Americans working in Europe are rich expats, not migrant workers sweeping floors and waiting tables.

Relatively speaking, the main socioeconomic problems in America are not so much that any of the people who have jobs are uniquely poorly-compensated, so much as chronic unemployment, downwards social mobility, the factors that contribute to those,[4] and that middle-class families must now take on a small fortune in real estate and college debt to raise children to the same middle-class standard of living.[5]

[0] The only place I've looked at that's even somewhat competitive salary-wise is Switzerland, the one country in Western Europe that's even more capitalist than America is. Also the only country I've ever visited where (driving 175 km or so) I never saw any visible poverty at all (or anywhere that didn't appear to be both prosperous and growing).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earned_income_tax_credit

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_tax_credit#United_States

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicaid

[4] Globalization/deindustrialization/automation, crime, broken families, drugs, etc.

[5] And it's still more difficult for those lower on the ladder, who can't take on that much debt.

"I don't know what Danish fast food employees and store clerks earn, but I doubt they make more than software developers ($45,000/year is about $22/hour),"

McDonald's in Denmark pays about $20/hour. Quoting http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/28/business/international/liv... :

> ... he earns the equivalent of $20 an hour — the base wage for fast-food workers throughout Denmark and two and a half times what many fast-food workers earn in the United States. ... a study from the University of California, Berkeley found. American fast-food workers earn an average of $8.90 an hour.

You also wrote: "I've occasionally researched positions in Europe, and while I haven't looked at Denmark specifically, mid/senior-level software developer salaries tend to be around $45,000/year (or even less),"

http://www.payscale.com/research/DK/Job=Software_Developer/S... says "A Software Developer [in Denmark] earns an average salary of $66,385 per year. Most people with this job move on to other positions after 20 years in this field."

http://www.daxx.com/article/it-salaries-software-developer-t... says: "Quite predictably, the US and the EU are the areas where software developers earn a lot. The highest paying country is Switzerland, with an average annual software developer salary reaching $104,200. Switzerland is followed by Norway with programmer’s wages of $81,400 per year, the United States with $76,000, Denmark with $71,500, and Israel with an average of $70,700 per year."

P.S. You also wrote "the only Americans working in Europe are rich expats". Just how many Americans do you know in Europe? Because the ones I know (I am a US citizen who lives in Sweden) are not rich. (FWIW, I prefer the term "immigrant", not "expat.")