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Wednesday, March 25th, 2020

Denmark’s Idea Could Help the World Avoid a Great Depression

Author:     Derek Thompson
Source:     The Atlantic
Publication Date:     21 March 2020
 Link: Denmark’s Idea Could Help the World Avoid a Great Depression
Stephan:   I pay very close attention to the Nordic countries because on the basis of hard data those societies are healthier, happier, more affluent, more democratic, longer-lived, more literate, better educated, and better prepared for climate change than the United States. This report describes one of the social policies they are trying.

Credit: H. Armstrong/Getty/Atlantic

While the White House and lawmakers haggle over the terms of an emergency economic-stabilization package, Denmark has gone big—very, very big—to defeat the unprecedented challenge of the coronavirus.

This week, the Danish government told private companies hit by the effects of the pandemic that it would pay 75 percent of their employees’ salaries to avoid mass layoffs. The plan could require the government to spend as much as 13 percent of the national economy in three months. That is roughly the equivalent of a $2.5 trillion stimulus in the United States spread out over just 13 weeks. Like I said: very, very big.

This response might strike some as a catastrophically ruinous overreaction. Perhaps for Denmark, it will be. But we are at a fragile moment in American history. The U.S. faces the sharpest economic downturn in a century, and statistics that seem impossibly pessimistic one moment look positively optimistic hours later. In weeks—even days—Denmark’s aggressive response could be a blueprint for how the […]

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