Abstract
What makes a good society? This question is one of the oldest in political economy. While widely different answers have been suggested over time, the answer given by Aristotle still seems to us to have a strong intuitive appeal: A good society is a society that enables its members to lead a good life. This definition begets the next question: What makes a good life? The next section gives a first look at two answers:
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Notes
- 1.
In economics the original question has developed into the field of welfare theory where the answers given are very abstract.
- 2.
The reason to take the logarithm is that welfare theory claims that relative differences count more than absolute differences. If you are poor, it matters a lot to get an income raise of € 100 per month, but if you are rich, such a raise is less important, but it may increase welfare the same if you get a 10 % increase in the wage.
- 3.
A similar question is used in both the World Values Surveys (WVS) and the European Social Survey (ESS). The pattern in the results is the same: Denmark and Switzerland always stand out as very happy countries. This is also the case when the sample of countries is extended to other Western countries and to the rest of the world.
- 4.
The pattern is stable across the five surveys, so we just report the aggregate for all polls for each country.
- 5.
Denmark is now ahead of Sweden that has a rather similar welfare system. The difference to other EU-countries and Switzerland seems large at first, but it is smaller than it appears: Expenditures that are public programs in Denmark are often parts of (more or less compulsory) insurance schemes in other western countries.
- 6.
- 7.
A special part of the literature looks at microstates. They normally do significantly better than their neighbors as they specialize in safe haven activities; see Paldam (2013).
- 8.
- 9.
For a broad introduction to the institutional development of the Danish model see for instance Campbell et al. (2006).
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Christoffersen, H., Beyeler, M., Eichenberger, R., Nannestad, P., Paldam, M. (2014). Two Good Societies: Switzerland and Denmark. In: The Good Society. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37238-4_1
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