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Comment by aerosmile | Hacker News Reader

> I’m Danish and our laws regarding advertising may seem a little totalitarian to Americans

Apparently not just Americans... There are around 10k Americans living in Denmark [1], and around 1.3M Danes living in the US [2]. While I am sure that everyone you talk to in Denmark will tell you they love it there, that's due to the survival bias. The immigration streams tell the true story, which is that the Danes are voting with their feet and overcoming incredible financial and cultural challenges to move their families to the US.

With that in mind, no, I am not really keen on learning about all the wonderful hurdles your government has come up with to destroy every last bit of a chance that an entrepreneur has to advertise their business. Surely, the intentions were all good, but you know what they say about the path to hell...

[1] https://www.thelocal.dk/20190402/where-do-denmark-based-amer... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danish_Americans

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> Danish Americans (Danish: Dansk-amerikanere) are Americans who have ancestral roots originated fully or partially from Denmark. There are approximately 1,300,000 Americans of Danish origin or descent.

And the history in the article goes back to the 1600s.

I think you need to reassess your sources and position.

Agree on the sources but not on the position. Perhaps we should limit the immigration stats to the last 50 years or something, but no amount of hair splitting will reverse the overall point - which is that far more Danes immigrate to the US than vice versa, despite the fact that there are far more Americans than Danes.

Btw, nothing against the Danes. There's no country in this world where the same is not true. You hear about the Swiss tax laws, or the German unions, or the Italian lifestyle, or the Swedish health care. And yet, all those people are playing the Green Card lottery (just like I did and everyone else I grew up with).

The population of the US (328 million) is roughly 55 times that of Denmark (5.8 million).

There are an estimated 30 to 35,000 Danes living in the US [1] (not Americans with Danish ancestry, which seems irrelevant). By your own logic re: voting with your feet, it seems the conclusion should be the opposite.

[1]: Embassy of Denmark in DC, cited on https://wise.com/us/blog/how-to-adjust-to-life-in-the-us-as-...

> The population of the US (328 million) is roughly 55 times that of Denmark (5.8 million).

Your logic is reversed. Assuming that the US and Denmark have equally favorable living conditions, and the US population is 55 times larger, there would be a 55 times higher chance of a US citizen deciding to jump the fence than the other way around. The fact that this is not happening, shows that the US is perceived as a more desirable place to live.

This back and forth is so ... weird. You are trying to somehow use one metric of population and migrations to measure what I have to think is quality of life. Why not then just use studies that tried to measure this? Do you reject them because all Scandinavian countries score higher than the US?

I don't reject anything - there's no question that the median citizen lives a more comfortable life in Scandinavian countries than in the US. But there's a nuance to human nature that might be difficult to admit, and that's that people are inherently ambitious, to the point that both things can be true at the same time:

1) The median Scandinavian citizen is living a more comfortable life than the median US citizen

2) As a Scandinavian citizen, you're more likely to want to live in the US than as a US citizen to want to move to a Scandinavian country.

If you found this exchange weird, I hope you didn't find me disrespectful or anything of that sort, but more like challenging some long-firm beliefs that have been repeated so many times that it's difficult to hear any other point of view. And if you still don't agree with me, that's totally fine - I might very well be wrong. The whole point of being on HN is to hear POVs that are contrarian and hopefully thoughtful.

I think your 2) can easily be misconstrued to mean something else. At least, "want/desire" does not logically follow from migration stats. There are way more important factors that affect this metric.

Not to mention that a generally poor population are stuck in the US, while for the upper income brackets actually have it OK in the US. While in Scandinavia, almost everyone has the means to travel the world. Even store clerks, or otherwise "minimum income workers".

I would agree with that - the US population that has the means to leave doesn't have the incentive to do so, and those who have the incentive don't have the means. Conversely, the Danes who are too ambitious for the way that Denmark is set up likely have the means to leave.

It could also mean that most Americans think the US is the world, and they don't know that Denmark exists.

Or that it's easier for more Danes to migrate to the US than vice versa because they're more familiar with the language and culture of the US than vice versa.

There are so many potential reasons; it's silly to draw conclusions about what country is "better" (on some underspecified scale) based on just migration stats.

I find the argument about the familiarity of cultures very strong, and you're likely onto something there.

As ridiculous as your comment is, there has been less than 100000 people to move to the US from Denmark since our advertising laws were passed, around 70000 of them have either returned, changed citizenship or are dead.

No one surveyed by Gallup has left because of political reasons and between 70-80% of them would prefer to return home if their work allowed it.

https://m.statbank.dk/TableInfo/VAN2KVT

Oh wow, that's just silly. You're talking about immegrants from about 400 years ago. They were colonialists exploiting a "virgin" land for profit. This has nothing to do with contemporary entrepreneurship, for all intent and purposes these Danish Americans are Americans.

Continue to think the US is a dreamland while the median Dane have a much higher quality of life.

> 400 years ago

If you read the children comments, you will see a more nuanced take on those stats.

> Continue to think the US is a dreamland while the median Dane have a much higher quality of life.

I don't doubt that; the US is not optimized for the median citizen. But neither is Hacker News - I suppose a median community would be some kind of an offline newspaper with readers' comments. If that excites you, more power to you.

Well I find it immoral to optimize for high quality of life while financially oppressing the majority. If the US at least enabled high quality of life for the majority, with exceptional QOF for the few, then great, but that's not happening. So It's not about being excited about something, it's about being anti oligarchy and pro democracy and (true) freedom.

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