Thanks to social democratic policies, the bottom 60 percent of Danes are better off than the bottom 60 percent of Americans. Even middle-class Danes benefit from a strong welfare state. The only group that doesn’t? The rich.

Comparing incomes across countries poses certain difficulties: incomes are paid in different currencies, products have different prices, tax levels are different, and benefit levels are different. Many years ago, economists came up with a decent-enough way to cut through most of these problems: figure out the prices in local currency amounts for a given consumption basket and then compare those prices across countries to determine how much a given unit of currency is worth relative to the US dollar.

This is called Purchasing Power Parity (PPP). And it allows you to say that, e.g., 1 US dollar is equal to 7.985071 Danish kroner. With this knowledge in hand, it becomes possible to see, e.g., how Danish GDP stacks up against US GDP or how the median Danish income stacks up against the median US income.

Last year, Denmark’s PPP-adjusted GDP per capita was $60,551. In the United States, the same number was a bit higher at $63,543.

In 2017, the last year the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has data on the subject, the median disposable equivalized PPP-adjusted cash income in Denmark was $30,739. The same number in the United States was $35,600.

This figure is the best one we have from the OECD, but it suffers from one very big flaw: it subtracts the taxes people pay from their income, but does not count any of the noncash benefits they receive toward their income. This means that the taxes the median Dane pays toward public health insurance, child care subsidies, and free college are deducted from their income, but the value of these benefits are not then added back.

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