"Happiness is... being Danish"

An article in The Times this week takes a look at why, even though the Danish tax is so high, the Danes have consistently come out with top scores on life satisfaction in surveys over the past 30 years.

Not only is the article - which concludes that despite Danish society's slightly homogeneous nature ("Friendliness to outsiders stops short of real friendship"), Danes are so happy because of a lack of competitive consumption - an interesting read, but the comments below (8 and counting...) make some good additional points.

Having just returned from the long-awaited long weekend in the UK, I can agree with the points about over-consumption of everything and anything. I spent 20 minutes in the local supermarket in England trying to find a packet of Oxo cubes, wandering up and down the myriad aisles before finally discovering them on a shelf above the ice cream (yes, apparently, that is the obvious place for stock cubes... why did I not realise that straight away?). I did not expect this of myself, but I actually started to praise the narrower range of goods in supermarkets in Scandinavia - now, that really is a turn-up for the books.