A couple weeks back Asa and I chit-chatted over the type of government featured in Star Trek. I said it was sort of a militant Scandanavia, where all needs were met and all were reasonably well off. I may, however, have arrived at such a conclusion without doing my homework. Or rather, I may have bought right into established untruths about Scandanavia's "success." This NYT editorial raises some very interesting facts about that murky land of blondes and 70% tax rates.

The study found, if the E.U. was treated as a single American state, it would rank fifth from the bottom, topping only Arkansas, Montana, West Virginia and Mississippi. In short, while Scandinavians are constantly told how much better they have it than Americans, Timbro's statistics suggest otherwise. So did a paper by a Swedish economics writer, Johan Norberg.

Contrasting "the American dream" with "the European daydream," Mr. Norberg described the difference: "Economic growth in the last 25 years has been 3 percent per annum in the U.S., compared to 2.2 percent in the E.U. That means that the American economy has almost doubled, whereas the E.U. economy has grown by slightly more than half. The purchasing power in the U.S. is $36,100 per capita, and in the E.U. $26,000 - and the gap is constantly widening."

In late March, another study, this one from KPMG, the international accounting and consulting firm, cast light on this paradox. It indicated that when disposable income was adjusted for cost of living, Scandinavians were the poorest people in Western Europe. Danes had the lowest adjusted income, Norwegians the second lowest, Swedes the third. Spain and Portugal, with two of Europe's least regulated economies, led the list.

Like I said, this is an editorial, so the numbers have invariably been spun to some degree, but it's an interesting view nonetheless.