It's a European cultural issue. Denmark is not any different.

There are big discussions in Denmark right now about how to create growth. So the following can be applied to Germany as well I think.

I am saddened to see that most politicians thinking is:

1. Education
2. Green Tech (Wind Mills and Wave Mills primarily with government funding. Yes you heard that right)
3. Upgrading your education
4. Education
5. Innovation

All completely useless. And here is why:

1. Less than 5% of people with higher education in Denmark starts companies.

2. Green tech is not a thing. It's a term a vague one like UX. Let it go on record that the next bubble will be the green tech bubble.

What we should be talking about is technology, chemistry, biology, physics and various combinations of those.

Instead as seem to be the case in most of Europe eager to ditch nuclear (an actually fairly environmentally friendly energy source) governments are betting on specific technologies. Completely disregarding that it's impossible to get any proper economy into them anytime soon.

What can I say, sigh...

3. Denmark has a fairly large group of blue collars. Of course it makes some sense to try and upgrade them and I am sure it helps with some of them. But the battle to get a proper production industry up and running is simply futile and wont work.

First of all, the danish salaries are some of the highest in the world. Danes have some of the most protecting laws to the blue collar worker (no I am not at all against that, just trying to explain why it wont work) That means we are loosing to Germany and Poland and Sweden.

Danish Engineer ca. 40.000 DKK
Polish Engineer ca. 15.000 DKK
Indian Engineer ca. 5.000 DKK (if not less)

Just to show you the difference here. Anyone having done outsourcing knows that the quality can be different but it really depends on what kind of project we are talking about.

Second. The US lost 4 million jobs to the Chinese between 98-04. In the same period of time the chinese lost 18 million jobs to ... the robots.

Everything that can be automated will be automated and believing that we can somehow resurrect an industry that never really where that competitive is just pure insanity. Even engineers are loosing jobs.

4. Yes education once again. This is just to illustrate how much the government believe in this. Recently a study was done that showed that companies with most Phds had the highest revenue. This was then used as a proof to show just how important education is for the future of this country.

Now anyone who have spent just a couple of days on HN knows one of the biggest fallacies gets called out here.

"Correlation != causation"

Of course the other take on this story could be. The companies with the highest turnover had the most Phds hired.

The report made no attempt to claim connection between the number of Phds and the financial success of the company. No. Leave that the to the politicians.

5. According to our politicians we are supposed to grow from the experience economy and through innovation. Our cultural minister even have made a "task force" of cultural celebrities from around europe who are to travel around europe and find out how to use art as a vehicle for growth and innovation.

Yes you heard it right. This is the kind of insanity we are dealing with here.

Never mind that saying we need innovation has as little effect on the ability of a country to innovate as saying green tech creates green technology. The politicians actually believe that they can intellectualize growth and progress.

In other words. Everything that is right about SV is wrong about Denmark and my guess most places in Europe.