Want to get ahead? Move to Denmark- by Diane Roberts

America doesn't have a class system. That's a European thing, right?

Here in the Land of the Free, you can be born in a log cabin you helped to build, overcome poverty and pull yourself by your pioneer bootstraps – all the way up to the White House. Or even Wall Street.

Despite a shed-load of evidence to the contrary, many still swallow this New World fairy tale. Rick Santorum is one of the few Republican candidates warning that economic mobility in the US lags behind western Europe. Nevertheless, debating his Republican rivals before the New Hampshire primary, the former senator got positively hostile over all the talk of "middle-class" hardship, claiming that merely using the c-word somehow "buys into the class warfare arguments of Barack Obama". With all the certainty of a man who refuses to believes in evolution, Santorum said, "There are no classes in America."

t would be pretty to think so. However, the reality is that America is more class-bound than other advanced nations. If you really want to achieve the American Dream, move to Denmark. A child born into the bottom fifth on the income scale in Denmark will almost certainly better his economic situation: only one quarter of those at the economic thin end stay there. The same is true of other Scandinavian countries.

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