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That everybody pays for. And so graduates leave university without crippling debt, people get seen by doctors, kids are fed and housed, mothers and babies get time to bond, that sort of stuff. It's considered worth doing by Danes.
I would love to give up my car and simply walk or ride a bike to work. The issue of distance can be solved by working close to home. Why are some people in love with the idea of driving a car?
The sad thing is having no interesting places to drive to in your fancy 40 thousand dollar
Mercedes SUV other than the local Walmart or Target, Jack In the Box drive thru, strip mall, McDonald's etc.
Please continue insisting that mass transit is defined by having trains run every twenty seconds or so.
The reality is that Norway is less sense than the United States and I can easily live there without a car thanks to the infrastructure. Ditto for Sweden.
Your insistence that mass transit is defined by simply having a subway is sophomoric. It's a mass transit system and a system comprises of myriad forms of transit including busses, cycling infrastructure, trains etc.
We are not advocating putting a subway in Wyoming, but are advocating improving the transit options in American urban areas and MSA's which by and large are more dense than most Scandinavian cities save Stockholm and Copenhagen.
Congratulations are in order, however. You managed to name and misspell eight Norwegian cities. Perhaps in your studies you would note that actually Lillehammer and Oslo are quite close and while I'm not particularly sure the train runs three times an hour it is quite easy to get between the two via train.
Stop conflating urban transit systems with nation wide transit systems. Going from Tromsø to Ålesund or Stavanger is quite some distance and in a country with a very low population density it would be moronic to have trains going three times an hour given the populations of the cities you mentioned.
You really sure about that? even when you make Stockholm and Copenhagen magically disappear to support your claim.. you would still be wrong.
Unless if you really think this and this is really more dense than this and this
Apartment living is huge in Scandinavia, even in the small towns and cities. which creates more dense environments. in the USA single family housing dominates everywhere even in large cities, which creates low dense environments.
What is happiness? Good health, happy home life, decent job, good food, time to relax. Does it matter where you live so long as you have that?
You are on the right track, but some of your list I think isn't quite accurate.
Happiness is almost entirely derived from having good relationships with the people around you. And good health makes up most of the rest.
Having a "decent job", "good food", and "time to relax" actually has very little to do with happiness. Though they are connected to those things which do make us happy.
Particularly if we look at "decent job". What you really mean is "decent income". And why is having a decent income a key to happiness? Not because having some arbitrary level of income makes us happy on its own. You don't continue to get happier as you get richer. After about $70k a year, greater income actually lowers our happiness. And humans were happier in the past than we are today, even when we were much much much poorer. Income is actually purely "relative". We want a "decent income", only because we don't want to be poor or otherwise feel inadequate, unwanted, or left-out.
In that sense, the need for a "decent job", is intrinsically connected to your social environment(IE relationships). To a large extent, so is "good food" and "time to relax". Because when you're doing those things, you are usually doing them with other people.
As for Denmark. The benefit of Denmark is high levels of income/wealth equality. Inequality makes us unhappy.
And, because more people walk/ride bicycles, people tend to be more healthy. Though I think the quality of relationships in Denmark isn't great, and getting worse.
You really sure about that? even when you make Stockholm and Copenhagen magically disappear to support your claim.. you would still be wrong.
Unless if you really think this and this is really more dense than this and this
Apartment living is huge in Scandinavia, even in the small towns and cities. which creates more dense environments. in the USA single family housing dominates everywhere even in large cities, which creates low dense environments.
Your argument has been rendered mute by the simple fact that you have cherry picked statistics so much so that you are comparing a city of 15,000 (Jamestown, ND) to a city of more than 100,00 (Linköping, Sverige). Of course Linköping is more dense.
To calculate density one simply takes the total number of people in a country and divide that number by the total area of a country. Using this measure the US is more the twice as dense as Norway and significantly more dense than Sweden.
You are also making huge assumptions about Scandinavian culture. Apartment living is popular in Scandinavian cities as it is popular in American cities. Oslo has large swaths of residential housing and you don't have to travel far from either Stockholm or Copenhagen to find housing either. It certainly exists. I could name at least 10, probably 20 US cities off the top of my head that are as dense, if not more so than Copenhagen yet Copenhagen has far better transportation.
Not supporting public transit vis à vis the fallacious density argument is simply ignorant.
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hmmmm...
even when you make Stockholm and Copenhagen magically disappear to support your claim.. you would still be wrong. 
