The argument usually regards education, the social safety nets, and healthcare- three big-ticket items Norwegians have agreed to fund for all that we rugged individuals think of as coddling.
Norway has large oil and gas production compared to the size of its population. That difference is seen even comparing the GDP per capita of Norway to other relatively similar Nordic countries which are similar to the US on that measure. Norway’s a great country from all I know visiting there and working closely with a number of people from there, but on economic statistics there’s a serious reason not to directly compare it to rich countries without the same relative dominance of natural resource production v population.
Also a remarkable country in some non-economic ways, for example Norway’s dominance of the Winter Olympics, and most medalists come from the central region of the country, it’s one region of several 100k people that has dominated world medal counts at some Olympics. But how do you discuss ‘imitating’ something like that?
In between those things, a number of smaller rich European countries have better social measure than the US that’s not limited to Norway. But societal homogeneity is a certainly a factor which might affect that. If neo-Puritan (that’s an American tendency we still see and not just from people who go to church 
) wokeness starts accusing people of immorality (‘racism’) to point that out, that when it’s obviously off track. One obvious factor in enacting comprehensive social welfare programs in democracies is the degree to which voters more likely to pay in identify with recipients in the programs. And that’s higher if the recipients are of the same ‘tribe’. And Nordic countries can probably be described somewhat as highly advanced tribal societies. Also the woke themselves say ‘race’ is the reason a lot of Americans oppose that kind of social welfare system. How can you then say it’s ‘racist’ to point that that kind of social division is part of what prevents such programs gaining acceptance?
And it’s not just about social welfare spending. Nordic countries tend to have higher trust of strangers which is a key component of ‘social capital’. That tends to be lower when strangers in your country are more likely to be members of other groups. This appears to be basic human nature.
And going in the opposite direction of unreasonable comparisons, why can’t Norway create various whole new industries like the US has in recent decades? Well to start with obviously it’s just a lot smaller in population, but that’s also probably an area where ‘diversity is our strength’ is actually true in the US. I reiterate that this is a ridiculously unfair comparison to Norway, but I’m not sure the comparisons which say ‘Norway is better’ are all that relevant in practical reality, even if one argues they aren’t quite as unfair. The two countries are apples and oranges, is the point.
There are ways in which ‘diversity is our strength’ is true in the US and ways in which it’s not IMO. It’s petty intellectual dictatorship I believe to try to shut people up on questions like this by wielding the ‘R’ word and similar neo-Puritan over-moralizing of politics/policy discussions.
You don’t have to guess or mischaracterize what I was claiming. I claimed that Sweden has a larger foreign-born population than the US. Wikipedia puts it at 14.3% for the year 2010. Reuters puts that same figure at 13.7 for the US in 2017. Sweden has more foreign-born people than then US, period.
My intention in demonstrating this is to show that Sweden isn’t a pure ethno-state. If you weren’t claiming that, cool, I post it for the benefit of people who lean on Sweden’s alleged ethnic purity as an excuse for why their socialism works as it does.
This is an incoherent, ranty wall of text. If you’re not going to distill your point, I’m not going to do it for you, and I don’t appreciate being indirectly called an idiot.
Which part of “61% is of a vaguely defined category” implies that whites are monolithic?
That’s part of the point I was trying to make- ethnic Norwegian is well defined, while “white” is not, and neither is “black”, “Hispanic”, “Asian” or even Native American- that term encompasses a whole lot of separate groups which may not have a lot in common, geographically, socially, culturally or in terms of income.
And what **Corry El **said is what I was getting at- it’s not an explanation either way, but it is something that’s almost certainly a factor for many reasons- that makes it easier in Norway to get things done.
I don’t doubt that having a socially collectivist attitude a-la Norway is easier when everyone’s more or less the same, than if you have dozens of separate groups with different goals, starting points and success criteria.
That doesn’t mean that either country is doing things wrong, it just means that the conditions are different, and that what’s good and works in one, may not work in the other for various reasons, including having a homogeneous population.
But if all of us Americans were African-American, or Latinx, or whatever, and we replaced that scummy Caucasian majority with a more deserving ethnic group, we could have a theoretically easier-to-govern population. It wasn’t proposed that white people are easier to govern, only that homogenous groups are. So I understand how the OP doesn’t intrinsically see their position as racist.
I find the arguments made in this thread convincing, however, so I concede that the bump’s position was indeed tainted with racism. However, I can easily believe that bump truly didn’t mean it that way at all. As long as they are open to understanding the perspectives offered in this thread, surely we can cut bump a break and agree that the intent wasn’t racist.
Again, this is just accepting the proposition, by racists, that homogeneity is a positive good, even if you narrowly define this “positive good” down to something relatively small like “consensus is easier”. Why are you just accepting this narrative as if it’s self-evident? It’s not.
No its not, unless you think ethnic Norwegians lack the same kind of demographic differences that distinguish American whites from each other.
U.S. was not founded on socially collectivist principles, so even if the country was full of 100% European descendants, it’s unlikely we’d have a system radically different than the one we have.
If I thought you were an idiot I wouldn’t respond to you. If you thought that was indirectly aimed at you then my apologies. You should know me well enough to know I’d just say your points were idiotic if I thought they were, and THAT would indirectly be saying you are an idiot for making them. If you don’t want to deal with the rant wall, that’s fine. As to your actual point, to me it’s playing with stats to try and spin a narrative. Sweden is mainly comprised of Swedes, regardless of spinning the stats. They certainly have more of a percentage of ethnic Swedes then the US has of ANY type of ‘white’ person. It’s only if you aggregate every type of ‘white’ person in the US into one big group that you can even talk about this stuff.
For all intents and purposes, Sweden IS a homogeneous ‘ethno-state’ (in more than just ethnicity, as the majority are also Lutheran…over 87%) though I’m sure you can spin what ‘pure’ means. Of the 10 million odd Swedes nearly 8 million are ethnic Swedes, with the foreign born non-ethnic Swedes making up less than 2 million (which is how your cite is spinning the stats…I mean, that’s 20% of the population!!)…many of those, of course, are Finns (with Norwegians and Danes making up many more, as well as a smattering of Turks, Greeks, Yugoslavs, etc etc) , which are very similar. The US, by contrast, has nothing like 80% of our population being anything like homogeneous unless you lump all ‘white’ people into the same basket. If you don’t do this (which Sweden doesn’t do, which is where your cite is saying they have such a large ‘foreign born’ population from…many being from other Scandinavian countries) then I believe Germans are the largest single ethnic group in the US…making up a whooping 12% of the population of the US.
Dang, I wrote a long, very convincing post, and it got lost somehow. I will try to summarize.
Arguments that tell other people how good they have it are often on shaky ground. bump, I can’t tell for sure, but your expertise in Norway seems to relate to seeing how white the country looks overall and extrapolating from that.
Well, imagine a provincial American who parachutes into Belfast in 1988 and concludes, “Wow, everyone here is a white Christian – this must be a very unified society!” What I’m saying is, if one doesn’t know how Norwegians view their own divisions in their society, one should not assume that their race/ethnicity unites them.
I have more to say but for some later time. Bottom line is, I think you made an argument from ignorance because of the massive assumptions you have made about Norwegian and American society, and absolutely 100 percent for sure it touched on racist propaganda, whether you intended to reflect that or not.
ETA: but let me add one other thought: there’s plenty of Americans who think that we ought to be united by the fact that we are Americans. Maybe whatever unity Norwegians enjoy is because they have embraced the fundamental worldview of what meaning a Norwegian means, in terms of how ordinary people relate to their state, careers, family, society, etc. that has no significant bearing on the color of their skin. In other words, maybe they are doing better on building and sustaining a national ethos that we aspire to.
One thing being potentially positive about homogeneity doesn’t mean everything is. Picking an example where it’s advantageous therefore isn’t a ‘narrowing down’ of a position that it’s advantageous in all respects.
For one obvious example of advantage to heterogeneity in US history there wasn’t a way to as quickly fill the US with an overwhelming number of Europeans, for ‘taming’ the continent, unless they came from a lot of places in Europe. Places which didn’t view themselves as monolithic by any remote stretch. That was ‘strength in diversity’ quite literally, assuming we’re willing to view US history as not itself too much ‘tainted with racism’ to take any pride in. Anyway the European settlers were more able to accomplish the share goal of many of them, to establish a large European population country in a large land mass, than if they’d insisted newcomers had to be British, or Protestant or other limitations some of them believed were appropriate.
But if you look at the political history of the home town of multiple generations of my family, NY, I don’t see how anyone can contend that ethnic politics haven’t and don’t introduce an element of friction, again even looking to the mainly ‘white’ past, rotating alliances/rivalries of Irish, Italians and Jews (Poles, etc. Bay Ridge in Brooklyn used to be heavily Norwegian). NY is a great city, but consensus among people with strong and diverse group identities is harder. That seems like basic reality to me, and I’m not dissuaded from feeling so by the your tactic of calling it ‘the argument of racists’.
Your thinking may suffer from the imagined slippery slope of starting with an imagined prescription (‘let’s get rid of all the X’s’) and sliding that back to trying to shout down descriptions of reality as ‘the argument of racists’. Typically harder to get consensus among people with multiple group affiliations than within one of those groups. I think that is pretty close to ‘self evident’.
How much that factor describes the totality of differences in social conditions in one very large country (US) v one quite small and highly natural resource rich for its population country (Norway) is a lot more complicated. My position on that comparison is mainly that it’s not very useful because it’s so complicated, and especially considering Norway’s outlier status in basic economic stats due to oil and gas as compared to countries much more similar to it (the other Nordic’s) than the US is.
And by the exact same token, the notion that Norway is somehow in constant and complete agreement with itself and there are no tensions whatsoever because they’re mostly white folk is blinkered to hell. There are plenty of sub-groups within Norwegian culture, with the very same political, moral, religious divides. Norway isn’t exceptional any more than the US is exceptional.
Straw must be on sale. No one, as far as I know, said that Norway has ‘no tensions whatsoever’, or even is in complete and total lockstep. But a question for you…should be a softball one. What percentage of Norway’s population disagrees with their county’s policies with respect to core issues such as their stance on social programs, spending, funding of government programs, etc? Is it 40% or more? :dubious:
There are certainly different political parties in Norway, but to what extent are they at odds with the core beliefs in the country? Seems to me the majority of the differences between mainstream parties hinge around immigration, not spending per se. Even their more fringe parties seem to be in agreement, broadly, about most of their core stances. Sure, where the bar is set differs…a bit…but not that there is a bar at all nor is where they think it should be radically different. So, what do you see as the great divides? What is the great ‘political, moral, religious divides’ you mentioned in Norway, especially between their ethnically Norwegian population?
XT, do you think a country that has a widely agreed upon national identity and a multiethnic population can exist and prosper?
It seems you think that it can.
But when a country isn’t meeting its full potential, seems like there is a gravitation to the simple answer of “oh, multiethnic state, tsk tsk!” as opposed to looking at the actual issues that divide us.
This isn’t just about America and race. I’d say that a strong majority of Americans would think that the Middle East conflict or the Troubles were religious conflicts (tsk tsk!) when they are/were not.
Is this agreement due to ethnic and cultural homogeneity or is it because the country’s populace hasn’t had pro-capitalism, anti-socialism rhetoric beaten into its collective ass since 1776?
Absolutely I do. The US itself is a good indicator of that, or Canada if you prefer. I think that such a bond, such history and identity can be forged over time. There IS a US identity, after all, a common story or narrative that binds us together as one nation (I, of course, don’t believe in that under god part, but mmv).
The thing is, it’s just harder for some things if we don’t have generations of shared culture, history, language, and all the other things that make up a shared ethnicity such as exists in many nations. In some ways that’s a good thing, for us, as we can be more flexible, more changeable, more open to new ideas. In some it can be a trial, as it’s harder for us to agree on things like where the bar should be. We do (well, mostly) agree there should BE a bar, but where it should be and for who is much more variable than for countries where they have a more homogeneous population.
I’m not sure where you were going with the American race thing or the middle east. Honestly, the majority of their issues are because the Europeans decided where the boundaries would be, and forced them to those boundaries even when they didn’t and don’t make any sense. That’s the root of many of their issues, IMHO. They don’t have a shared ethnicity or history in many cases, as their thinking is more tribal or regional, but not in the arbitrary boundaries the Europeans decided they would be in…and that causes a lot of issues, especially when they were forced into such a merger instead of coming to it on their own. This is, of course, a gross oversimplification, but trying to put it in the context of this thread.
Ironically, I’d say Norway is every bit as capitalist as the US is…probably even more so. And THEY think they are capitalists as well. It’s funny that you put it in these terms, though. It’s also funny that you think the US has had this somehow beaten into us since 1776, instead of something we ramped up basically in the late 19th century or early 20th.
Well it’d be easier for me to answer this question if you’d define what you think “the core beliefs” of Norway are. Because um… I dunno about you, but I wouldn’t know what the core beliefs of my country (France) are or would be, nor what the core beliefs of the US of A are come to think of it.
Like, I think I could possibly get a majority of French people to agree with the sentence “France is a country that exists and has reasons to keep existing” :p, but past really basic stuff like that, pfooie, y’know ?
As for political rifts in Norway, well, immigration as you say is a big one (there are some insanely racist far-right groups) which doesn’t map to “race” as much as “culture” (e.g. Sami and Poles are white, but oooh boy do they get flak from Norwegian nazis) as is the rise of far-right assholes. You know those guys, you’ve got them too and the Norwegian ones both come from the same mold of unsatisfied entitlement, and have the same ideas - anti-feminism, anti-gay, anti-immigration, anti-Jews etc… Suffice to say they have a huge racism issue towards non-whites (and non-Christians) as well.
Even the mainstream culture is… I’m not sure what the right word would be - it’s not quite patriotism as much as a giant pride and sense that they have the best country and system there is or could ever be ; which in turn both blinds them to real issues the country faces and makes them real aggro against anyone trying to rock the boat or even just *point *the issues. In many cases they also struggle with “Not Invented Here syndrome”.
The current government is *very *non-socialist, the Prime Minister is a lady in the mold of Thathcher who’s intent on rolling back public spending and promoting trickle down free market nonsense (like neoliberals do everywhere, basically) which is somewhat unpopular and has prompted the minority Christian Democrat party to waver in its support of the Conservatives. They’re kind of the kingmakers at this point because the Conservatives don’t have a majority and their rise is fairly recent - if the KrD jump shit, the Conservatives are done. PM Erna’s government faced a crisis as recently as last August due to the left coalition’s opposition to a new transport policy (something about a solution to too many road tolls I think? Transport infrastructure in general is kind of shit from what I understand) and she had to essentially give her supporters in minority parties (like the Christian Dems) an ultimatum : either vote with us, or we’ll kick your guys out of our government. Much like Thatcher (or Macron), she has also been accused of enacting policies that favoured the rich more than the rest of society.
Another Big Question is the future of the oil fund - as you might know, Norway controls big oil fields and they are, for the most part, nationalized with the proceeds of oil extraction being lumped into a national fund that is in part used to fund social programs, and in part invested around the world. However there are growing concerns with that wrt. climate change, and wrt “even if we do make sure the fund is invested ethically, is it ethical to have one at all when the oil itself is going to be used to make problems worse ?”. As well some of the conservatives want to privatize the oil altogether because greed is good. And then there’s of course the question of “what do we do when the oil runs out ?”
There’s the usual urban/rural divide, the rural parts of the country depopulating rapidly and having worse access to technologies (like high speed internet, hospitals, public transport, etc) which in many places is getting quite dire. And that’s kind of a problem because the majority of the country’s population is rural. Meanwhile big cities get more and more expensive to live in, housing prices and rents keep climbing… stop me if you’ve already heard that one :). In addition, food costs and poor food diversity are seen as problems.
The police is increasingly coming under fire for its use of solitary confinement even absent trials - they have larger leeway in action and repression than some would like. Cannabis legalization is also a wedge in that regards (because contrary to the popular perception of Scandiwegia as an all tolerant, socially progressive free-for-all ; Norwegian mainstream culture is pretty hardcore Christian fuddy-duddies which frustrates the more atheistic among them) - and on the flipside they have an alcoholism problem although not as bad as Finnland.
On the Generation Wars front, the 30-and-younger who’ve been influenced a lot by American media are starting to reject the Janteloven, that is to say culturally enforced conformity and looking down on personal ambition or greed. There’s a bit of sky-is-falling concern that the very “socio-cultural homogeneity” that the older generations believe held the country together for so long is breaking down. That being said, to which extent Janteloven ever was an actual Thing at the national level, as opposed to your run of the mill small-town attitudes & philosophies is up for debate. I’m sure one could make parallels to podunk Appalachians thinking Our Billy has become very uppity ever since he came back from college, or solving a dispute between people with “I know your father, boy !”.
That tension-y enough for you ? 
I wonder if there’s some backwards truth to it, that it’s first cousin to something important.
We don’t have lots of problems because we’re heterogeneous. We’re heterogeneous, and we have lots of problems, because our nation was founded in chattel slavery, and we’re still dealing with the repercussions of that. Race theory was basically invented to justify chattel slavery, and it’s an amazingly self-perpetuating system over time, outlasting slavery by a century and a half and counting. This system is still used to prop up a class structure in the US that depends on and creates a racial underclass.
Norway’s got 99 problems, but a centuries-old formalized system of race-based discrimination against its own citizens isn’t one.
Oops, that would be “jump ship”, not “jump shit”
Eighty-seven percent of the US population was born here. The vast majority of Americans have a shared experience that goes back generations. As mentioned before, Sweden has more foreign-born people in it.
So again - why should we jump to the conclusion that race is the problem here? Why are we afraid to question whether our ideas are good and working, and instead jump to the conclusion that the problem is race?