Thank you for your concern.
We are not in shambles. We are doing fine.
Best regärds,
Scandinavia
To be fair even the more extreme Republicans aren’t against public education in general, just federal funding and management of it.
Those are actually separate issues, or more that the rate of growth isn’t in keeping with the increase in average lifespan. Sweden’s population is growing, although a fair portion of that will be due to immigration. I remember quite clearly back around 2003/2004 the big thing that was made about the baby being born to bring the population up to nine million. It is now at nine and a half million.
Regarding being homogenous, compared to other countries it definitely is so, but it isn’t as homogenous as you’d believe. For example, 14% of the current population was born outside of Sweden, 9% outside of the EU. And that doesn’t take into account second and third generation immigrants. The third and fourth biggest first generation immigrant groups are from Iraq and Iran.
To be honest, I am sure Republicans would be just fine with “separate but equal” schools for the children of poor and middle class children. You remember “separate but equal” schools. I mean, let’s be honest, Republicans want the kids of the wealthy to have excellent, well-funded educations and the children of the poor and the middle class to have crappy educations. They want the amount of money your parents make to be even more important than it already is. And they want the red states to be able to sneak religious teaching into biology classes at will. (Intelligent design, anyone?)
That’s actually already been addressed further up in the thread. Roughly 80% of Sweden are people with Swedish background, 20% have some other background (that 20% would include the 14% of total population that are foreign born immigrants.) That is extreme homogeneity, really by any definition. You have one group that makes up 80% of the country, I think the largest group in the United States is probably under 20%, and even then you only get there by “aggregating groups.”
Like African-Americans are around 13%, but they aren’t monolithic. That’s a term that can include first generation immigrants from Africa or it can include people with hundreds of years of familial history here tracing back through the slaves in the South. Because the United States has had significant immigration from countries in Africa, Haiti, Jamaica etc and those people are considered “African American” by the census–but even within that group there is extreme diversity.
Hispanics are almost 17% of the population of the United States, and within that group there is extreme diversification.
If you’re going by very aggregated groups, non-Hispanic whites is the single largest group at over 60% but the largest sub-group is still not even 20% of the non-American whites. Versus Sweden, where literally one single ethnicity is 80% of the population.
Even Sweden’s immigrant population is fairly homogeneous when compared to the United States, with only a few countries representing the lion’s share of immigrants.
Yes, well…whats remarkable with that is…that it doesn’t really. Buy social security, I mean. Its salted away for a rainy day, and all the considerable social security in Norway is bought by the taxes, without oil money. (Yes, I know thats not what you meant, but…
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Thats just first generation as far as i know. Saami not included, Kvæns not included, second and third generation Somali, Pakistani, Iraqi etc not included.
That…does not seem supported by real-world observation. Does complexity scale exponentially from the government of Iceland to that of Norway, with 15 times larger population? Thats a pretty big leap for exponential scaling! Does it scale from Norway to Germany with another 15 x the population? Or from Sweden to Japan with 15 times the population of Sweden? Or between Norway and Sweden for that matter. Is the twice as big Sweden exponentially harder to govern? Australia has almost five times the population of Denmark, is such scaling complexity observable between the two?
Is Italy or Greece really that much easier to operate than the larger USA?
It seems to me that the “scaling complexity” is mainly assumed to operate between the USA and any other country that might be doing better. If such an effect exists, observation would seem to indicate it is extremly minor, and probably drowned out by the economics of scale.
Complexity is not a fully quantifiable measure so it is indeed incorrect to claim it scales exponentially with population size. Lots of things go into complexity, but size is a very important and major factor. At the simplest level compare a Germanic tribal leader in the year 100 AD and his job versus the job of the Roman Emperor. Anyone who doesn’t think the Roman Emperor’s job was immensely more complex I would argue is being facetious.
China is most definitely more complicated to govern than the United States, without a doubt. India also, without a doubt.
But there are different models, India has more regional devolution of powers, which helps to make things less complicated on the central government. China has less of that. India is a democratic country, which means everyone’s ideas have to be given some consideration, so on that point it’s more complicated than China’s where that is less of a concern (note I said less, the government of China does indeed care what its people thinks, it just is not directly beholden to their opinion.)
On the whole I think China has a more complex system of government and government bureaucracy than India mostly because the Chinese government tries to be more involved in everything which causes things to be much more complex. Similarly, the Empire the Mongols put together was probably much easier to manage than the Roman Empire because the Mongols didn’t do a lot of the local governing that the Romans did. And of course the Romans did minimal local governing compared to say, how the United States governs its people.
Just take a matter like Medicare and reimbursement rates. In the United States there are dozens of regions with distinct economies, where things genuinely cost a good bit different. Medicare has to have policies about reimbursement that account for that it or it won’t work. So that either means you make the system hierarchical with a lot of different regional offices (which in itself adds complexity) or you try to manage it all centrally (which itself adds complexity.) How many people in Sweden live outside of the southern part of the country? An area probably no bigger than Pennsylvania, which is just one of the fifty states. The idea that managing a region or two is the same as all the distinct regions of the United States is questionable.
But population size and geographical dispersion undeniably make government more complex. I only suspect someone with no sense of scale would believe managing Denmark is the same as managing the United States and it all just easily scales up with population.
And of course, because of its size the United States is unavoidably heavily involved in foreign affairs, foreign aid, military projects around the world etc. This is unavoidable for a country our size. The fact that we are the sole superpower exacerbates it, but even countries like Russia or China have lots of foreign policy and foreign military issues they have to deal with. Countries like Sweden and Norway essentially have no, they barely even operate in the international sphere compared to the United States. The government of the United States has to manage probably the most complex series of diplomatic and military arrangements of any country, on top of a global expectation of being involved in almost every major flash point, on top of all of its domestic responsibilities.
Federal Germany seems to be struggling along with 80+ million.
Nordic countries tend to have a culture that puts great store by co-operation, social responsibility, consensus and the importance of the community over the individual. I guess that comes from Protestantism and a climate that requires people to pull together just to get through the winter.
That makes them very easy to govern and a natural fit for nation state with an efficient economy. They tend to pull in the same direction, have clever people doing responsible jobs and dim people doing simpler tasks. They disapprove of politicians feathering their own nests, have progressive taxes and get good services in return and seem to prefer meritocracy rather than nepotism and cronyism. Concepts that have countries like the US and UK aspire to but seldom seem to reach.
All of this is admirable in social and economic terms but…and there is always a catch…they lose creativity, innovation and cultural diversity. They are ruled by the priorities of home and hearth and the culture stifles personal expression. They cut down tall poppies. Discourage risk takers and individualism and Art and Culture adhere to the orthordox and the safe.
Yes Nordic Social Capitalism works, but it comes at a cost that means no Hollywood, no Silicon Valley, no Broadway, no Rock and Roll, no Internet startups… Though recently they have been making great strides in dark and sinister detective fiction that explores the netherworld of murder and violence lurking beneath the calm stoic exterior.
You win some, you lose some.
When consumer have money in their pockets they spend it. This results in profits for companies as they meet demand, and jobs for the people who make the products. You call it ‘redistribution’. I call it increasing profits and creating jobs.
And that’s a pretty naive model of how ‘the economy’ works. If all it took for economic growth was people having money in their pockets, governments could just print more money and hand it out, and that would serve just as well. Nobody has to do anything, everybody profits!
And that’s a pretty simplistic argument, ignoring that printing money and handing it out doesn’t create value.
It is naïve to think that cutting tax rates for the 1% will magically create jobs. First, they’re already sitting on trillions in cash and job growth isn’t exactly robust. Secondly, three decades of ‘trickle down economics’ has been shown to be a failure.
To expand slightly, almost everything government does is part of the economy. Every public good - law and order, education, sanitation, pollution regulation, vaccination and many others will have monetary exchange involved, which should be paid for through taxation, and that will affect the economy, as it should. Public goods are those that benefit/harm everybody, and you cannot stop anybody from being subject to that benefit/harm - not as a matter of law, but that it is not reasonably possible to do so. To prevent the “Tragedy of the commons” if you will, although it is a broader concept. To my thinking, that’s why public action exists and I naturally think it’s a very defensible point. Redistribution on the other hand, is simply taking from one set of people and giving to another. It skews incentives for all parties involved - those that are taken from, those that are given to, and those doing the taking and giving. It’s a pretty dangerous road to go down, and definitely one that isn’t sustainable.
Redistributing money doesn’t create value either - it just skews incentives. And the second part of your statement is pure strawman. I have said nothing about the level of taxes. Taxes should be at the lowest level that allows government to perform its proper functions - providing public goods. I don’t have a view on whether taxes in the US are too high or too low, not having looked at the matter.
Out of curiosity: Why do you ask?
I wouldn’t expect a region of the world to be in shambles unless I’d seen some news reports pointing that way. Have you read anything claiming that we’re in shambles?
Or have you seen descriptions of our societies that seem so absurdly utopian they have to be myths? If so, they are probably exaggerations or over-simplifications. We’re doing pretty well (she said smugly) but we’re certainly not living in flawless paradises.
Or did something else prompt that question?
The fact is that revenues are not as much as they need to be to pay the bills. Taxes were much higher during our most prosperous times. Are you suggesting that there was a lack of incentives? Suppose I have a billion-dollar idea? Does it make sense for me to toss it because I can only keep $700,000?
The U.S. government is tasked with ‘promoting the general welfare’, which means improving the situation of its citizens. It can do that (sort of) by putting people on the dole. Or it can create situations where people can earn money. One way is to pay for the things you mention. Infrastructure projects are needed, and they employ people. Or it can raise revenues such that the majority of people can stimulate our consumer economy by consuming. Or it can be more Nordic and provide the basic necessities of life, and also stimulate the consumer economy.
Have you considered that it may also perhaps be that bills in the wrong places are higher than they need to be? The skew of incentives from redistribution that I mention works in three different ways - it reduces incentives from those who the money is taken from to earn higher amounts, it increases incentives for people who the money is given to not earn higher amounts, but by far the worst of all, it reduces incentives for governments to do the things only they can do effectively - provide public goods.
This is painfully clear in my own country - India. Here too the constitution tasked them with ‘general welfare’. Politicians chose the socialiam route, being overly involved with the economy and redistribution, leading to decades of slow growth and misery until there were too few rich to take from, and too many poor to give to. The break with that model in 1990 saw immediate gains in welfare - the past 20 years have seen millions of people pulled out of extreme poverty at increasing rates and millions more move into the middle class. But the mistakes of the past are being forgotten quickly. Now that there are again people to take from - politicians are again increasingly taking the easy path - take from those who have, and give to those who have not. In doing this their incentive to take the hard path - fix the actual underlying structural problems(poor provision of public goods) is weakened tremendously.
Redistribution is absolutely useful and proper when the economy gets out of whack as it is now, with the one percent owning 65% of the wealth in this country. Companies and the uber wealthy are swimming in cash, they are storing it overseas to avoid taxation which does NO ONE in America good but them. In a properly managed economy we’d raise taxes, take legal actions agaisnt the board of directors and CEOs of corporations that hide money overseas, and spend the money on programs to get middle class jobs going again. Middle class people spend money, which gets the economy going. The wealthy hide money, which stifles economic growth. Trickle down economics and laissez faire capitalism are proven failures.
You seem to think companies and the uber wealthy are literally like Scrooge McDuck. Swimming in cash is the one thing the wealthy would like to do the least because it means they’re getting poorer by the minute. People with money like to invest their money to make more. If they’re not investing in the USA, that is a signal of a problem. The USA is better off trying to identify and fix the problem than to declare it will hunt down the people who want to take their money elsewhere.