So tell me which ethnicity of humans in the United States has a problem with improving access to child care.
One can’t say that ethnicity is the problem, and then fail to provide more details on why it is so.
That’s because you are equating ethnicity with shared outlook and common goals. It’s not. The US ‘ethnicity’ doesn’t exist, it’s pockets of very different groups or tribes, and there is a ton of socio-economics layers in the mix. They aren’t even sharing goals or outlook with the groups they came from…now it’s shared goals and outlooks with small pockets of people who they feel are like them (this crosses ethnicity in the US to a point, and is more aligned with economic and social status).
So, in theory and for small groups, there ISN’T a problem with, say, improving child care…child care in very vertical places and regions IS very good. As good as Sweden. It’s when you try and expand that to encompass a continent sized nation that the model doesn’t work (even expanding this to a large state it breaks down). Not because of the Swedish Americans, or the Irish Americans, or the Black, Latino or Asian Americans…but because we are talking about a relatively young country composed of wildly varied groups who don’t have the same close nit history, goals, outlook or world view as a few million Swedes in a very small corner of Europe.
Interested readers might take a look at George Lakey’s book, Viking Economics: How the Scandinavians got it right, and how we can, too!” for the history and a clear look, warts and all, about what is going on there. I don’t think the size and diversity of the US is the big issue: look at Canada. And think, “decentralization.” You don’t need a single universal standard applied by Washington, though you may need federal tax money.
WTF? First the US can’t have nice things because we aren’t ethnically homogenous (see posts 11 and 14 where that is outright stated, and 15 where it’s kind of raised though not as directly) and now ethnicity doesn’t exist in the US?
You have totally lost me.
Percentage of foreign-borne citizens: Australia 33, Switzerland 29, New Zealand** 25**, Canada 22, Sweden 18.5, USA 14, Norway 14, Belgium 13, Iceland 11, Denmark 9.
I don’t really think the setup in Switzerland, Canada etc works that different from Sweden. And the US is actually less diverse than a lot of them. This notion that the US is more diverse is an artifact of perception: The US sees ethnic differences in terms of skin color. Very visible and easy to notice. But European fault lines lie along other differences.
From the American perspective, this debate in the 1980s could easily have argued that homogeneity and lack of ethnic differences was the reason why Yugoslavia was doing better than other Communist nations.
XT didn’t say that ethnicity doesn’t exist in the US, they said that there is no one ethnicity in and for the US, as there is in Sweden.
Consider: if Sweden is largely homogeneous, then if they have “Us” and “Them” feelings, “Them” are mostly somewhere outside the country. In the US, “Them” can be across the street.
Also the size of the population matters. 10 million people of mostly the same background is a lot more cozy than 300 million people of highly varied backgrounds. People generally have no problem taking care of people who are close to them when they’re in trouble. But they do have problems taking care of people about whom they know very little, and may actively dislike. When it comes time to vote, these things matter.
Regarding the homogeneity of Sweden: I have read (no cite, sorry) that many Swedes have problems with the idea of refugees who not only aren’t Swedish, but who don’t want to give up their ethnic identity and try to become Swedish. In some ways this is more difficult for Sweden than the US, except that they seem to have made up their collective minds to try to accept refugees anyway. Any Swedes or anyone with better knowledge of this issue, please let me know if this is not correct.
That’s because, I suspect, you are trying to score points in some game or something along those lines. I didn’t say the US can’t have nice things… we clearly do. I said we can’t be just like Sweden…we clearly aren’t. I gave the explanation that I think best fits the data. Ethnicity certainly does exist in the US…but it’s not the same as what is ethnicity in Europe (clearly saying there is none was a point of confusion and I should have been more clear…I’m not writing my doctoral dissertation though, just responding quickly on a message board between meeting to a threat that vaguely interests me). European French aren’t anything like American French, yet Americans with French ancestry still say they are French American. Swedish Americans are the same. As are Chinese Americans, or Japanese Americans. Hell, I’d say that East Coast Swedish Americans aren’t that similar to West Coast Swedish Americans (wrt shared history, outlook, view point or much else outside of broadly being ‘Americans’ and ‘of Swedish ancestry’), or those that live in the central states, or the northern states, or the southern states. Ethnicity doesn’t mean the same thing in the US as it does in Europe…you might say our ethnicity is more, um, black and white…but it’s also differently nuanced. But it’s also more mixed up in socio-economic class, yet it’s not class as the Europeans think of it either.
If you and the others saying similar things want to believe (and I use that word deliberately) that the US could be just like some small (or even large) European country, and it’s all the <insert whatever boogie man you think is the cause> fault, well, knock yourselves out. I don’t think there is another nation quite like the US…the one I can think of that would be closer would be Canada, and even there the differences are stark…so I don’t believe what works for them will work for us en masse. Small parts adopted in? Yeah…but then, we have done a lot of that already. We just haven’t done it across the board for our massive, continent sized nation comprised of people from all over the world but with uniquely American (and parsed even finer, so American from X state and Y county and Z city…and, hell, A neighborhood) outlook and view point.
I’m not trying to score points, your terms were clearly confusing. I appreciate you trying to clear it up.
But you all are clearly dancing around an issue: you say ethnic diversity makes it harder for us to enact certain policies. I ask who/what this is in reference to, and I get responses that beg the question: “You see, Sweden is homogeneous and we aren’t.” And around and around we go!
You can’t have it both ways: say that Sweden is homogeneous and therefore they can reach accord on all these policies, X Y and Z; and then say we are heterogeneous and therefore we can’t do the same… without laying out with some more specificity what the fractures are within our heterogeneous ethnic society and how those relate to specific policies.
For example: reparations for slavery. I’m making up these numbers, but if you told me that 90% of white people are against it, 80% of Hispanics are against it, but 70% of African Americans are for it, then yeah – I can see that a heterogeneous ethnic society has a relationship to policy.
But I don’t think anyone here seems willing to make that case. It’s just repeating an unsubstantiated, “they are all the same, and we are different, so our diversity means we can’t agree – don’t ask me to explain!”
ETA: to say it another way, you keep on asserting that correlation is causation. I want you to substantiate that. Otherwise, you might as well be arguing that we have too many pickup trucks and baseball diamonds to possibly improve our child care policies, since we have way more of those two things than Sweden does.
I don’t even think it’s a racially-oriented thing. We have enough diversity just in cultural backgrounds and geographic location/history to cause plenty of issues.
For example, I’m a white male from Texas, who is predominantly descended from German (Texas German on one side, Pennsylvania Dutch on the other), Scots-Irish and English immigrants.
Other than being “white”, I probably don’t have all that much in common as far as political concerns with a white Irish-descent guy from Boston or a white Italian-descent guy from Chicago. And to your point, I probably have some similar and a lot of different concerns from the black people who live in apartments a mile from my home, and both of us probably have somewhat different concerns from the hispanic immigrants who live a couple of miles from us.
That’s the point I’m trying to make- we’re a BIG country and a diverse country. It would be trivial to get 10 million like minded people on board with just about any political stand here (the entire population of Sweden), but it’s a lot harder to get a majority of the various groups to agree here - wars have a way of making that happen, for example.
This would seem to be even more difficult in more diverse nations, like Sweden. Or like the other nations that run policies not too dissimilar to Sweden with numbers of first-generation immigrants up to 1 in 3 of the population.
I mean, why do you assume that it’ll be easier for a Saami Swede from Kiruna to find things in common with someone from Malmø of Iraqi or Somali extaction? Or just a 08’er from Stockholm? Or some guy from Gotland?
While the US may be physically large, it is also recent, with little time for regional differences to develop. Also Americans have had great internal mobility during the time the nation has existed. I would not assume that the regional differences are greater than nations which have had thousands of years to develop them.
How would I substantiate that in terms you’d accept? I mean, to me, clearly Sweden is full of Swedes…Swedes who are and have been a homogeneous population that have lived, worked, married, had children, died, fought and everything else together as a people with a common history and outlook for centuries, if not longer. Equally clearly, America and Americans have not. We do have a common mythology/history, sort of like Sweden, but it’s not the same. Ethnicity wise, we are clearly not the same…we have a huge number of ethnic groups, and even within some arbitrary narrow and vertical group like ‘Swedish American’ there are more differences than between groups of Swedes living in different parts of Sweden.
I think I CAN have it both ways on this one. I think we are simply either failing to connect wrt how I’m laying this out, or we have such differing view points and world view that there is no common ground. Sweden can do what it does because they are all (a majority of Swedes) on the same page wrt what they expect their government to be and do for them…and their expectation is informed and shaped by their homogeneous nature, shared history, shared view point and world view. In the US we have very different expectations of what the government is, does or is supposed to do. Hell, a quick look at this message board should show you that much. You and I are similar on some things, but very different on others. Why? Because we aren’t homogeneous, we have different (though similar in many things) world view, expectations, history, and almost certainly ethnic background (as well as perhaps different socio-economic levels growing up and today) and come from different parts of the country. And you and I are going to have different view points and world view and the rest from someone living in New York, or Florida, or California or North Dakota. Even IN those states there is often a wider divergence in this stuff than you get in differences in different parts of Sweden.
If you don’t see that then I don’t know what would convince you…to me, it’s asking how to prove water is wet. Just ask yourself…how would the US, as a whole, implement say Sweden’s childcare policies across the board. Just that. Now ask yourself…why couldn’t it happen. Is the answer just because Republicans would block it? And even if so…what does that tell you?
In relation to the question at hand, it does not matter how you perceive Sweden. In order for homogeneity to be a reason for Swedish policies and any success or ease of implementation, it is only relevant if Swedes perceive Sweden as homogeneous.
Also, it is necessary that the other nations that have successfully implemented Swedish style policies perceive themselves as homogeneous.
I very much doubt that is the case. I would believe that there could be considerably less hostility across the fault lines than in the US.
Talk about a bunch of words to just beg the question. I do not question your sincerity in asserting this opinion you’ve laid out, but I urge you to take a step back from it. You’re basically saying that you don’t know how to prove to any degree whatsoever that ethnicity makes any impact here, other than your first blush/gut feeling that OF COURSE it is a big difference!
Does this sound to you like a reasonable argument? Can I just argue that Swedes don’t favor gun rights because their average daily temperatures are so much lower? Which OF COURSE is true, they ARE colder than the U.S., on average!
If you don’t know how to demonstrate that water is wet, perhaps you should avoid weighing in on debates that involve water. Similarly, I avoid weighing in on things like agile software development because I can’t make a case for or against it that isn’t just totally based on my instinct.
Why can’t the U.S. transplant Sweden’s policies on child welfare? It would be a tremendously controversial issue because about a third of our population are strenuously opposed to social progress and policies that make life better. Another third are somewhere in the middle and might not care that much about others.
None of this is because these people are French American, or Midwest American, Japanese American, or whatever ethnic/racial identity anyone cares to pick. It’s because of a certain political opinion that is fairly common, and certainly not because of their color/religion/ancestry/whatever nonsense makes you think that Swedes are all the same and Americans are all snowflakes.
The way I interpret the homogeneous population data point is not that there exists ethnicity of people who are opposed to child care. But if there are opportunities to ‘other’ various groups, then that can be used as a scapegoat to not support various programs.
100% of a heterogeneous population could be in favor of something like child care, but when faced with the decision to exert the political will to do so, the more differences that exist across the population, the more potential excuses to not do so because of such differences.
I think the ethnicity question in Sweden is going to answer itself. The large scale immigration over the last 10-20 years is going to seriously change the ethnic makeup of Sweden. I would guess that in 20 years time we’ll see what impact that has on the Swedish social state. I don’t honestly have a clue. Now that the Social Democrats no longer have a monopoly on the government, Sweden is much less stable than it was before. The rise of extremist parties is troubling and trying to assimilate the large immigrant populations has proven challenging. If you look at all of the mess that happened over the last half year, you can see that immigration is going to be a serious challenge to the status quo.
I think that the rise of conservatism in the rest of the EU might also have a negative impact on the Swedish safety net. The Swedish economy is sluggish and jobs and corporations are slipping away to the south where tax rates are cheaper. That makes it tempting to cut taxes to deal with the problem, but Swedish social programs make that nearly impossible. What we are seeing is that a lot of the ‘cadillac plan’ government programs are slowly being ramped down. The number of Swedes turning to private insurances and pension plans has been increasing steadily over the last 15 years or so and it would be hard for anyone to say that the safety net is as secure or as robust as it was a decade ago.
This isn’t to say that the social safety net is dead, but I don’t think the picture is quite as rosy as the OP suggests and there is certainly reason to wonder about its long term prospects. We’ll see. I think the world is gearing up for ‘Interesting Times’ as the saying goes, but I’m an eternal pessimist, so we’ll see.
The question shouldn’t be “What’s going on with Sweden?” On all the relevant factors in this comparison the US lags behind most countries in the developed world, countries with substantial differences in political systems and economic success. So what sets the US aside from all of them?
I suspect at the core it’s about the US focus on individual freedom. There are a bunch of other influencing factors and historical events to have led the US down this path, but the number one propaganda tool against the development of a cooperative society is individual freedom.
“Workers should be entitled to vacation.” - But what if they don’t want it? Or what if I don’t want to give it to them? The FREEDOM way to do this is that if they want a job with more vacation they can switch jobs!
I’m not following, but if you or someone can give an example of an ethnic group in the U.S. being used this way… unless you’re talking about how Donald Trump uses race to divide American opinion on things?
So, like, the reason we can’t have better policies is because of Donald Trump? Well, shit, someone should have said that right in the beginning, and I’d be right on board! 
Again, what this is lacking is any substantiation of this, or even examples, which is what I’ve been asking for.
Sweden don’t have an underclass and also a strong federal government that can actually do things.
In the USA, it’s the cult of individualism. If you can’t do completely, and I mean completely for yourself, you don’t deserve help. Everything that might help you outside of yourself or your family is a handout. And you should turn to the church for handouts, or go beg in the street. And if you beg in the street, for god’s sake stay out of my sight. Your misfortune annoys me.
Listen to some of these people that call into talk shows, bitching about tax dollars paying for poor kids school lunches, and you’ll see what I mean.
They don’t mind tax breaks for the rich though. The same billionaires that are making their lives a living hell. If billionaires were using tax money to pay for their lunches in between tee times, that would be just fine.
Grim Render has clearly shown that Sweden has a LESS homogeneous population than the US does. Seems to me that’d be a pretty good reason to drop the homogeneous theory.