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Ah, another resident of a homogeneous country with 13% of the population of California with vast amounts of oil is telling everyone else how their country shoul

Ah, another resident of a homogeneous country with 13% of the population of California with vast amounts of oil is telling everyone else how their country should be organized. It's like the only son of a rich lawyer telling his college buddy, from the worker's family of seven: "why do you still drive that 2002 Accord, clearly my brand new BMW M5 is much better! It's surprising you poor people don't want a proper car"

totalZero 10y ago
Just about every one of us is culturally indoctrinated with a list of necessities and norms. It's interesting to see what happens when people who received different lists bump into one another.
- AstralStorm 10y ago
  About as interesting as watching train accidents. After the first few, they all start to look the same with minor variants.
enraged_camel 10y ago
What does cultural homogeneity have anything to do with the way a country treats its homeless? Also, while Norway may be rich in natural resources, so is the USA. So I'm not entirely certain how that matters either.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- mfoy_ 10y ago
  American Exceptionalism is the card being played here. It effectively means: "Our country is fundamentally different from your country, so what works for you won't necessarily work for us. Your success or failure is no reason for us to follow your example." Often this card is played despite the "fundamental differences" not necessarily being all that pronounced, or all that relevant. No two countries on this planet are identical, yet an astounding number of policies translate generally well despite that.
  - jedmeyers 10y ago
    > Often this card is played despite the "fundamental differences" not necessarily being all that pronounced How having a population of 60+ times higher and oil revenues 10 times lower as a percentage of GDP is not a relevant difference when discussing the amounts being spent per person on a a social safety net?
    - mfoy_ 10y ago
      Sure, having a larger population makes it harder to scale, however The GDP of the U.S., Canada, and Norway are all fairly comparable. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2004rank.html https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/... Norway is #11 with $68k, the U.S. is #19 with $55k, Canada is #32 with $45k. Also, oil revenue as a percentage of GDP is hardly relevant. It's not like you're only allowed to spend Oil money on social security.
    - enraged_camel 10y ago
      Again, America may have lower oil revenues, but it's a much bigger country geographically, and has vastly more natural resources. You'll have to do a much better job explaining why oil, specifically, is relevant here.
      - jedmeyers 10y ago
        Norway oil exports in 2015 even with low oil prices were still more than $5000 per person. Combined with the proceeds from the oil investment fund the revenues go even higher. United States on the other hand has to "work for a living" since it does not get 60 times more revenue from selling natural resources than Norway does. And distribution of proceeds from natural resources among the population is regarded to be fair by a much higher percentage of people than distribution of revenue from taxes on the working population.
        mfoy_ 10y ago
        Norway isn't even really spending it's oil money, so this entire comparison is entirely invalid. Norway puts 100% of the oil revenue in a trust fund and takes out no more than 4% per year. Think again on the similar GDP Per Capita rankings, and review this: https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=SOCX_AGG https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=SOCX_AGG Norway only spends about 22% of it's GDP on Social Benefits. The U.S. spends 19.2%. Breaking that down into dollars does tell a different story: Norway spends about 50% more on social benefits than the U.S. does, but you can hardly argue that the U.S. cannot afford it. To throw Canada into the mix, it spends about 17%. That's a lower percentage of a lower GDP. In fact that would imply that Canada spends approximately 25% LESS on social benefits than the U.S. and has still has free healthcare. One caveat to this is that I am comparing social benefit percentages from 2014 and comparing them to GDP Per Capita data from 2015, so take the exact numbers with a grain of salt. The argument I'm trying to make is that it's political, not economic.
- chillingeffect 10y ago
  Intense variations in local resources and culture heavily impair nationwide consensus on healthcare. Families in rural areas can thrive with a knife, saw and shotgun, drinking from clean lakes, growing food and living healthy, aerobic lifestyles. They see little need for government intervention. They barter and travel on unimproved roads with horses and all-terrain vehicles, even making their own fuel. Even in the event of a fire disaster, they can quickly rebuild on their own vast property. In denser urban areas, housing codes and other cultural laws, like riding horses, drying clothes on a line, noise and land use restrictions and sleeping in public spaces make living close to the land impractical and/or illegal. Collusion with the developed world and its government is mandatory. People in these areas are happy to invest in personal radios transmitting their consumption habits and private conversations in exchange for access to the benefits of mass production, including remedies for their own sacrificed health. In these areas, those with the ability to generate for the system do just fine or excellent. Families with cultural lag, such as the poor, badly educated and immigrants - voluntary and involuntary - have to get up to pace, learning the unintuitive ways of the modern, urban jungle. It's hard work, yet with all the access to information, it remains largely possible. The bottom layers who can't keep up get minimal assistance from the government to figure out how to get back into the system or move out to the rural areas. America is all about navigating the 1,000 shades between these two extremes.
- ef4 10y ago
  > What does cultural homogeneity have anything to do with the way a country treats its homeless? It's easier to be generous to people who are more like oneself, and who are physically closer to oneself. Consider all the people in Europe right now who may be perfectly happy to support generous welfare for homeless people who happen to have been born on the same side of their borders, but who are hostile to homeless people who just fled Syria. Or consider the difficulty of scrapping every national welfare system in Europe and uniting them under a single EU government. I contend that would be very difficult. America is more like the EU than it is like Norway. Norway is much more like Massachusetts, which has very Norway-like quality-of-life metrics.
  - AstralStorm 10y ago
    So why not solve the problem in each state separately? Add long as the problem is solved, nobody would care why. Federal government can provide the right incentives and resources.
mfoy_ 10y ago
Here comes good ole American Exceptionalism to derail the thread.
sctb 10y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12605243 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12605243 and marked it off-topic.
- jedmeyers 10y ago
  Very nice example of thought policing on HN. Original comment is somehow on-topic but this one isn't.
omginternets 10y ago
I hear this often, but somehow precise objections never come up. What exactly is wrong with what he's proposing? Why would a socio-economically heterogenious country with a population of 350M not benefit from public health insurance and welfare? What makes it such that, in principle, these social plans could not be applied in a manner sympathetic to the political and social organization of the US (e.g. by delegating implementation details to states and municipalities)? The US has very real and tangible problems with healthcare and the lack of a social safety net, yet a significant portion of Americans insist on brushing off advice from cultures that have all but solved these problems. To conclude with an analogy in a similar vein as yours, this is like watching a minimum-wage earner blowing his money on a luxury car, plasma-screen TV, XBOX and weed, and subsequently complaining that he's stuck in a rut. And when concerned, well-to-do neighbors offer friendly advice, he responds with the equivalent of "buzz off, your situation is different than mine". Yes. That's the point. Their situation is different and they know something about how to get there.

totalZero 10y ago

Just about every one of us is culturally indoctrinated with a list of necessities and norms. It's interesting to see what happens when people who received different lists bump into one another.

AstralStorm 10y ago
About as interesting as watching train accidents. After the first few, they all start to look the same with minor variants.

enraged_camel 10y ago

What does cultural homogeneity have anything to do with the way a country treats its homeless? Also, while Norway may be rich in natural resources, so is the USA. So I'm not entirely certain how that matters either.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
mfoy_ 10y ago
American Exceptionalism is the card being played here. It effectively means: "Our country is fundamentally different from your country, so what works for you won't necessarily work for us. Your success or failure is no reason for us to follow your example." Often this card is played despite the "fundamental differences" not necessarily being all that pronounced, or all that relevant. No two countries on this planet are identical, yet an astounding number of policies translate generally well despite that.
- jedmeyers 10y ago
  > Often this card is played despite the "fundamental differences" not necessarily being all that pronounced How having a population of 60+ times higher and oil revenues 10 times lower as a percentage of GDP is not a relevant difference when discussing the amounts being spent per person on a a social safety net?
  - mfoy_ 10y ago
    Sure, having a larger population makes it harder to scale, however The GDP of the U.S., Canada, and Norway are all fairly comparable. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2004rank.html https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/... Norway is #11 with $68k, the U.S. is #19 with $55k, Canada is #32 with $45k. Also, oil revenue as a percentage of GDP is hardly relevant. It's not like you're only allowed to spend Oil money on social security.
  - enraged_camel 10y ago
    Again, America may have lower oil revenues, but it's a much bigger country geographically, and has vastly more natural resources. You'll have to do a much better job explaining why oil, specifically, is relevant here.
    - jedmeyers 10y ago
      Norway oil exports in 2015 even with low oil prices were still more than $5000 per person. Combined with the proceeds from the oil investment fund the revenues go even higher. United States on the other hand has to "work for a living" since it does not get 60 times more revenue from selling natural resources than Norway does. And distribution of proceeds from natural resources among the population is regarded to be fair by a much higher percentage of people than distribution of revenue from taxes on the working population.
      - mfoy_ 10y ago
        Norway isn't even really spending it's oil money, so this entire comparison is entirely invalid. Norway puts 100% of the oil revenue in a trust fund and takes out no more than 4% per year. Think again on the similar GDP Per Capita rankings, and review this: https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=SOCX_AGG https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=SOCX_AGG Norway only spends about 22% of it's GDP on Social Benefits. The U.S. spends 19.2%. Breaking that down into dollars does tell a different story: Norway spends about 50% more on social benefits than the U.S. does, but you can hardly argue that the U.S. cannot afford it. To throw Canada into the mix, it spends about 17%. That's a lower percentage of a lower GDP. In fact that would imply that Canada spends approximately 25% LESS on social benefits than the U.S. and has still has free healthcare. One caveat to this is that I am comparing social benefit percentages from 2014 and comparing them to GDP Per Capita data from 2015, so take the exact numbers with a grain of salt. The argument I'm trying to make is that it's political, not economic.
chillingeffect 10y ago
Intense variations in local resources and culture heavily impair nationwide consensus on healthcare. Families in rural areas can thrive with a knife, saw and shotgun, drinking from clean lakes, growing food and living healthy, aerobic lifestyles. They see little need for government intervention. They barter and travel on unimproved roads with horses and all-terrain vehicles, even making their own fuel. Even in the event of a fire disaster, they can quickly rebuild on their own vast property. In denser urban areas, housing codes and other cultural laws, like riding horses, drying clothes on a line, noise and land use restrictions and sleeping in public spaces make living close to the land impractical and/or illegal. Collusion with the developed world and its government is mandatory. People in these areas are happy to invest in personal radios transmitting their consumption habits and private conversations in exchange for access to the benefits of mass production, including remedies for their own sacrificed health. In these areas, those with the ability to generate for the system do just fine or excellent. Families with cultural lag, such as the poor, badly educated and immigrants - voluntary and involuntary - have to get up to pace, learning the unintuitive ways of the modern, urban jungle. It's hard work, yet with all the access to information, it remains largely possible. The bottom layers who can't keep up get minimal assistance from the government to figure out how to get back into the system or move out to the rural areas. America is all about navigating the 1,000 shades between these two extremes.
ef4 10y ago
> What does cultural homogeneity have anything to do with the way a country treats its homeless? It's easier to be generous to people who are more like oneself, and who are physically closer to oneself. Consider all the people in Europe right now who may be perfectly happy to support generous welfare for homeless people who happen to have been born on the same side of their borders, but who are hostile to homeless people who just fled Syria. Or consider the difficulty of scrapping every national welfare system in Europe and uniting them under a single EU government. I contend that would be very difficult. America is more like the EU than it is like Norway. Norway is much more like Massachusetts, which has very Norway-like quality-of-life metrics.
- AstralStorm 10y ago
  So why not solve the problem in each state separately? Add long as the problem is solved, nobody would care why. Federal government can provide the right incentives and resources.

mfoy_ 10y ago

Here comes good ole American Exceptionalism to derail the thread.

sctb 10y ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12605243 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12605243 and marked it off-topic.

jedmeyers 10y ago
Very nice example of thought policing on HN. Original comment is somehow on-topic but this one isn't.

omginternets 10y ago

I hear this often, but somehow precise objections never come up. What exactly is wrong with what he's proposing? Why would a socio-economically heterogenious country with a population of 350M not benefit from public health insurance and welfare? What makes it such that, in principle, these social plans could not be applied in a manner sympathetic to the political and social organization of the US (e.g. by delegating implementation details to states and municipalities)? The US has very real and tangible problems with healthcare and the lack of a social safety net, yet a significant portion of Americans insist on brushing off advice from cultures that have all but solved these problems. To conclude with an analogy in a similar vein as yours, this is like watching a minimum-wage earner blowing his money on a luxury car, plasma-screen TV, XBOX and weed, and subsequently complaining that he's stuck in a rut. And when concerned, well-to-do neighbors offer friendly advice, he responds with the equivalent of "buzz off, your situation is different than mine". Yes. That's the point. Their situation is different and they know something about how to get there.