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I visited Iceland last month on business for about a week. Iceland seems great statistically because there is no national underclass. Most Icelanders would be
by motoko 18y ago
I visited Iceland last month on business for about a week.
Iceland seems great statistically because there is no national underclass. Most Icelanders would be considered "middle class" today in the United States: some college, literate, aspiring to home ownership, and employed in services.
In every other country, the national statistics are skewed by some underemployed, undereducated, and often foreign "labor class" (or worse, welfare class). There is no "ghetto" in Iceland (though strangely, graffiti is everywhere). Why?
Because every modern nation was at one time "industrial," and industrial countries must import/create/preserve a labor class to work factories and plantations. But Iceland went from "frozen rock" to "modern service economy" in about 70 years.
I assure you that it's not a magical fairyland where everyone is happy. It's more like an American suburb of 250,000 (maybe in WA) where everyone is white and employed in an office... and a glacier/volcano/wind storm has trimmed away the unpleasant urban and rural elements and plunged them into the Arctic ocean.
Icelanders have the same hopes and strifes one would expect in such a suburb.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- kradic 18y agoSounds a lot like Seattle or Portland.
- Tichy 18y agoAlso, I think they are rich because of the cheap energy sources?
- marvin 18y agoThere's more to it than that, and the same goes for Norway. Sweden (ranking 6 on the 2007 index) has much of the same social structure as Iceland and Norway, but does not have the same availability of cheap energy. Sweden does have a fair amount of hydropower available, but you'll also find other countries in the top of the Human Development Index that do not have access to such luxuries. Also, notice that the Middle East is nowhere near the top of the index. Having abundant natural resources certainly helps things along if a country has good leadership, but it is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition.
- Tichy 18y agoSo which countries without natural resources are dong well? Japan, perhaps?
- gahahaha 18y agoSingapore, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Germany, South Korea, Japan, Denmark (some oil/gas), Netherlands (some oil/gas), parts of the Caribbean? Seems to be a Europe/East Asia bias going on here. In addition some of the richest states in the US doesn't have a lot of natural resources.
- LogicHoleFlaw 18y agoI wonder how the individual US states would fare if measured separately in such surveys. There really is a massive cultural and economic variance between them. McDonald's is everywhere, sure, but if you scratch the surface the differences can be vast. It's often misleading to try to generalize across the entire nation. Many of the tourists and exchanges students I've met here have mentioned how they didn't really appreciate the size and diversity of the nation until they experienced it for themselves.
- jimbokun 18y agoConsidering only GDP: http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2007/06/10/131-us-states-renamed-for-countries-with-similar-gdps/ http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2007/06/10/131-us-states-re...