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This is an important point to understand. Scandinavian countries are 1. Small, 2. Homogenous, 3. Culturally and demographically stable, 4. Economically stable.
by corporate_shi11 7y ago
This is an important point to understand. Scandinavian countries are 1. Small, 2. Homogenous, 3. Culturally and demographically stable, 4. Economically stable.
There are genuine differences that come with national scale that make comparisons of a small country's economy to a large country's economy impossible. It is similar to how you cannot simply scale up a mouse to the size of an elephant, since the mouse's skeletal system would collapse under its own weight. There must be qualitative adjustments to the bones to allow for such a drastic increase in size.
It is unrealistic for large countries to hold themselves to the standards of small countries, yet political and social activists do so in spite of the fundamental impossibility of comparison.
- cc81 7y agoSweden is no longer homogeneous. We have a larger percentage foreign born than the US for example.
- Nasrudith 7y agoSweden had an empire at one point - if they were homogenous then they would have failed at every turn. There is a reason why the Romans had political correctness and xenophobia is fundamentally an ideology for and of losers literally.
- sveme 7y agoSweden is in no way homogeneous.
- pavlov 7y agoGo back a hundred years, and the notion of Finland as homogeneous or stable would seem laughable to its citizens. The country had just been through a devastating civil war. It has two national languages unintelligible to each other’s speakers: Swedish spoken by traditional elites and coastal populations, Finnish spoken by peasants. Having just separated from the collapsing Russian Empire, few observers would give the new Finnish state good odds of surviving the decade. The last major famine was still in living memory. Progress is made, not inherited as some kind of ethnonational attribute.
- corporate_shi11 7y agoThink about what you're saying, the country was in tatters in the wake of a civil war precisely when it was not culturally homogenous. Finnish is spoken by the vast majority of the population today. Progress has been made largely due to unification. Finland would not have been able to sustain itself otherwise.
- pavlov 7y agoFinnish is my native language, but I grew up in Helsinki in the 1980s in an environment where essentially everyone I met could speak at least three languages. The notion that Finland is a culturally homogenous single-language nation is absurd to me.