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I have a ton of admiration for Dutch society and their social safety net. They do a great job culturally of remembering to treat everyone in a very humane manne

• mr90210 4y ago
  It’s ok to wish, but don’t you forget that the Dutch government has to solve problems for only 17 million people whereas the American government has 333 million people to take care. Yes, America can learn from The Netherlands and other countries that are doing well, but it’s also reasonable to acknowledge how hard the American problem is.
  • Retric 4y ago
    I don’t get this argument. Government scales with population size just fine.
    • ryandrake 4y ago
      Exactly. Pennsylvania has 13M people. Why can’t Pennsylvania do this?
      • kortilla 4y ago
        The freedom of movement between states in the US makes this a challenge. States with better social safety nets end up attracting the low-income residents from other states.
        • l33t233372 4y ago
          There is free movement between countries in Europe. I suppose there are generally some language barriers, but to me the situation seems fundamentally the same.
          • dmoy 4y ago
            But is there freedom of access to social systems? https://ind.nl/en/consequences-for-right-of-residence-when-applying-for-public-funds#benefits-for-eu-eea-and-swiss-citizens-and-their-family-members https://ind.nl/en/consequences-for-right-of-residence-when-a...
          • kortilla 4y ago
            Nope, the countries put up significant barriers to access social safety nets (permanent residency durations, proof of working during time before that, etc). In the US you can generally establish residency in a different state in the amount of time it takes to get a USPS change of address notice and a billing statement of some sort showing that you’re able to receive mail there.
          • AdrianB1 4y ago
            No, there is only a limited the freedom of travel between countries in EU (not Europe), but not of movement. For many years people from the newly admitted countries in EU had no right to work in the rest of EU. Most of the diplomas are not automatically valid in other countries and in some cases, not at all - example: pilot license for light planes, I have a Romanian license and I can fly in Greece a plane registered in Romania, but not a plane registered in Greece. If I switch to a Greek license, with training and exams, I am not allowed to fly Romanian planes :(
          • red-iron-pine 4y ago
            Very different systems, very different safety nets, and non-trivial language barriers. Yeah you can move wherever but you're not eligible for benefits, and the hiring managers want to know you speak fluent $LANGUAGE and have the right certifications from whatever credentialing system exists there. Common currency and regulatory standards, but it's not like you're just moving from Spain to Poland, at least not without serious hurdles.
    • nukeman 4y ago
      In fact, bureaucracy benefits from economies of scale. You can only get so small (population wise) before you can’t shrink the number of bureaucrats any further.
    • sokoloff 4y ago
      Government might scale, but people's willingness to give up their own resources to help someone else does not scale indefinitely. As an extreme example, I'm much more willing to help my immediate family than my extended family and I suspect the same is true for most people. That same property extends to being more willing to pay for my local schools than for struggling schools 1300 miles away in Mississippi or being more willing to pay for support for a homeless person that I can see and interact with than to pay that same amount for one hundreds or thousands of miles away.
      • pipodeclown 4y ago
        You could easily solve that by having social/redistributions measure on a municipality/state level... The Netherlands is also part of the EU, very little social welfare measures are effectuated through the EU, most of that happens on a state level.
        • dml2135 4y ago
          If it's so easy to solve for, why hasn't it happened already?
          • Zaiberia 4y ago
            Because the US is no longer a full democracy, and the government mainly represents corporations rather than its citizens?
            • themaninthedark 4y ago
              The Us has never been a democracy, it has always been a (democratic)republic.
              • Retric 4y ago
                It started as a democratic republic but it isn’t currently a democratic republic.
    • coredog64 4y ago
      Diseconomy of scale is a thing.
    • A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
      I am not buying the assertion at face value. The bigger the government is, the harder it is to scale it. Like any bureaucracy, it quickly gains its own life, customs and belief systems. If anything, the reason small d democracy works is because the government is local, everyone is participating and invested in outcome.
      • Retric 4y ago
        The absolute worst case is you break it into independent entities the way US cities operate, larger scales can help solve problems but you don’t need to operate on them.
    • chmod600 4y ago
      Does it? People complain a lot about Congress, and a lot of those problems are reasonably connected to size. More likely, there are a benefits and costs to a large government. I doubt it's scale-free.
    • dsfyu404ed 4y ago
      No. Leadership very much does not scale linearly. It gets more expensive the bigger you get. Look at all the process at BigCo vs the lean startup. Government also has to deal with all those tradeoffs inherent to people managing.
    • jimbob45 4y ago
      This is the kind of response that makes back-end devs fume. "Why is our website going down with 100x the users we had last week? You guys must have built it incorrectly.".
  • quacked 4y ago
    More specifically the Dutch do not have multiple different multi-million strong underclasses with specific histories of dominated adversity. If you restrict the count of 333 million down to people who more closely match the financial and social background of the majority of the Dutch, you actually find a sub-nation inside America that's doing pretty well.
    • mr90210 4y ago
      America is very unique in that sense, given its scale, history and status quo, the Americans will have to find an American-way to deal with some of its own challenges. It’s not an easy task.
    • The_Double 4y ago
      The program in the article linked is specifically targeted to some of the poorer neighborhoods in Amsterdam. These neighborhoods are known for them being largely inhabited by the descendants of former slaves and colonized people from the former Dutch empire.
      • mcv 4y ago
        No, they're from various parts of the world, not just former colonies. Amsterdam has sizeable populations from Morocco, Turkey and Ghana, none of which were ever Dutch colonies. All those groups suffer from racism and poverty to various degrees.
  • hazzahzah 4y ago
    to be fair, the american government also have a bigger budget to play with. It's more of a priority issue than a scale issue.
    • mr90210 4y ago
      After thinking about such large challenges for a while, I’ve concluded that money alone isn’t enough. Money solves money problems, too much money flowing in the wrong direction solves nothing.
      • Scotrix 4y ago
        I think the issue is in regards to who is in charge of the money and what are their incentives. Overall I believe that free and good(!) basic education independent from status and location is a solution for many problems but it seems that as more capitalistic a system becomes as less incentive there is to actually educate and teach the population.
      • yadaeno 4y ago
        +1 too much money flying around just causes inflation, since the underlying resources that the money is trying to allocate remain constrained. West coast US cities are a perfect example of this, not enough housing means labor resources are constrained which is the biggest input for actually getting things done (fixing problems, creating value, etc).
  • PurpleRamen 4y ago
    It's not so much the size of the group, but the size of their problems and conflicts. USA is a very diversified country, with many different groups, cultures, interests and conflicts. Probably more than any other country in the world.
    • mr90210 4y ago
      Exactly, America is unique in that sense. China, India, Brazil and Nigeria also have +100 million people, but they are far less diversified, nevertheless, they also struggle with challenges that come from massive scale. It’s not easy.
      • tchalla 4y ago
        Oh yes, China/India/Brazil are “far less diversified”.
        • mr90210 4y ago
          That was a gross overstatement on my end.
  • cushychicken 4y ago
    That seems like an acceptable excuse until you recognize that America also has about 23 times the GDP of the Netherlands - about 15% more money per person.
    • idopmstuff 4y ago
      It's not just about dollars per person - the difference in size of the countries makes country-wide solutions much more challenging. The Netherlands are about 16,000 square miles. The US is 3.8 million square miles. Taking something like medical treatment as an example, it's not just that you have to scale up the number of beds and doctors in each hospital - you need to build many, many more hospitals, staff them, ensure they have critical infrastructure, etc. That's not to say that the US is doing even close to enough, but the fact that GDP per capita doesn't do anything to capture the differences in magnitudes of solutions required by the two countries.
      • jackothy 4y ago
        Building one hospital costs the same no matter how many hospitals are already in the country, or am I wrong? Because of this, if the USA has 23 times as much money as the Netherlands they should be able to build 23 times as many hospitals as the Netherlands. (Or am I wrong??)
        • svieira 4y ago
          Given this example, the ratio in square miles US to NL is approximately 237 / 1. So 23x the money and 237x the size leads to one order of magnitude less money per square mile when comparing the two situations.
          • jackothy 4y ago
            Good argument. So it's not about the total population size at all. But comparing GDP/square mile actually makes sense. But at the same time, the situation is nowhere near 10x worse in the US since you mostly just need hospitals close to the urban centers anyways. (Though I do grant you that quality of life for people in very rural areas will be a bit worse since they need to travel far)
  • insane_dreamer 4y ago
    Maybe if the US didn't spend about $700 billion a year on its military, it might have money to take better care of its citizens. It's not that the US doesn't have the means. It's just clear that its priority is not improving the lives of Americans.
    • cushychicken 4y ago
      The US spends more of its budget on healthcare for its citizens than it does on its defense budget. As a person who works for a defense adjacent company, I can tell you confidently that government adjacent healthcare is the closest thing this country has to socialized medicine. I do agree that it doesn't seem to be a priority. I have to assume there's a bunch of slack and waste in the system given the amount of money that goes into it.
      • insane_dreamer 4y ago
        > The US spends more of its budget on healthcare for its citizens than it does on its defense budget. Yes but most of that is medicare, most of which is really part of social security for the elderly (a very good thing, but not at all comparable to what European countries do in terms of providing access to health care for all their citizens).
      • insane_dreamer 4y ago
        It's important to distinguish between discretionary and non- discretionary spending. WH/Congress can't (easily) change the amount spent on medicare because its non-discretionary and therefore somewhat protected. It can however decide how much to spend on defense (which it continues to increase).
  • quijoteuniv 4y ago
    Not everything is about the US.
    • cushychicken 4y ago
      No, but the US happens to be where I live, so I have a vested interest in caring about it.
      • quijoteuniv 4y ago
        Yes, apologies for the short sentence. You further explain what i meant. My point is that one can consider oneself to be part of the earth, a city, the universe or a small group of tech interest people who enjoy reading HN. I find often and specially when good social system are found outside the US, the comments in HN turn immediately US centric, but instead if you think yourself as a citizen of earth, conversation could broaden. Just an idea. Thanks for the feedback to let me elaborate.
• dokem 4y ago
  The Netherlands doesn't have tens of millions of citizens who refuse to engage with society in any meaningful way due to certain circumstances from many generations ago.
  • l33t233372 4y ago
    Jim Crow, redlining, and other “official” forms of discrimination are not things from many generations ago.
  • contravariant 4y ago
    True but that is a vacuous statement as the Netherlands does not have tens of millions of citizens.
  • pipodeclown 4y ago
    Sure but isn't that a bit of a chicken-egg question? Why doesn't that the Netherlands have a huge poor underclass? Perhaps it has something to do with education at all levels being practically free and having social safety nets to ensure people don't fall through the cracks of the system ending up being homeless/destitute. I can tell you btw we do have a significantly large underclass, they just don't live on the street or in crime ridden ghettos.
    • lozenge 4y ago
      It has more to do with the Dutch gaining their wealth through colonising their underclass, instead of what the US did which was import an underclass as slaves. Well, they did enslave Africans, but they were sold to the Americas instead of brought "home".
  • recuter 4y ago
    Of course, because they didn't keep them anywhere near themselves: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Dutch_slavery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Dutch_slavery It did help them jumpstart their economical development by.. quite a lot tho and they have been very prudent with their money ever since.
  • 4y ago
• madboston 4y ago
  Hey we can help everyone out there. Just not in my backyard bro and definitely not with my tax $$ /s.
  • themaninthedark 4y ago
    Interesting thing to me is: This is a story about a supermarket doing this on their own, not with government assistance or for a tax break and not with tax dollars. The comments here are focused on how the US government should do more. In the US we have churches and other religious institutions that would help with problems like this locally but as time has gone on, their membership has dwindled. Perhaps we should take a look at this article and try to get our companies to emulate what is being done here?
    • 93po 4y ago
      This is a very libertarian mindset. The government exists (should exist) to serve its population. We shouldn't rely on private charity for the basics of a functioning society.
      • madboston 4y ago
        even the most liberal parts of US will not go anywhere near doing such thing. As the name might suggest, I live in such area and the attitude towards such things will not get any backing anywhere (government or private businesses)
        • 93po 4y ago
          I mean, food stamps are a thing. Free school lunches are a thing/are becoming a thing. Public housing is a thing. Medicare/Medicaid is a thing. There's a lot more we could do to make these systems more efficient, less expensive for tax payers, and also provide them much more widely. Clearly there's public support for them, by most, in some capacity.
      • themaninthedark 4y ago
• jiscariot 4y ago
  Seems to me the US and Dutch societies have moved even further apart when it comes to social trust/social capital. e.g. Fukuyama's warned the US about in 1992's "Trust: The Social Virtues and The Creation of Prosperity" has happened. Everything gets easier, when you live in a high-trust society--unfortunately I don't think the US has been high-trust in quite some time. The bad part is that it takes generations to build and a decades to erode. My local bodega doesn't have free groceries, but rather a sign on the door prohibiting people from wearing ski masks, because groups were walking out with merchandise.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • thunky 4y ago
    As a counterexample, I know of a church (in the US) that gives away groceries for free. It's once a month, but they allow people to take home a good amount of food, including meats.
• WeylandYutani 4y ago
  True but I wish that it wasn't necessary. There was a time when people with a minimum wage job could afford to pay rent. Now the government has to pay 10k euro to help them make ends meet.
• vinni2 4y ago
  It’s amazing how many European countries have transformed from their colonial past.
• mcv 4y ago
  This is actually proof of the official safety net failing. It's a private project funded by donations from people and local companies, not taxes. They're helping people who fell through the gaps of the social safety net. For all it's progressive reputation, Netherland has had economically conservative right-wing governments for a long time now, and vocal extreme-right parties trying to push further into that direction, while the left has been dwindling. A couple of years ago there was a massive long-term scandal where poor families of a mixed background where treated as fraudulent criminals, which has done tremendous harm, and despite everything coming to light and everybody being upset about it, the main person responsible for it is still our prime minister. It's good that the Dutch people and companies are stepping up where the government is failing, but it would be better if the government wasn't failing this sort of thing.
• theodric 4y ago
  Pity the reality of everyday isn't so friendly