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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
by 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 agoI don’t get this argument. Government scales with population size just fine.
- ryandrake 4y agoExactly. Pennsylvania has 13M people. Why can’t Pennsylvania do this?
- kortilla 4y agoThe 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 agoThere 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 agoBut 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 agoNope, 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 agoNo, 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 agoVery 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 agoIn 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 agoGovernment 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 agoYou 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 agoIf it's so easy to solve for, why hasn't it happened already?
- Zaiberia 4y agoBecause the US is no longer a full democracy, and the government mainly represents corporations rather than its citizens?
- themaninthedark 4y agoThe Us has never been a democracy, it has always been a (democratic)republic.
- Retric 4y agoIt started as a democratic republic but it isn’t currently a democratic republic.
- coredog64 4y agoDiseconomy of scale is a thing.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y agoI 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 agoThe 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 agoDoes 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 agoNo. 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 agoThis 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 agoMore 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 agoAmerica 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 agoThe 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 agoNo, 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 agoto 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 agoAfter 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 agoI 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 agoIt'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 agoExactly, 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.
- cushychicken 4y agoThat 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 agoIt'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 agoBuilding 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 agoGiven 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 agoGood 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 agoMaybe 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 agoThe 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 agoIt'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 agoNot everything is about the US.
- cushychicken 4y agoNo, but the US happens to be where I live, so I have a vested interest in caring about it.
- quijoteuniv 4y agoYes, 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.