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"The Nordics’ success depends on their long tradition of good government, which emphasises not only honesty and transparency but also consensus and compromise."

• mbesto 14y ago
  The big government/big corp/big law collusion makes this almost impossible in the USA. I would argue that it's impossible to do in the USA because the US is a very heterogenous culture whereas countries like Sweden are a very homogenous culture. Solidarity among people is much easier to achieve with individuals that have existing and reasonable bonds with each other.
  • sebcat 14y ago
    "As of 2010 however, 1.33 million people or 14.3% of the inhabitants in Sweden were foreign-born." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Sweden http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Sweden The equivalent number of foreign-born citizens in the US is 13% according to http://www.census.gov/population/foreign/ http://www.census.gov/population/foreign/
    • cobrausn 14y ago
      The 'native born' citizenry of the US is hardly what I'd call 'homogeneous'.
    • doktrin 14y ago
      Is that a like for like comparison? In Sweden, percentage of foreign born may paint a relatively accurate picture of homogeneity, whereas the same is not true in the US. Mass - immigration is very recent for the former, but not for the latter.
      • sebcat 14y ago
        I don't know if it is. I think it can be, but it's not just about who's foreign born. It's an interesting subject. The US has been formed by immigration. Though at some point you should be considered assimilated. If my grand-grand parents emigrated to the US, are their descendants still Swedish? What about my grand-parents? What about my parents? What about me? From a generational standpoint that is. I would say most parts of the US is very homogeneous. It's just that it's very segregated. Based on race and class. You don't see a lot of rich Caucasians in Compton. I think homogeneity is about community. About feeling related. Relating to others. Empathy. State of mind. Speaking a different language than the rest is definitely a barrier. But learning a new language doesn't take that long if you're being accepted by the community. Integration. Immigration is not new to Sweden. Sweden is not a country built on immigration like the US, but I dare say that people have immigrated here for at least a couple of millennia. Look at the big picture. The native Americans immigrated too. All swedes did too. Is origin important, or assimilation/integration?
      • pc86 14y ago
        Not only that, but someone born and raised in Los Angeles is going to have nothing in common with someone born in Oregon, or Tennessee, or Michigan, or Vermont.
        • vacri 14y ago
          What? Not even speaking English?
        • legitsource 14y ago
          Someone born and raised in New York City probably doesn't have that much in common with someone from upstate New York either.
        • _delirium 14y ago
          Really? I was born and grew up in a suburb of Chicago, but have since then lived in Los Angeles, Houston, Atlanta, and a few other places, and have rarely felt that my born-in-Chicagoness was at all an important or a distinguishing factor. There are Americans I don't have a lot in common with, but it doesn't have much to do with where we were born. For example, I don't tend to get along with people who have anti-intellectual views, but you find those (and their opposite) anywhere. I think of myself as "American", but I would be hard-pressed to think of anything particularly "Chicagoan" about me. It'd be something trivial like hot-dog or pizza preference, probably. As far as geography goes, I see more differences within than between regions. I don't have a lot in common with people who live in very rural areas, for example. But e.g. a coffee shop in Midtown Atlanta doesn't feel that much different from a coffee shop in Brooklyn or Westwood. And the Atlanta suburbs don't feel that different from the Chicago suburbs.
    • seabee 14y ago
      The point I infer from your post is only valid if all second-generation+ immigrants are fully assimilated into the country's majority culture. The existence of various racial and geographical cultures would go against this theory.
    • jandrewrogers 14y ago
      It is not just a matter of being foreign born. The US is a very large country and different regions have markedly different cultures and societies with their own histories. Some of these regional cultures have a long history of not being able to cooperate, which is part of why the Federal government is often dysfunctional. There is a tendency to treat the US as a homogeneous culture when it is far from it in practice. Despite a common language and currency, there is probably a greater cultural distance between e.g. the Pacific Northwest and deep South in the US than there is between many European countries. People identify with their regional culture, whether it is Southern, Cascadian (aka Pacific Northwest), New England, the Sagebrush (aka Mountain states), Midwest, or California.
      • sebcat 14y ago
        I'm not saying the US is homogeneous, I'm saying it's not all about immigration, it's about integration and assimilation as well. "there is probably a greater cultural distance between e.g. the Pacific Northwest and deep South in the US than there is between many European countries" Right. Making a comparison to the countries in the Balkans is very interesting here.
      • purplelobster 14y ago
        This is laughable. I (surprisingly) see just as many regional differences within a single European country as in the US. For example, people from Gothenburg can't stand people from Stockholm, dialects and customs vary greatly. People very much identify with the region they're from. I'm from an island that historically had much German and Danish influence, hence it has it's own language (almost died out though) and very peculiar dialect. The island has its own customs, food even sports. Many people from the middle or north have trouble even understanding southerners, especially those with a rural dialect. The south also used to be part of Denmark for many hundreds of years which is partly why they have such a strange dialect. Sweden has its own indigenous people called Samer that live in the north, which have their own language. Sweden has a history spanning more than 1000 years, with vikings, invasions, kings and empire. Wherever you go in Europe, you'll see the same but EVEN MORE diverse. It seems you haven't really been to Europe much, or you wouldn't say something so hilariously wrong. On the other hand, I'm European, and have lived in 3 different US states and visited maybe 15. Whatever regional difference within the US that you are talking about is largely urban vs. rural, but the culture itself has become a blend of whoever immigrated, but there are only small remnants left of that. The US is largely a homogeneous country in my eyes, people move cross states here way more often than people do in Europe, because in Europe you'll get genuine culture shock, if you can even understand the language. Laughable...
    • juiceandjuice 14y ago
      If you've ever traveled across the country, you'd realize people in Seattle are much different than people in Phoenix who are much different than people in St Louis who are much different than people in Boston who are much different than people in Atlanta who are much different than people in Honolulu. You could easily the population of Kansas is as different from the population of California as Colombia is different than the population of Argentina, so I don't think "foreign-born" is a good metric for heterogeneity in the context of this question.
  • halvsjur 14y ago
    I think that's a very good point. When I was growing up in Norway, the 'others' were always far away. We were all so similar, in so many ways, it was very difficult to pit us against each other. After 30-40 years of immigration, we're now much more heterogeneous and the solidarity and feeling of community is almost gone. When I was growing up, we were taught in school that 'it must never happen again'. It's almost funny how violently people here cling to this understanding of WWII while at the same time seeming to accept all the 'this is who you should hate today' that the media here is peddling now. A previously open and trusting society, experiencing real cultural clashes, mixed with misunderstandings and fear. This is unfortunately the perfect scenario for some real dark forces to appear, and I think it's not very long until it really goes off the rails here.
    • geon 14y ago
      > This is unfortunately the perfect scenario for some real dark forces to appear Well, they kind of did, and you handled it perfectly. Anders Berivik killed 77 people (mosly kids). Compared proportionally to the population of the US, that would be 4822 people, a lot more than the 2977 victims of the 911 attack. Yet Norway didn't start imprisoning people without trial, nor harass them at airports. 77 / (5033675 / 315255000) = 4822.44781
  • pnathan 14y ago
    > I would argue that it's impossible to do in the USA because the US is a very heterogenous culture whereas countries like Sweden are a very homogenous culture. Solidarity among people is much easier to achieve with individuals that have existing and reasonable bonds with each other. This is a really important point. Solidarity and diversity are on a spectrum in some fashion. If you are too other from the other, then both of you have a hard time relating and caring about the same things. I see this again and again in political threads: "others" arguing their POV, but the reality is that both of them simply have a terrifically minimal common ground.
  • r00fus 14y ago
    Not only is the US heterogenous, but that division is constantly being driven through the slave culture of the deep south that really never died. So you have a large part of the country (13%) who are native-born, but are seen as the "other" but another large part of the country, and an institutional culture to keep this divide in place.
  • afterburner 14y ago
    Also, population of US: 300 million, population of Sweden: 10 million, only a bit more than NYC
    • geon 14y ago
      But comparable to North Carolina. You already have states. Use them.
• rayiner 14y ago
  This is perception more than anything else. I don't see many people complaining that government was too big in the "golden age" of the 50's and 60's, yet total government revenue as a percentage of GDP has been pretty stable since then: http://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com/include/usgr_chart3p22.png http://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com/include/usgr_chart3p22.pn.... Indeed, if you factor out the huge increase in social security and medicare expenditures that result from the aging of the population between 1950 and today, the rest of government is probably smaller today than it was then. Moreover, much of what seems to be "growth" in government is the result of transfer payments--things like Social Security checks that are taken out of one pocket in the private sector and deposited directly into another pocket in the private sector. In terms of bureaucratic machinery, at least the federal government has been shrinking: http://www.nextgov.com/cio-briefing/wired-workplace/2010/09/too-many-federal-workers/53775 http://www.nextgov.com/cio-briefing/wired-workplace/2010/09/.... In 1950, there were 1.44 million federal workers for 150 million people. The number of federal employees peaked in absolute terms in 1990, at 2.25 million, but that number actually represents a decline in relative terms, because by then the U.S. had 250 million people. Today the federal workforce is at about 2.15 million, while the population is at 310 million. That is to say we have twice as many people as we did in 1950, but the headcount of the federal government is only 50% larger. As for your other points: collusion, etc. We are substantially less regulated today than we were in the 1950's and 1960's: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deregulation#Deregulation_1970-2000 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deregulation#Deregulation_1970-.... Many major industries (trucking, airlines, energy, finance, communications) were deregulated between 1970-2000. With decreased regulation came decreased opportunity for regulatory capture. The idea that things are worse today than they used to be is a lot of "back in the good old days" day dreaming.
  • notahacker 14y ago
    In other words, the main difference to "big government" since the Cold War is that it's now politically astute, rather than alarmingly unpatriotic, for the Right to attack it. :)
  • andrewflnr 14y ago
    How is government spending as a percentage of GDP? Because AFAICT our biggest problem in the USA is not spending within our means.