6 ms·

What they seem to be glossing over is that homogeneity plays a large factor in this. Whether it's tribes, races or just plain ol' religion, a lot of inherent in

• schoper 14y ago
  Actually no. The non-homogeneous states in America with lots of Nordic peoples tend to be the best governed as well. Think Minnesota ("think Minnesota" is the answer to every statistic comparing Europe to the States, crime, gun control, healthcare, etc., because Minnesota is basically Yankee Switzerland on every statistic). Almost as if it's not about the legal structure, but rather the people. It's more like if you rated everyone on the planet on "does this person make the place where he lives a better place or not", Scandinavians (and their descendants) would score perfect 10s. A geneticist friend of mine has an explanation for this: he thinks that adaption to civilization makes us more nepotistic. He contrasts guest-rights in Northern Europe with "my brother against my cousin, my cousin against the stranger," of Egypt. When he gets melancholy, he will tell you that future of civilization is Mesopotamia -- where we have been civilized the longest. And Idiocracy.
  • rdouble 14y ago
    The Nordicism of Minnesota is a bit of mythology perpetrated by Garrison Keillor and the locals. It's more German than Nordic, as are the the other well run states such as Wyoming, North Dakota & Iowa. Vermont is also generally in the top five of "best governed" states and the largest ethnic group is French Canadian, not a group renowned for their skills of governance. Minnesota is not like Switzerland at all. Nor are Minnesotans Yankees. "Yankee Switzerland" is a pretty bad phrase for describing Minnesota.
  • eksith 14y ago
    Minnesota is more than 90% white and Christian : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Minnesota http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Minnesota But I have a feeling, Minnesota's "Yankee Switzerland" status has more to do with public education than with its demographic makeup.
    • dbaupp 14y ago
      Are Nordic people not "white"?
    • bearmf 14y ago
      Public education quality depends very heavily on demographics, doesn't it?
  • slurry 14y ago
    On the other hand, there tends to be an inverse correlation between a European ethnic group's IQ scores in Europe and their IQ scores in the United States. Germans and Dutch score higher than the Europe-wide average, German-Americans and Dutch-Americans score lower than US-wide average.
  • giardini 14y ago
    "... tend to be the best governed as well. Think Minnesota..." You mean like http://www.betterbankruptcy.com/bankruptcy-blog/2011/07/the-state-of-minnesota-declares-a-government-shut-down/ http://www.betterbankruptcy.com/bankruptcy-blog/2011/07/the-... From the article at that URL: "Minnesota government was forced to shut down Friday, July 1, for the second time in 6 years after Minnesota lawmakers could not reach an agreement for the state’s budget." Mmmmmmm...sounds like paradise.
  • skreech 14y ago
    You mean "Yankee Sweden", right? Switzerland is not a Nordic country.
• bbgm 14y ago
  It is a huge reason, as well is the small populations. Doesn't mean that one shouldn't commend them though. There are other parts of the world with small, homogeneous populations and they havent' done the same.
• slurry 14y ago
  Are the Nordic countries notably more homogeneous than Portugal, Greece, Montenegro, the 26-county Irish state, or Tunisia?
• rdouble 14y ago
  Most countries are relatively homogeneous. Some of the most homogeneous countries are the most horribly governed: North Korea, Albania, Algeria, Haiti, Lebanon, Libya... the list goes on and on.
  • KaeseEs 14y ago
    How do you consider Lebanon to be homogeneous? The religious divide there is so deep and long-standing that it is enshrined in law, with power in the government divided along confessional lines.
    • rdouble 14y ago
      Yes, Lebanon is a bad example. I was going with the fact that most people are technically Arab, ethnically. But you are correct, that doesn't have much bearing on the actual divisions in the country.
• JumpCrisscross 14y ago
  As of 2005 the U.S. had a foreign-born population of 12.8%; Sweden 12.3% (Norway and Finland were 7.4% and 3.0%, respectively) [1]. They aren't as strikingly homogenous as one would think. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_foreign-born_population_in_2005 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_foreign-bo...
  • BashiBazouk 14y ago
    So, the US is 87.2% native American? Or are we only counting the first generation as "foreign born"?
    • lkbm 14y ago
      Looking back a single generation might be too short a timespan to get a good gauge of homogeneity, but I think going back five hundred years, several hundred years before the foundation of the nation would be far less meaningful, to the point of absurdity.
      • BashiBazouk 14y ago
        I probably phrased it poorly. I was trying to point out that populations in the US mostly come from somewhere else and how quickly each group homogenize with the rest of the population differs greatly per group and region.
        • msh 14y ago
          Everybody on the American continent come from somewhere else, humans originally developed in Africa after all.
    • dalke 14y ago
      "Foreign born" has a specific, well-defined meaning. It refers to a person born someplace other than the person's country of residence. Some foreign born people are immigrants, though "immigrant" is an ambiguous term which can include the native born descendants of foreign-born people. The term foreign born also includes non-immigrants, like temporary ex-pats working overseas for 5 years and students getting a foreign education. The term "foreign born" is used in part so as to avoid the debate you are attempting to provoke.
• pathy 14y ago
  Last I checked Sweden had a roughly the same percentage of immigrants as USA so I am not sure that is a good reason. Population size on the other hand it is clear difference but I don't know if that is significant.
  • saraid216 14y ago
    The type of immigrant matters, too, I'd suspect. The United States has 13.6% Africans whereas Norway has 1.4, Sweden has 0.8, and Finland has 0.37. [1] I have also suspected that the availability of pioneer country has made it easier for Americans to refuse integration, or the "I don't like the people here; I'll vote with my feet" effect. This is speculation, though; I don't really consider it evidence until people have studies and analyses done and such. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_diaspora http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_diaspora
    • mongol 14y ago
      From your link: "The term has been historically applied in particular to the descendants of the West and Central Africans who were enslaved and shipped to the Americas by way of the Atlantic slave trade" Meanwhile: "103,077 African-born people were resident in Sweden as of 2009." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_immigrants_to_Sweden http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_immigrants_to_Sweden) which means that more than 1 % of residents were actually _born_ in Africa, while your link refers to residents that are descendants, sometimes since many generations.
  • notdrunkatall 14y ago
    The percentage of immigrants is not the only determining factor in cultural homogeneity.
• DrJokepu 14y ago
  The Nordic countries aren't ethnically homogenous, not even when disregarding recent developments in migration. For example, there's a very large Swedish ethnic minority in Finland and vica versa. Swedish and Finnish people are ethnically very different, Swedish people being of Germanic origin while Finns having Uralic origins. There is an excellent relationship between them these days but this wasn't always the case.
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  • skrebbel 14y ago
    You're confusing language with identity. All Swedish-speaking Finns I know consider themselves exactly that: Finns who speak Swedish. Aaland is an exception though, having more of a Swedish identity, but also regionally separate.
• uvdiv 14y ago
  What they seem to be glossing over is that homogeneity plays a large factor in this. Note that there is a spectacularly heterogenous country at the top of the same list. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singapore#Demographics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singapore#Demographics
  • RestlessMind 14y ago
    I do not have scientific data about this, but shouldn't smaller territories and city-states (Singapore, Hongkong etc) be easier to govern compared to actual big countries?
    • uvdiv 14y ago
      Singapore is the same size as Norway, Finland, and Denmark. They're all small. I have no clue.
      • NiekvdMaas 14y ago
        Maybe in population, but Singapore is not even 0.2% of the size of Norway...
      • pm90 14y ago
        Singapore is not the same size as the Nordic countries. Norway: 148,746 sq mi Finland: 130,596 sq mi Denmark: 16,562 sq mi Singapore: 274 sq mi
        • cpeterso 14y ago
          But compare their populations: Norway: 5,033,675 Finland: 5,421,827 Denmark: 5,580,413 Singapore: 5,312,400
          • RestlessMind 14y ago
            I was referring to geographical size. And as I said, while I do not have scientific evidence, I have a hunch that managing same size of population over a vastly smaller area should be easier.
• unavoidable 14y ago
  Every time an article like this comes up, someone immediately pops up to say something like "the listed countries aren't multi-ethnic like the USA!" This is a meme that should die, because it isn't based in any fact, but is mere speculation. A quick look down any statistics for immigration (as other posters have pointed out) will show very little difference between the US and other "Western" countries. The assertion that multiculturalism restricts good governance clearly does not hold up to scrutiny. Canada, for example, compares well to Scandinavian countries on certain metrics (education, economy, formerly healthcare...), and nobody can plausibly argue that Canada is not at least as multi-ethnic as the US.
  • pdonis 14y ago
    You're conflating immigration, multi-ethnicity, and multicultural. The key factor in homogeneity, which is what translates to ease of governance, is limiting the number of subcultures. Scandinavia and Canada have far fewer subcultures than the US; yes, people may be of different ethnic backgrounds, but they all basically think the same. There is nothing like the US difference between "red state" and "blue state" outlooks. There aren't huge debates over whether creationism should be taught in schools. You don't have people in the national legislature with radically different beliefs about facts like how old the Earth is. Of course it's going to be easier to govern.
    • unavoidable 14y ago
      Is it the institutions that cause divisions, or is it the divisions that cause the institutions? I don't think this answer is as clear as you suggest, because a great deal of beliefs and ideologies are passed down by institutions such as schools, which are of course mostly government controlled. Is it merely a historical artifact that the US has so many creationists? I use Canada as an example because I think it's interesting how two countries that were basically founded by the same people (European settlers, mostly British in the early years) have diverged so greatly in both governance and ideology.
      • rsheridan6 14y ago
• specialist 14y ago
  More homogeneous, yes. But cultural vs ethnic. Also note the comparative reversal of inequity. During the 20th century, Sweden worked very hard to address it. Whereas since the 70s, the USA has been working very hard to undo the progressive New Deal reforms, allowing inequity to get much worse. I can't imagine a well governed state with gross inequity.
• tokenadult 14y ago
  You're going to have to be very specific about what you mean by "homogeneity" to tighten up this argument. Other comments farther down-thread precede mine in time, but I thought I would group some discussion of some of the disputed factual points here, because I agree with a thoughtful earlier comment that "This is a meme that should die, because it isn't based in any fact, but is mere speculation." Show the work if you want us to believe that this is a significant issue. Looking at a list of countries by population, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population I am reminded that Sweden is the most populous Nordic country and that the Nordic countries rank about the same in the world rankings as Singapore, an amazingly multi-ethnic country. It is hard to remember anymore that Singapore was a very, very poor country when it achieved independence (after being expelled from the Federation of Malaysia in 1965). Singapore was settled earliest by ethnic groups similar to those in current Malaysia, with a big influx of wretchedly poor agricultural laborers for plantation labor during the British colonial period. It was not expected in the pre-independence period (which extended into my lifetime) that Singapore would ever be prosperous. (You can watch a videotape of the movie Saint Jack, which was filmed in Singapore, for a reminder of the poverty in Singapore as recently as in the early 1970s.) But the early leadership of independent Singapore strongly emphasized effective generally available primary education (without at first even making school attendance compulsory) and studied the best international examples of sound textbooks and effective teaching practice. http://www.merga.net.au/documents/RP182006.pdf http://www.merga.net.au/documents/RP182006.pdf School pupils in Singapore from my generation (born in the late 1950s) grew up in a country that was extremely poor (it's hard to remember that about Singapore, but until the 1970s Singapore was definitely part of the Third World). People from Singapore are so ethnically diverse that Singapore has four official languages from four different language families. All the school pupils were educated in a foreign language (the language of schooling in Singapore has long been English, but the home languages of most Singaporeans are south Chinese languages like my wife's native Hokkien or Austronesian languages like Malay or Indian languages like Tamil). Official surveys by the Singapore government http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Singapore#Languages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Singapore#Langu... show that as recently as 1990, Singapore had no majority language among the various languages that people speak in their homes, and the plurality language category was category including more than one language, none of which are even one of the offical languages of Singapore. Yet young people growing in that generation, going to school in a language they generally didn't speak at home, received very thorough instruction in mathematics and science and other subjects. Today Singapore is prosperous, and one set of projections suggests it is on track to be the richest country in the world on a per-capita basis by 2050. http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2012/08/15/singapore-worlds-richest-country-by-2050/ http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2012/08/15/singapore...
• meh01 14y ago
  Ah, good old HN opinion as fact.