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Comment by sremani | Hacker News Reader

Why so must fascination about a homogeneous society that has population of City of Houston? I will not take some of these articles of Scandinavian fetish any seriously any more.

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> homogeneous society [...] Scandinavian fetish

Foreign-born population of Sweden: 16% Foreign-born population of Norway: 13.9% Foreign-born population of USA: 13.1%

https://data.oecd.org/migration/foreign-born-population.htm

how convenient, to pick and make it native vs foreign born? you know better than that!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_United_State...

Diversity, as understood as a possible problem for social cohesion, is not about race: it's about culture. And the vast majority of Americans in the US have only one culture: the American one. The exception for this is first (and sometimes second) generation immigrants. That's why I use the native vs foreign born statistic.

Ah, there are many different cultures among the people who are born with American citizenship. It's common-sense to me that most of the races have their own culture. (Although, admitting that it's common sense to me makes me wonder why sociology we have to back it up.) A lot of my friends in high school were Chinese-American. They spoke without accent, and most of their families actually came via Taiwan, but their culture and values and family structure were distinctly different. Also, shoes-off in their home!

And even among whites, there are distinct cultures. I was confused why I didn't enjoy living in Massachusetts, until I read this: http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-see... and it started to make more sense. I've got Borderer roots :)

> And the vast majority of Americans in the US have only one culture: the American one.

I don't think there is one unifying American culture. There are some common cultural elements, but there are fairly distinct regional (as well as racial/ethnic) cultures in the US.

I think those common cultural elements form the American culture. Having fairly distinct regional cultures, and even languages, is not uncommon.

If the US would not share a culture, intra-US migration would be a big issue, as it is in the EU.

> If the US would not share a culture, intra-US migration would be a big issue, as it is in the EU.

Migration (and simply interaction) across some of the internal cultural divides (especially the ones closely tied to race/ethnicity) is a big deal (you know those big problems with race/ethnicity the US has -- that's a big part of them). The regional variations are less of a big deal not because the regional cultures aren't distinct, but because the regional cultural areas are far bigger than in Europe, and the US has better inter-region support structures, which -- outside of rare major crises -- reduce mass internal migrations across those regional cultural divides.

(When there have been mass internal migrations, culture clashes and problems with migrants similar to those seen in Europe have occurred in the US, but I don't think there's been a big internal dislocation of that type since the 1930s Dust Bowl.)

Convenient in the sense of that most countries don't collect race demographics and there isn't any other data,

or convenient in the sense of you having little to offer as a retort?

Convenient in a sense you cherry pick and overfit data to prove Finland is more diverse than America.

Why do you think you have nothing to learn from any society that is smaller than yours?

Why do you think that the Nordic model can't scale?

Having moved to the US from Germany, not a Nordic country, but a country with a much tighter social net that works comparatively well, I agree that it probably wouldn't work in the US. I think a social net works best if there is enough empathy in society to keep people happy with paying for those who need the net as well as keeping people from exploiting it too much. Of course there will always be someone unhappy with paying or someone exploiting he system, but it only works if that remains relatively rare. That is much easier if you have a relatively high empathy for each other which is easier in fairly homogenous populations. The US seems to have a very split society along all kinds of groups. There seems to be a strong fault line between large coastal cities and the middle of the country, racial divides, Republicans vs Democrats etc. These divides seem much larger to me than anything I know from Germany and I can only imagine that they are even smaller in the less populous, Nordic countries.

I am in the US and I would be happy to chip in to help pay for health expenses of a poor person, who has no family, etc.

What I am NOT willing to do, however, is pay enormous overhead to the the insurance/healthcare/bill-processing complex which sucks out the blood out of this country.

I bet most people in the US object not to some kind of a social contract to help the less fortunate, but to the completely broken system.

> I bet most people in the US object not to some kind of a social contract to help the less fortunate, but to the completely broken system.

I feel like there is quite a few who are fundamentally against the idea.

There'll always be a few against. What matters is more than 50% agree on it.

Health insurance is a PITA here. Physio in Canada charged me $60/ session. Here it's $240 per session. Insurance pays about 100 but I still pay $140 out of my pocket.

America has a crazy obsession of being rich that people will easily screw others to make a buck. It's a very stark difference to Australia and Canada.

The Nordic countries aren't spontaneously homogeneous though. It's because we (social democracy mostly) worked hard to make it so. As the Nordic countries are becoming more like everywhere else we also see the rise of things like populist parties and racial divides.

I'm not even sure the Nordic countries themselves think their model would scale. At least in Helsinki, they also enjoy having a low cost neighbor to the south in order to go tax free shopping.

I don't want to leap to conclusions, but this argument always seems like a dog whistle to me. What is it about cultural heterogeneity that you think would make this sort of a model unsustainable?

I've always wondered how the people that live there feel about the constant "I wish we were like them!".

Don't really know how to feel. It's kinda like it's disingenuous hype. Sure most of all these "omg look at Finland" facts are mostly true, but they come at a cost.

It's a pain in the ass to have a business or a high salary here. Everything is expensive and you could end up paying 60% taxes of your salary, after the employer pays taxes on your salary. The bureaucracy can get ridiculous too, it's like they don't want to have businesses here. The system works with a small population but I don't think it could ever scale.

Basically, if you're ok with being nothing more then middleclass, it's a great place to live, but the ambitious people who really bring in the money and pay the majority of taxes aren't living nearly as good as they could elsewhere.

I keep looking at the salaries of US jobs with my title and I'd make so much more money there, and have more left after all the taxes. Then again I had a free education and the healthcare is pretty much free and decent.

Maybe it's one of those "grass is greener etc." type deals.

Well, as someone whose life in .fi hasn't been so terribly great so far, I find the hype a bit irritating. Everything is so amazing, except for those for whom it isn't. Opportunities certainly aren't equal. "The Nordic approach of basic universal social policies—that allow everyone to fulfill their potential, allow everyone to work, allow true equality of opportunity" is just bull.

And just like a lot of other European countries now, we have a bad unemployment problem (and the statistics lie; they coerce people into various programmes that result in them not showing up as unemployed, even though they don't have an actual job). There are signs that suggest the social "safety web" won't hold up; government budget is really tight and cuts are made here and there. Benefits are not increased as cost of living gets higher. I don't know what the statistics say, but there are lots of alcoholics. And again not sure what the statistics say today, but afaik .fi has ranked pretty poorly with regard to cases of depression and suicide. Maybe all is not so well?

And then there's this touchy wtf-worthy subject of the generation that boomed after war retiring. Supposedly there aren't enough of us to fill their positions so we need immigrants. Meanwhile, as I said, unemployment is pretty sickening.

Eh, today I learned that one finnish person that played with us on the internet might have commited suicide sometimes in the past year. The nordic countries are definitely less of a paradise the hypetrain makes them

A software dev living in Finland. From what I gather (by reading HN) I could easily get 10 times bigger salary in the US, buy a bigger house and a nicer car for less than I can here.

But personally I care about neither. What I care about is a stress free life. Since I have low living expenses, the safety net would easily cover all the costs of my current life style and that life is available for everyone (barring mental illness such as alcoholism which seems to be a problem). I live within a walking distance from the city centre, my work and groceries. Public transport is great, although I don't use it since I can just bike everywhere. Or if I need to use a car I can just rent a brand new merc for the weekend. And nothing of that would change even if I never worked a day in my life again.

Also there's about zero chance of ever landing a jail sentence, or getting harassed by a cop.

So I'm pretty proud of the society we have built.

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