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Comment by tostitos1979 | Hacker News Reader

tostitos1979

What is the nature of the debt? Housing?

As an aside, I once saw a homeless man in a Scandinavian country. Someone actually stopped their car to check on them. As a tourist from NA, my mind was blown. Was impressed by that but not having to pay 10 bucks for a cup of tea :p

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I grew up in Stockholm, Sweden and used to live there until a few years ago. There are plenty of homeless people in Stockholm nowadays. There's one outside almost every grocery store in the city center. For comparison, I'm currently living in Taipei, and I can count the number of homeless people I have seen in the last few months on one hand. They probably exists but they are definitely not visibly present.

As to the nature of debt, it is almost entirely in housing. It is currently a big debate about whatever there should be laws on private cash investment and mortgage repayment rates.

Homelessness example from Sweden's public radio (2014): http://sverigesradio.se/sida/artikel.aspx?programid=2054&art...

OECD private debt: https://data.oecd.org/hha/household-debt.htm

EDIT: Almost all the homeless people you see in Stockholm are Romani people. They are one of the five officially recognized national minorities in Sweden, along with Jews, Sami, Sweden Finns and Tornedalers (https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...)

Are the homeless in Stockholm Swedish or Roma?

EDIT

> EDIT: Almost all the homeless people you see in Stockholm are Romani people. They are one of the five officially recognized national minorities in Sweden, along with Jews, Sami, Sweden Finns and Tornedalers ...

Please refer to my post below replying to this same assertion from another poster.

Those are not mutually exclusive options: there are plenty of Roma who have been in Scandinavia for centuries.

Yes I know, but to pretend that the number of Roma begging in city centers in some parts of Scandinavia has not increased by orders of magnitude in the past decade is pointless.

My point is that the OP was attempting to construct an argument about the supposed failings of a social structure based upon an anecdote about people that were never part of the social structure in the first place.

(NB I never said that they aren't welcome to join the society just that they haven't done so.)

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