Hacker News Reader

Comment by rubashov | Hacker News Reader

As a result of their tax rate and size of government? That's ridiculous.

Denmark is wealthy and comfortable because it's full of Danes. I bet you Danes in the US are even wealthier and more comfortable than Danes in Denmark.

View on HN

To be honest your point seems completely vacuous (far more ridiculous than the point you are responding to). It appears to reduce to "Danes are magical - I think". What makes Danes special? Is this not related to the sort of government they would create and support?

"Danes are magical"

I can assure you we are not.

Some of them are ;)

They are high time preference and relatively high IQ. These are the features that distinguish the various ethnicities that build pleasant societies.

I guess you meant to say that they have low time preference.

Because America is the greatest country in the world people outside America couldn't possibly be happy with the way they do things?

To be fair, in the few cases where I've seen good data, most groups do better in the US than in their native countries.

For instance, Asian Americans have average income of $65,000. Japan, the richest country in Asia, has average income of about $40,000. Japanese Americans also live 2 years longer than Japanese.

Swedish Americans are also considerably richer than Swedes, as I discovered today: http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/03/super-economy-in-o...

Like it or not, ethnicity plays a big role in many social measures. The US is very diverse, and certain groups drag our averages down (groups that are very small in Europe and Asia).

Yeah, but that's a self-selected group. People who are capable of moving their families to another country to pursue a career are more likely to be successful. Similarly people who grow up in poor, backwards communities (trailer parks and projects, meth and crack), tend to wind up poor and backwards. Maybe I'm a reactionary liberal but I have an easier time believing that than the inherent genetic superiority of the danes (oh and that's just SO close to certain ideologies I'm always wanting to accuse the Tea Party of harboring).

Wanna see something really cool? Look at a satellite image of Denmark. It's almost entirely farmland, with little spots of ultra-dense village or city every so often. No suburban wasteland. I'd be 20% happier just for that.

Swedish Americans are the descendents of lower class agricultural workers who left religious repression in Sweden between 1860 and 1910. In the case of Japanese Americans, they are descended from manual laborers who left Japan between 1882 and 1924.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_emigration_to_the_Unite...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_American#Immigration

In any case, I don't get how you could read either of my factoids and suggest I was pushing genetic determinism. Clearly, some environmental factors are important. For example, living in the US rather than Sweden or Japan seems to cause people to earn 50% more money. Using US health care rather than Japanese health care seems to increase life expectancy by 2 years (no, I don't actually believe this latter point).

But on the other hand, ethnicity does also seem to have some measurable effects. Asian Americans beat whites on most social measures in spite of the head start whites had.

Feel free to call me a racist tea partier if you like.

Oh, I wasn't accusing you at all, just noting it was funny that we were talking about the Danish with their blonde hair and blue eyes, in the context of genetic determinism -- been reading about Hitler and Stalin's respective rises to power recently, so it's on my mind.

As far as the Asian American thing, I'm personally partial to social factors there as well. At the risk of being a stereotyping a-hole, there's a lot of Asian Americans in SAT prep classes. Correlation with ethnicity doesn't necessarily mean that asians are genetically predisposed to be better at the SATs.

Really, I just wanted to highlight those satellite pictures of Denmark.

EDIT: Also, RE: the impoverished and hardworking immigrants, I agree, it's not like they were Saudi princes when they came to America, but those who did come were the ones who had the motivation to pull off the journey -- then, now that they've bitten it off, they're obligated to succeed. Still self-selecting to some degree to me.

When's the last time you flew coast to coast? There's quite a lot of farmland in the U.S.

There is indeed a lot of farmland in the US, but there's also more suburban wasteland than the entire land mass of Denmark (made up figure).

Denmark manages to have a higher population density than us while still being like 90% farmland. That's efficiency.

Comparing average incomes is meaningless for at least two reasons:

1) The cost of living will not be the same; and 2) Income is no measure of quality of life/satisfaction.

As an example, what if average incomes are higher, but so is income inequality? What effect does this have on the society (and the standard of licing of those within it) as a whole?

I also think jbooth has a point in that these are self-selected groups.

The data I gave is adjusted for cost of living. (Fun fact: adjusting for cost of living hurts Sweden, living there is more expensive, not less.) This blog post describes the methodology:

http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/03/income-distributio...

As you can clearly see from the graph linked to in my previous comment, the bottom 15% or so of Swedish Americans are slightly poorer than Swedes. The top 85% or so are richer. That's the effect of inequality.

As for quality of life/satisfaction - I'll focus on wealth since I don't really know what you mean when you say "quality of life" or "satisfaction" (they are fairly subjective terms).

Thanks for linking to the post with the methodology, it was interesting. It does show the difficulty of trying to get accurate numbers, although the author has clearly made an effort to.

Re: the effect of inequality: sure, that's the effect on income. But that is obviously not all that matters.

Yes, the things I am referring to are subjective. Yes, they are hard to measure. But this doesn't mean we should just ignore them, and focus on what we can easily measure. Sounds like a recipe for optimising the wrong thing.

Given the obvious bias displayed in the sweeping conclusions drawn in that post, I'm not inclined to put a lot of faith in the author. There are so many possible biases in that comparison.

For example, it's pretty well accepted that it's better to be high-income in the US than in Sweden, so if you for some reason have a population that is in the upper income levels in the US (due to being white and long-resident, for example) it's not surprising that they would have higher income than in Sweden. As Sweden is a much more redistributive society than the US, the upper income levels in the US are, as a matter of speaking, subsidized by the lower-income levels. And there are a lot more lower income levels in the US than in Sweden.

The conclusion that "The U.S would be even richer and have much less poverty if it was made up entirely of Swedes" is ridiculous. It's equivalent to saying "the US would be even richer if it was made up entirely of the people that make a lot of money", which completely ignores the fact that the US economy depends on low-wage earners to a completely different degree than Sweden does.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com