This is very interesting and sort of tangential to something I'd realized after I married a Scandinavian woman: If you want to get famous doing some thing, you haven't a shot in hell in a country with three hundred million people like the United States. But for example Sweden. Sweden has only nine million citizens, and more than ten percent of them live in Stockholm! This is such a relatively tiny audience. I imagined that anything you wanted to do: Write a book, sing a song, make a movie, open a restaurant, become a politician, play a sport, anything! It would be easier to attain status as noteworthy in a country with two orders of magnitude fewer people that all speak their own language, have their own culture, their own rules. I'm still convinced that this is the case, and I'd love the chance to test it someday.

Of course, please excuse my broad generalities and extreme oversimplification. But for example, most (non-Swedish) people don't know how much of Western culture is currently driven by Swedes. You go look at famous pop culture musicians and count how many of them are actually Swedes. You'll be surprised. Now, I haven't studied the rest of popular culture to know whether or not there is an equal amount of representation from other places e.g. Norway, Poland, etc. But it makes me wonder if these musicians -- every one of whom of course are as talented as can be -- if they are getting more international recognition because they have recognition in their own homeland? Or does Sweden produce musicians more appealing to Western popular culture? I'm not sure. So many questions, so many thoughts! One example of this type of idea that I've heard about in recent years is some woman from a wealthy family who did some kind of esoteric series of competitions -- skiing, I think? -- and was able to compete in the Olympics because of the lack of competitors for a slot in the team of a particular country. She was able to compete after winning a slot by default. This is sort of asymptotic to what I'm talking about, but not quite there. This is just a super-fascinating thing for me.