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Comment by expertentipp | Hacker News Reader

People tend to romanticize European Nordic countries and their cute pragmatic solutions of certain problems. Some numbers for scale - population 5.5mln, Finnish and Swedish population in the country >94%.

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Yeah, that's always repeated over and over whenever someone points at the nordic countries.

But how, in this specific case, does larger population size impact the implementation of income-tied fines?

Edit, further specification: doesn't the US, at least on a state by state fashion, have some kind of standard declaration /way of determining your income?

Well, instead of just slapping on the fine amount, you must now have a process to determine the person's income for each and every ticket. The scale of that process would be much bigger in the USA.

Yeah, sure.

But do you think this is an unbearable problem, and it will make the whole thing impractical, and the benefits are not enough?

Personally I really like the idea, but it might be a very expensive proposition to implement.

Edit: And could have unintended consequences for the court system, and create unintended incentives to ticket higher income people more vigorously than lower income (potentially creating unenforced laws in lower income areas).

I live in a high tourist area during the summer months (late May through early September). The police in our town are fairly strict, but extremely fair, when it comes to enforcing laws. However, there are certain tickets (i.e. speeding) where a significant portion of the revenue from the fine goes to the state. This is the case regardless of whether the infraction occurs on a "state maintained" or "town maintained" road. On the other hand, there are other types of tickets (i.e. parking violations) where 100% of the revenue goes directly to the town. What happens is that during the summer months (more tourists) tickets with a higher value to the town tend to get receive more enforcement time compared to tickets with a lower value to the town.

This is an issue of governance, not policing. The police are doing what the town has asked of them by valuing these tickets high, which is to punish parking infractions. If this is a problem, the townspeople need to get their government to relax these statutes. This is another way that income-based fines work well - the people with the means to influence this change now have an incentive to do so. This is also why it's unlikely to ever happen in most places, because as the article observes it is much more lucrative to find the sweet spot where you can toll people who are unlikely to be able to fight back (poor people, tourists).

> This is another way that income-based fines work well - the people with the means to influence this change now have an incentive to do so.

You're only thinking of one half of the problem. The rich people who are targeted more vigorously will be able to fight back. But the poor people who are left living in communities where the laws aren't being applied will have to live with the results of lack of enforcement. It sucks living in a place where the police will not punish offenders because it's not worth the effort.

>Edit: And could have unintended consequences for the court system, and create unintended incentives to ticket higher income people more vigorously than lower income (potentially creating unenforced laws in lower income areas).

I doubt that would be the case, because wealthy people have access to better lawyers, and police know this. It's one of the reasons they're currently more likely to abuse poor people. They also know that there will be less societal outrage.

Sure, it might be more expensive (added bureaucracy), or less (less unemployed people in jail... the country pays for them, right?). It might lead to targeting, or to a fairer society.

Everything has drawbacks, and I am not competent enough to estimate all possible effects on society at large. But the current system does not seem to be perfect either, and ideas for improving it should be considered (and sometimes discarded, of course).

No, you ask them to report it and jail them if they are subsequently found to have lied.

Which would indicate that it would be more efficient on a per-person basis in the US than Scandinavia due to economies of scale.

Most of Scandinavia has no financial privacy. What people earn and how much tax they pay are published online. This would make penalties based on income much easier. The US values financial privacy much more. It's also a very different society. It's easy to imagine precisely what would happen if peoples incomes in the US were published.

Everyone in the US who makes more than 10k (which I assume would be the minimum bracket for a fine) has to file income tax, and it would take a single bill to make this info available for the purposes of assessing fines; it doesn’t have to be public. And sure, some people cheat on taxes, but some do in Scandinavia as well.

The US values financial privacy more, because it's a way to perpetuate wealth inequality.

Isn't that just an argument for doing it at a State by State level?

Also, why describe something as "cute" and "pragmatic" - you prefer "ugly" and "impractical"?

More than half of the U.S. states have less than 5 million population. Moving violations and traffic tickets are usually administered on a state, county or local level. These aren't federal crimes, so it makes sense for each state to have their own unique system, as they often do.

In fact, as I write this it seems obvious that this system could be implemented without too much trouble in at least on U.S. state. Why wouldn't they jump at the additional revenue?

How is the population of the country and its ethnic make-up relevant to the idea of scaling fines by wealth?

Retorts involving a country's homogeneity and ethnic make-up as a reason social policies work well in that country usually carry a more sinister unspoken subtext, i.e. that ethnic diversity makes an environment hostile to social policies, and/or that some populations are intrinsically unfit for social policies. I don't want to go too far down that lane, so let's say that guessing the reasoning underlying this argument and examples of populations that argument is typically applied to are left as an exercise for the reader.

It’s not, but this argument comes up for absolutely everything Scandinavian countries do: universal healthcare? America’s too big. Prison reform? America’s too big. Not treating poor people like garbage? America’s too big. Oftentimes there isn’t even any reasoning behind why America’s size would be a problem, which is a good clue that the argument is bunkum.

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