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Comment by buboard | Hacker News Reader

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Seems like as good a time as any to pop in a reference to Michael Booth’s lovely book ‘The Almost Nearly Perfect People’. He’s British, from memory he’s married to a Dane, and he treks around all of the Scandinavian countries — Iceland & Greenland included — and dispels the common myths.

Review: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/feb/10/perfect-people...

leads to depression hence their sky high suicide rates.

That's a myth. Finland's suicide rate is basically the same as that in the US, and Norway, Sweden and Denmark all have a significantly lower rates.

It is an American myth? I have seen it numerous times here on HN, and always found it weird since it is very clearly false if you look up the data.

I know that Eisenhower (US president) helped popularize that view. Doing a search now found https://sverigesradio.se/sida/artikel.aspx?artikel=5924063

It was kind of true (at least more true) in the mid to later 80's. However since then suicide rates have dropped dramatically in both Finland and Sweden while having gone up in the US.

i mean compared to the poor european south

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/4187653/7825811/IMG+...

US is a huge country to compare as a whole

https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/suicide.shtml

The OP does have a point. Community solidarity has traditionally been there in the Nordic countries due to the harsh climate conditions and need to band together. However, the 20th-century welfare state model allows one to contribute to the community and help the neighbours without having to interact with them personally. Note how charitable organizations that do require personal interaction have broadly fallen by the wayside now that the welfare state has taken over, except for the occasional foreign sect working outside of the mainstream churches.

Spain is not a single-mind culture, FFS. From the Rainy and cold North to the Sunny South and the inner -wastel^U field landscapes, there is a huge difference. You can't put in the same mindset a celtic Galician, a Basque marine/IT guy, a Catalan media artist and a Castille Historian. Stop dividing Europe in North/South, in the end there is more like a scaled rainbow even inside countries.

i don't know i can tell by the tone of your writing you re spanish

and i totally agree that people are not stereotypical, but that goes mostly for the very recent generations. The world is heading to monoculture fast, yet when people talk about cultures, they refer to culture that is mostly expressed by the dwinding majority(?) of middle-aged people.

Maybe in the US, trust me that when you met Spaniard people in place instead across the Internet your opinion changes a lot. Most Spaniard regional countries have a very strong identity since the Middle Ages, and a lot of them before even Rome.

The "love of socialism" in the Nordic countries is not particularly old. Germany got a welfare system long before Norway for example, then motivated by mix of fear of the Marxists and Christian morality (Bismarck pushed it through with the support of Zentrum; one of the forerunners of todays CDU).

What happened in Scandinavia was not that Scandinavians were all that much more socialist than the rest of Europe, but that the workers movements happened to be more successful to the point of obtaining a political hegemony in the post-war years that allowed them to shape the system to a much greater degree, and the conflict level was much lower.

A large part of this was in response to religion. In particularly the role of strong Lutheran state churches that looked down on ostentantious displays of wealth and promoted community and sharing, which made it easier for the Christian parts of the right to find together with the labour movement on welfare issues. As a result the first comprehensive welfare bill in Norway, as in many European countries, was pushed through with the votes of the Christian Democrats.

In Norway at least a lot of this "love of socialism" is much less a "love of socialism" than it is a mix of that tradition of community and a strong but relatively moderate labour movement.

But it is also pretty recent - up until the 60's for example, Norwegian prisons were very harsh and following very much an idea of dealing with "tough love" for sinners that needed to be purged. Social and criminal reforms didn't really start happening at pace until the 60's and 70's, and were a constant issue of tension with religious values.

I think it's more that you've touched on a similar foundation: In Norway at least I think you'll find that quiet nature very much matches what used to be seen as how a good Christian would behave. Too much excitement would not do.

[you probably got flagged because HN is very sensitive to dragging politics into subjects that aren't inherently political]

I removed the S word and replaced it with welfare state which was my intention

I am not sure where I am going to start to help to sync up your worldview a bit but there are so many things wrong with this comment that an attempt will run a lot longer than the original.

Your ideas on socialism seem to be confusing communism, socialism, the well-fare state and the social contract all at once.

There is a lot of stereotyping in your comment (fair enough, there is too in the article), and you are jumping to conclusions about both the rates and the underlying cause of suicides in the Nordics.

Finally, your last paragraph again draws on stereotypical blue-prints about the British and the Americans.

they are anecdotal observations from my interactions with said people. i dont need help with my worldview, but thanks

Speaking from an Icelandic perspective, I think the 'love of socialism' stems from the fact that we've pretty much always needed to rely on one another to just survive in the harsh living conditions. Of course, these conditions have improved drastically since the early 20th century but I think a lot of the culture remains.

> needed to rely on one another

You would expect that to result in much more elaborate social rituals

As I understand it, Denmark and Sweden (and perhaps the other Nordic countries?) used to have more elaborate social rituals until relatively recently.

Eg, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Du-reformen .

I seem to recall that people could also referred by their job title, eg, "Mr. Programmer", and even listed in the phone book that way. But I can't verify that.

Social rituals have a cost. Nordic social rituals are there, but they are terse and focused around seeing certain behaviours as a duty. Look to more austere religious groups, and consider most of the Nordic countries were very much firmly Lutheran and largely saw "elaborate social rituals" as excess.

Or maybe just a climate thing? I find I want to talk much less when my face is freezing. In the long term I imagine this could have easily turned into a habit/cultural thing. You also hear about Latin American people being much "warmer" and friendly, etc.

It isn’t a climate thing. The further north you go through Finland, up to where the cold season lasts much longer than in the south, the more talkative people become. Northerners may not have smalltalk interactions with strangers, but they are more talkative among themselves than people in southern Finland.

i find the british are pretty chatty, even when its freezing. Yes, warm weather -> people being outdoors -> eventually chat more (and don't do much work)

As somebody from the UK who moved to Finland, there's a big difference in the degrees of "Freezing".

Sure in the UK somebody might say they're freezing at -5, but in Finland I've been as cold as -25, even in the South.

(People in Finland are better dressed for the weather, and houses are all pretty new, so they're generally well-insulated. But there's probably some truth in the idea that talking to strangers becomes less appealing when you're wrapped in scarves, and winter-gear.)

As a Finn, I would say that people at least in Finland tend to be more closed during winter than during summer. I think I saw some study where they seemed to notice this kind of pattern as well, but I think the study was done outside Finland.

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