Hacker News Reader

The US has 60x the population of Norway on 25x the land.

Honest question: given what you know about politics in Norway, do you personally believe Norway’s complexity reduction through agreement on common standards can scale to a country the size of the US?

Could 60 Norways mutually agree on common standards?

View on HN

The US is a federation of 50 states and in theory is highly liberal. Therefore at most your example should scale at the state level. As most states have fewer inhabitants than Norway then I don't see your point.

There’s no point for you to see. I asked a question: whether the original poster could see the political climate in Norway realistically scaling.

Maybe they’ve figured out something we in the US haven’t.

The case for this hypothetical scaling problem is baseless and absurd. It's a silly scapegoat. That's it.

People always bring out the population or area size of the US as an excuse against why we can't try to do better.

I think people bring out the population or area size in order to explain where facile comparisons fall down. Scale matters.

This fictional scaling problem makes as much sense as correlating the effect of some public policies on the height of the political leader or average temperature. It's a silly scapegoat that makes no sense at all.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com