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Comment by ramblerman | Hacker News Reader

These Scandinavian success stories are great, but it bothers me that they are always held up as some progressive ideal. As if it's even a choice for other nations.

They have immense advantages, and unique benefits. Norway in particular being the frontrunner.

Yet in my news feeds it seems middle European progressive parties (Belgium/France/Germany/Spain) always point to these countries and say "see, look what happens if we take care of our people". Ignoring not only the money needed for such an initiative, but the huge demographic differences from immigration in the last 20-40 years.

I welcome opposing thought here, because it's a matter that genuinely confuses me, and I'm open to being on the wrong side here.

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> Ignoring not only the money needed for such an initiative

The Finnish welfare state began in earnest at a time when the country was not particularly wealthy and it had little of the internationally renowned industry it has today. Furthermore, Finland managed to ramp up a welfare state at about the same time that it was forced to pay huge reparations to the USSR after World War II. Similarly, Sweden (the country which Finland used as a model for its welfare state) was not originally among the most prosperous nations.

The historical experience of the Nordic countries underscores that a welfare state is not a matter of having unusually large amounts of money compared to other Western European states, but rather it is a matter of taxation and spending priorities. Certainly Norway’s oil wealth lets it have some nicer public infrastructure than the neighbours, but such substantial natural resources are not a prerequisite.

> but rather it is a matter of taxation and spending priorities.

Rubbish. Finland has a sovereign wealth fund and a tiny population

When it comes to Nordic countries with sovereign wealth funds, you must be confusing Finland with Norway. Finland is not listed here [0], and the country has never had the sort of abundant natural resources that would make it a powerhouse in this regard. Sure, Finland does have forests, but the vacillations in the paper market in recent years and competition from other countries has hurt the economy, not boosted it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_sovereign...

So your argument is that it isn't on a wikipedia page so i'm wrong?

You are welcome to do your own research as to the lack of a sovereign wealth fund to power the Finnish welfare state. But the fact you get Finland's economy very wrong should already be clear to you from the downvotes you have attracted.

There is also a thing I noticed reading HN comments, when country pr city X does something good some US persons would jump immediately to find the reason this is absolutely impossible to be done in their local city,state or country. The "impossible" part is also most of the time defended with the excuse that US is bigger, less dense and freedom people have.

I imagine though that in such a large country there must be some city somewhere with good infrastructure, with good housing and with low crime .... anyway I think people need to think more on "how can we achieve X" not "how can I prove that X is impossible so we do not need to try "

What is Finland's advantage? Norway I get, it's oil. But Finland is just a well managed country without significant natural resources. Most of its industry is not related to extraction of resources.

Considering their mentioning of immigration, I fear (Edit: I was right, see replies) they see the the nordics‘ advantage as being almost entirely white.

That would not just be boorish, but also wrong: both Sweden and Morway (the two I just checked) have around 17% foreign-born residents, with more than half of those from outside the EU.

Race has nothing to do with it.

Rather the question is, does importing radically different cultures, and low skilled labor bear a cost on the welfare state.

This is a cost that is probably acceptable, and necessary, but we should keep an eye on the practical limits.

Norway has far more money to spend, and Finland has far lower foreign cultural migration, so they don't make fair examples.

The unemployment rate for native Swedes is less than 4%. The unemployment rate for foreign-born Swedes is at around 20%. Regarding Sweden, from Wikipedia: 'First generation immigrants, for example, constituted 60% of economic welfare recipients in 2016, 73% of all unemployed and 53% of those serving long prison sentences.'

This isn't a clear-cut "advantage", but Finland is much more ethnically homogeneous than America. Over 90% of people in Finland are ethnically Finnish. Heck, 70% of Finns belong to the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland [1]. It's not anywhere near as diverse (and fractious) as the USA.

The USA has historically chosen "more immigration, less social services" and Finland has chosen "less immigration, more social services". "More immigration, more social services" seems to be a hard sell. For whatever reason people generally seem turned off when a welfare state spends money on people who they feel aren't like them.

To me it is a problem of convincing voters to spend money, not lacking money to spend. Convincing voters seems easier in a homogeneous place (whatever it was immediately after WWII, there seems to be a strong "we are Finns" culture now).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finland#Demographics

> Heck, 70% of Finns belong to the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland

70% of Finns are merely on the rolls of the Lutheran Church, which really only means that parents had their child baptised as a popular traditional ritual, not as a sign of devout belief. I would suggest that Christianity never penetrated the Finnish psyche as deep as certain other European states. In most Finnish communities the church is not a center of community life but simply a building that stands as a museum (in many localities there is no active church at all). Also, with the rise of the welfare state, Finns immediately abandoned the notion that the Lutheran Church has any significant role to play in the lives of the less fortunate. Finland’s state churches themselves have happily handed over almost all of their charitable role to the state.

And in that portion of the country which was traditionally Orthodox, support for the welfare state doesn’t noticeably differ from the Lutheran part.

If you want to claim that Finns make their welfare state work because of ethnic homogenity, that ethnic homogenity would have to be located somewhere else than religion.

Finland has forests which isn't really much but is far more than just tundra.

I think their advantages are essentially fundamentally geographic but deeply counterintuitive. The Nordics counter intuively may have the "advantage" of a harsh climate which both aids defense and promotes "sincere" cooperation due to a force outside their control and long term planning and infastructure. Don't prepare for winter and it kills you.

Conceptuallly it is essentially an inverse resource curse where a disavantage has a positive impact. Of course there are other unspoken factors to their success. Like all nations the geographic distance to trading partners has influence on growth.

I don't know why you're being downvoted, I believe you're on to something here.

The harsh climate has forced these countries to adapt, otherwise you'd simply perish in the past. Finland, having no conceivable natural resources like Norway, was forced to adapt by building a few thriving industries and excellent infrastructure to facilitate them.

Having natural resources like oil means shit if you squander it like so many countries do.

Advantage is a matter of perspective, but taxes are high and mostly spent on public services. Nothing is ultimately free after all.

demographically Finland has about 2% of immigrants from outside of Europe. 0.3% have Arabic as their mother tongue. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Finland

That's a huge difference with France/Belgium.

The US has oil too. And far more than Norway.

Per capita Norway exported ~20x as much oil as the US in 2007.

  Norway        554.24 bbl/day per 1,000 people  
  United States  28.08 bbl/day per 1,000 people

https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Energy/Oil/P...

If they did export more, how much of the money would go directly to the US government?

The main advantage of Norway seems to be that they didn't give away their resources for pittances to private companies, but exploit them directly.

You cannot compare tiny Norway to the whole of the US. You have to compare to individual states in the US. Many American states have more oil than Norway and has produced oil for much longer and at much lower cost.

Drilling a 4km deep oil well out in the north sea in rough weather is very different from drilling 20 meters on land in Texas.

If you look at various American oil states. They have managed their oil wealth far more poorly than Norway. No sovereign wealth fund. Public system often underfunded and in poor condition. Look at Oklahoma e.g.

Oil is not Oil.

There are as many "blends" of crude as there are oil fields (about 160 blends according to wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_crude_oil_products). Some are "thicker" than others and that results in different products you can get from the crude you refine. Also, each crude requires a different setting in your refinery, and it is very costly and lengthy to change that setup.

Refineries in the US are for the most part set to heavy crude.

Guess what kind of crude the US get's from fracking?

. . .

It's not heavy crude.

Of the Nordic countries, only Norway has oil wealth.

Sweden in particular has had higher than European average levels of immigration over the past 20 years.

These countries are not a uniform block in the sense you’re suggesting.

Scandinavia, or even Norway, isn't an ideal for everyone. There would not be political consensus anywhere in the US, not even close, to the tax levels we have.

Ditto regarding our interpretation of property rights (you're almost always dependent on democratic or bureaucratic support for any significant change in usage, even in remote areas), our acceptance for de facto anti-competitive behavior in hiring, our deep cultural skepticism towards people who excel in business and professional life, ++.

Success stories regarding support for the weakest are often popular abroad, but it isn't just due to a homogenuous population that our policies aren't often replicated elsewhere. I make the deliberate choice of staying here in spite of being an ambitious professional, and support a significant part of our policies, but not all our policies favor everyone equally. This isn't pointed out so often.

Only Norway has significant amounts of oil, and even Norway was a prosperous welfare state before discovery of oil

I don't see why it is so important for you to ignore the Nordic experience. It seems like a very strong ideological drive to find flaws in the Nordic model or reasons to reject it.

Nordic countries started out worse than these other European countries in terms of money and resources. Nor is the demographics markedly different. German has much the same success story despite being a larger country. So there are universal lessons.

Also Nordics have lessons for all side of the political spectrum. Nordic countries have active states and many welfare services however they also relentlessly push people to work. Not necessarily by punishing them economically as many Anglo-Saxon countries to but by also offering a lot of help for people who struggle to get into work: health care, re-training, childcare etc.

Nordics are also very pro business and free trade. Nordics focus on helping people as individuals but there is not that much of propping up failing businesses. Unlike the US e.g. Sweden never bailed out failed car companies.

Nordics is a mix of both socialist and capitalist ideas. Unfortunately there has been a right wing agenda to tar the Nordic reputation for decades. All the way back to Eisenhower American conservatives strongly disliked Nordic countries. Sweden in particular was singled out as an object of derision. That Sweden in the 50s did not stigmatize single mothers offended them greatly.

Conservatives all the way back to the 50s ran all sorts of hit pieces on Sweden about how loose their sexual morality was. How society was falling apart in due to drunkness and low morality. These people have predicted and wished for our failure for decades. And it is frankly a bit sick that this belittling of Nordic success stories still keeps going.

We have not figured out everything, but can we not be given credit for something? Must there always be a dark side to Nordics to hype up among conservatives?

What do demographic differences due to immigration have to do with taking care of their people? Statements such as these come off as immensely xenophobic.

What is the immigration issue exactly in this context?

Why can't you put immigrants in houses too?

I'm guessing OP (Right term? I'm new to this!) is referring to immigrants, at least in Europe, typically depending more on the state for assistance and having much higher unemployment rates, thus having more immigrants would place a higher burden on public finances. This is from Wikipedia regarding Sweden: 'First generation immigrants, for example, constituted 60% of economic welfare recipients in 2016, 73% of all unemployed and 53% of those serving long prison sentences.'

Yeah I get that but this is a general "fix homelessness by giving people a place to live" issue. Immigrants are people too or aren't they? I mean, what changes with them?

Do you believe that immigration happens in a vacuum? I.e. the reason people immigrate is because they believe that going to location y is better that staying at location x.

Providing free housing, medical, school, etc... is a huge incentive.

This is why we try to control immigration, we simply don't have the resources to provide a safety net to everyone.

It's not like "everyone" is on the move to Finland. Never was and never will be. It's a strawman and unnecessary dramatisation to justify inhuman behaviour.

In this case: what do you want to do with them instead? Let them die on the streets? Did you even read the article? They are being provided with some kind of housing and support already like human beings deserve. Giving them a place to live, gives them also a chance to become a proper member of the society who also ads to it and can provide for other homeless.

For further reading regarding the "Pull Factors Myth" take this for example: https://www.ecre.org/op-ed-pull-factors-the-myth-that-never-...

Financially it makes sense though; shelters cost taxpayer and/or charity money, and there's a whole industry dedicated to discouraging people from sleeping in corners, public benches, and using public toilets. How expensive is it to just give people housing, a basic income, and the care they need?

I mean it's an opportunity to get someone back on their feet, and with time, reintegrate them with society - that is, turn them back into taxpayers. It makes sense both from a capitalist and a socialist point of view.

The problem is convincing those who think the homeless are subhuman undesirables who should be made Someone Else's Problem.

> The problem is convincing those who think the homeless are subhuman undesirables who should be made Someone Else's Problem.

This is approaching Twitter level of "everybody who disagrees with me on this topic is a fascist".

This is an important point to understand. Scandinavian countries are 1. Small, 2. Homogenous, 3. Culturally and demographically stable, 4. Economically stable.

There are genuine differences that come with national scale that make comparisons of a small country's economy to a large country's economy impossible. It is similar to how you cannot simply scale up a mouse to the size of an elephant, since the mouse's skeletal system would collapse under its own weight. There must be qualitative adjustments to the bones to allow for such a drastic increase in size.

It is unrealistic for large countries to hold themselves to the standards of small countries, yet political and social activists do so in spite of the fundamental impossibility of comparison.

Go back a hundred years, and the notion of Finland as homogeneous or stable would seem laughable to its citizens.

The country had just been through a devastating civil war. It has two national languages unintelligible to each other’s speakers: Swedish spoken by traditional elites and coastal populations, Finnish spoken by peasants. Having just separated from the collapsing Russian Empire, few observers would give the new Finnish state good odds of surviving the decade. The last major famine was still in living memory.

Progress is made, not inherited as some kind of ethnonational attribute.

Think about what you're saying, the country was in tatters in the wake of a civil war precisely when it was not culturally homogenous. Finnish is spoken by the vast majority of the population today. Progress has been made largely due to unification. Finland would not have been able to sustain itself otherwise.

Finnish is my native language, but I grew up in Helsinki in the 1980s in an environment where essentially everyone I met could speak at least three languages.

The notion that Finland is a culturally homogenous single-language nation is absurd to me.

Sweden is no longer homogeneous. We have a larger percentage foreign born than the US for example.

Sweden had an empire at one point - if they were homogenous then they would have failed at every turn. There is a reason why the Romans had political correctness and xenophobia is fundamentally an ideology for and of losers literally.

Sweden is in no way homogeneous.

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