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Comment by quijoteuniv | Hacker News Reader

Is interesting how americans have the need of discrediting iceland & scandinavia in general. You can read that between the lines of the comments. Really great countries to live, people gets a real chance at developing their potential.This article is an example of that.

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I think the undertone of the reaction actually varies a lot. Some people are dismissive, but I think a lot of people find it frustrating because the approaches and solutions that work when a group the size of a small American city has full national sovereignty are generally not workable in the many-layered federal system with city, state, and federal jurisdictions each many times larger.

Many people (Americans included) also fail to recognize that the majority of governance happens at the city and county level, then the state, then the least at the federal level.

So if you have a situation where a policy only works if “everyone does it,” that’s basically impossible in the US. Individual cities can (and do) act on all sorts of lessons learned from around the world, especially including the Nordic countries, and point to them as inspiration all the time. But just because an Austin or a Seattle wants to copy what was done elsewhere does not mean they can: it may conflict with state or federal law they cannot change, or it may be unworkable when half the population of their economic area is distributed among dozens of small and entirely independent suburban governments.

So in short, yes some Americans are dismissive of things that “worked in Iceland,” but I think most Americans are merely jaded that it’s much easier to accomplish significant change in city states and small countries, particularly with more homogeneous populations. It’s nothing against Iceland or any other country, except perhaps fatigue at people from those places wagging their fingers at America and saying how easy things are in a place completely unlike this one.

it’s not that most governing magically happens at the local/state level, but that the US govt is explicitly designed such that the state is the canonical governing unit, delegating responsibility to both cities/counties and deferring very limited powers to the federal level.

we’re not designed to have many national programs to address domestic issues. it’s up to the states to address domestic issues, with the added benefit that the country can iterate faster to solutions through states working on them in parallel and piggybacking on each others’ successes.

It's simple recognition that Iceland is a very homogenous place so homogenous solutions to problems are more likely to be effective. Iceland doesn't even allow baby names that aren't listed in their book of acceptable names. Now try to come up with a solution for homelessness that works in both Spokane, Washington and Coral Gables, Florida. They're very different populations with very different needs. It's great that Iceland has been able to reduce youth drug use but it's not applicable to the wider world except in limited circumstances.

Why wouldn't it be applicable to small homogenous US towns?

Parts of it certainly could be...but a major difference is Federal law versus state/city law. In Iceland where you basically have one city where everyone lives it's all sorta the same thing no? In the US, that can vary widely. Texas is incredibly different from Washington state not to mention Houston vs. Seattle.

Personally think there's got to be parts of this though that would be applicable somewhere. Seems rash to be completely dismissive (and to be fair not much of that in these comments).

> Now try to come up with a solution for homelessness that works in both Spokane, Washington and Coral Gables, Florida

Isn't homelessness generally handled at the city and county levels? Both places can independently look at how different areas of the world have combated homelessness, and also share their successes (or failures) with each other without being forced to both do the same exact thing.

Freedom of movement between municipalities makes most attempts at solving homelessness difficult if not impossible. NY simply shipped them out; cities with nice climates and access to welfare see a large influx from elsewhere. The harder a city works to solve the problem, the bigger the problem becomes.

A friend's mother- a chronic drug user who lived off of welfare- moves from state to state as she uses up whatever benefits they offer.

Not all people are in that situation or abuse the system like that, of course, but small countries with tighter borders have a much easier time dealing with a less mobile population of homeless and indigent.

Not from the US, but it seems there's a widely internalized view of the US being so big that it's ungovernable in some ways, so things that are learned in other countries can't be applied. A variant is that the population is not as "homogenous".

I've not yet fully understood why a large population or area or ethnicity would generally impede things so much, but maybe it's just misattributed and there's sometihng about system of governance or the population's general distrust of government makes it hard to get things done there.

Of course there are some genuine things that scane sub or superlinearly with population size. For example network effects are bigger in bigger populations.

The "homogeneity"/"diversity" argument for why things that work elsewhere won't work in the US is often just racist dogwhistling. The Nordic countries are not actually as homogeneous as Americans seem to think, and the US isn't as diverse as they seem to think, either (hint: diversity != skin colour). See for example the lists here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_ranked_by_et...

the largest nordic population is sweden, which is less than 10% the population of the US. it is also ethnically significantly more homogenous than the US, which by your own standard is dizzyingly diverse ('white' contains dozens of ethnicities, along with regional and class subsets and period of integration). assuming that the same policies work for everybody in all circumstances is willful blindness.

Have you been to swedis cities lately? It's diverse.

i do not doubt that there art parts of sweden with significant diversity; it still pales in comparison with america, one of the most diverse nations in history

I checked your link. It says the exact opposite of what you claim.

The second list says - Sweden Ethnic Fractionalization : 0.060000

US EthnicFractionalization: 0.490100

So it says America is 8 times more diverse than Sweden.

Sounds about right. That makes Sweden a lot more homogenous than the US.

The first list is really screwed: it lists Italy and China as among the least diverse - which is rubbish.

That’s because it only includes linguistic diversity- not ethnic diversity. So Sicilians and Milanese are grouped together, as are Han and Tibetans.

Latin America becomes much less diverse, because the many ethnicities speak Spanish, etc.

Look at how undiverse Cuba is!

America has a large number of different cultures, ethnicities and religions, but to get a decent job you need to English.

Consider immigrants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d...

My link shows that there is a bigger share of immigrants in Sweden (19%) than in US (14%).

I think cultural diversity weighs more here than skin color.

Everyone is saying your thinking doesn't apply because scandinavian countries are small and homogeneous and the policies wouldn't work in the US Some of this is just BS. It's like if the US had no public education and people just shrugged "Free basic education for all doesn't work and Scandinavia doesn't count, they're too small and homogeneous."

> You can read that between the lines of the comments.

Yes. I see the veiled racist comments, the completely anecdotic evidence, the sofa-experts disregarding the article findings... It is tiresome the coordinated attacks against progressive views.

We should work together to make this a better world. I really do not get what is the goal of the people that writes this kind of comments. Don't they have families? Don't they depend on the same world stability and technological advances?

I am happy for Iceland and I hope that their example extends.

The flip side of this is Europeans discrediting America because it doesn’t perform as well as Nordic countries. This kind of chauvinist attitude is really common on this site and it’s super obnoxious, because Nordic countries really aren’t comparable to the US as a whole, on basically any measure that you choose.

Iceland has roughly the population of Glendale, California, which is one of a couple dozen satellite cities which, along with Los Angeles proper, make up the Greater Los Angeles area, which is one of two major metro areas in California, which is one of 50 states of the US. You can find plenty of ~300k metro areas in the US that are a good match for Iceland, and plenty that aren’t. If you want to understand American over and underperformance on various metrics, you have to look at why, say, Sweden does so well on various metrics and, say, Greece does not. Because the scale of the US is similar to Europe as a whole.

...because many nothern european countries provide a much higher quality of life than the US without being wealthier.

I recall post financial crisis there was untold amounts of gibberish about using Iceland as an example. It's a city block of a country. It's completely irrelevant in every way when extrapolating for a real country

We're not discrediting it because it's Scandinavia, we're discrediting it because iceland has a miniscule population and actual effects of interventions are difficult to meaningfully tease out from chance on this scale. I looked it up, and I'm unsure if in reading this right, but Iceland has 360,000 people? That's it? If I'm not reading that wrong, my small suburb of ny has 1% of the population of the entire country - and size effects matter in terms of how easy strategies are to implement and whether changes are from natural variance or real fundamental progress.

I find it more curious if there won't be sequelae such as overweight rates going up instead. That would be interesting.

Iceland is not that small. It's comparable to many medium sized cities in Europe, or a district of a big one.

You're comparing a country to medium sized cities though - on a continent with a population of 750 million people, versus a country like America with 350 million, it's like 350 thousand. What small City governments can do and how they govern is different from alrger cities like NY, different again from states and from the monster of the federal government or the European union

> we're discrediting it because iceland has a miniscule population

So find one or more groups of 360,000 people in your country and start testing it on small parts of your population.

Don’t just ignore the findings because you can’t apply it to your whole country at once (which is a bad idea anyway: e.g. some nation-wide education changes at home have been big mistakes).

I spent a month traveling around Iceland. My suburban neighborhood is more populous than 99% of the town/villages on the island. Even the largest “cities” are smaller than any town where I live. It’s really hard to see how anything that works for such a tiny homogenous population could apply to us.

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