There is no way the average well educated American understands what the European or Scandanavian model is. These systems are complicated moving targets and documented in a foreign language.
Americans are arguing over what they imagine the model to be, and have probably gotten it wrong.
And then what does well-educated mean?
I would agree. It's similar to the lack of deep knowledge of public health systems in other countries, which are typically understood as slogans.
There's also the unwritten parts of a 'Scandinavian Model' (or whoever). These are monocultures with their own logic and behavior.
America is a monoculture too, to non-racialists. The differences between Americans can be attributed to sub-region and class/income - not race
I think there's a fallacy at play - not sure which one it is, whereby a person sees a lot of nuance, variation and detail in the minutiae of what they are familiar with, but the unfamiliar is painted in very broad strokes, lacking nuance, and based on surface-level understanding.
> There is no way the average well educated American understands what the European or Scandanavian model is.
Understanding its relative performance is orthogonal to understanding how it generates that performance, so that’s not really even the outline of a rebuttal.
> These systems are complicated moving targets and documented in a foreign language.
There's plenty of documentation of pretty much every significant world politico-economic system in English.
Coincidentally, I haven't ever managed to find anything on how the Chinese actually operate. I'd be very interested to know what they've done - for all that I don't like their approach to freedom they did engineer one of the (if not simply 'the') greatest economic miracles of history.
Love or hate them, there is something to learn from in China. They seem to be fairly tight-lipped on the details of what. Nobody in the western media seems to care.
Seeing reporting from Nordic political issues in US-based media; they often get it wrong. Sometimes a little bit wrong. Often a very skewed incomplete image.
That’s true of US political issues, too. A “well educated American” is both aware of this and is educated on issues beyond transitory immediate events by sources beyond just the news media.