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Comment by lmilcin | Hacker News Reader

Nordic countries are kinda special in this regard. Historically, you were very unlikely to survive in northern climate on your own. Being part of community was necessary prerequisite for survival.

I have been on couple trips to northern Norway/Sweden. People there did not even have locks in their houses, it wasn't even necessary. I wonder if it changed now with advent of migrations from eastern Europe and Middle East.

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Same in Northern Canada. When buying a house there usually at the end of the financial part of the transfer of a house you get the keys. The previous owners rather sheepishly admitted they didn't have them. Lawyer pipes up 'then we'll have to change the locks'. Owners say that's going to be a lot of work because the doors never had any locks in the first place. We kept it like that.

I can't even imagine not changes the locks on a house you just bought. (Unless, as in your case, locks aren't even desired.) Even if the previous owner had no malicious intent, they might have accidentally kept a key that someone else could get ahold of... Or they might have given out a key, etc. There's no good reason to avoid it, IMO.

It's also a fun thing to do.

The re-key kit is only a few bucks, and it's a pretty simple process, and you get to enjoy the ingenuity contained in the lock while you work on it.

As a middle point, I’ve been living at my house in the Midwest for 4 years now and while we have locks, I didn’t changed them out from the previous owners. I suppose they could have some extra keys but I trust that they don’t and won’t come into my house (and unless they’re playing a really long game, they haven’t, and the previous owners live fairly close as we got some letters from their child’s daycare accidentally sent to us).

What makes you think Middle Eastern or Eastern Europeans specifically would change anything?

Also curious why he forgot about all the migration from Africa. Everyone locks their doors here in Africa and builds cages around their houses effectively.

The last time I paid attention to statistics, in Norway the migrants were a small minority of inhabitants but large majority of all crimes.

As a note, the people who like to "do crime" for some reason are not willing to move up north and prefer to stay in Oslo.

What statistics? Are there stats on convicted criminals by country of origin in Norway?

Sure: https://www.ssb.no/sosiale-forhold-og-kriminalitet/artikler-...

Regarding countries; when adjusting for gender and age, three countries have > 100 offenders per 1000 immigrant (table 3.3), namely Kosovo, Somalia and Iraq. The lowest rate is 26.8 for the Netherlands (or 10.1 for Oceania, but data not available per country).

Note that immigrants, in general, were underrepresented for some crimes (damage to property, drug-related) and overrepresented for others (ratios): 1.73 for theft, 1.5 for violence and abuse, 1.2 for trafic. When adjusted for age, gender, place of living, and occupational status, immigrants from Africa were overrepresented by 174% and 101% for violence/abuse and offending public order/integrity, respectively (p. 34).

From the abstract:

> [W]e use data on all immigrants, Norwegian-born persons with two immigrant parents and people in the remaining population who were 15 years or older and permanent residents as of January 1, 2010, and explore the proportion in each group that was charged with at least one offense committed between 2010 and 2013. The results show that both immigrants and Norwegian-born persons with two immigrant parents are overrepresented as registered offenders, with the rate of overrepresentation being highest in the latter group. Among immigrants, the overrepresentation is most substantial among family immigrants and refugees, as well as for individuals from African countries. For Asian immigrants the picture is more complex. Overall, Asian immigrants are overrepresented. However, while immigrants from certain Asian countries are similarly overrepresented, other Asian countries are underrepresented. Individuals from Western Europe and North America, as well as education immigrants, are underrepresented as well. The pattern is, with some minor exceptions, relatively similar for Norwegian-born persons with two immigrant parents. The patterns of over- and underrepresentation also apply to most types of offenses, except for drug offenses where most immigrant groups are underrepresented. Overall the overrepresentation is substantially reduced when we account for differences in age and gender, especially in the groups with the highest rates of overrepresentation – including Norwegian-born persons with immigrant parents. Place of residence and employment have limited explanatory power once the demographic differences are accounted for. For most immigrant groups a certain level overrepresentation persists also after sociodemographic characteristics are taken into account. It is, however, important to stress that the vast majority of individuals in all population groups were not registered as offenders during the period we consider.

To understand the parent commenter's question (in a US-centric way) you have to examine the political-economic parallels, historical and contemporary, between the US and Nordic countries and decide whether the same structures and conditions exist or not. Presumably, the parent commenter was hinting at the way by which US elites in the 1600s developed a theological basis for social-economic stratification which divided and maligned non-property holders in order to maintain the status quo the effects of which reverberate to this day. Nordic countries, being perceived by the US as being racially homogeneous presumably wouldn't have be susceptible to the same divisive forces, but with shifting racial demographics, inch themselves closer to those same initial conditions.

To answer the original question, it depends on the likelihood that social divisiveness foments either spontaneously or cultivated purposefully. Someone with more knowledge on topics like the Sweden Democrats, Norway's Progress Party and their progress toward social division would be better at addressing it than me.

As a point of comparison, North America has harsh winters that can be difficult to survive if one is unprepared. Many (a majority of?) early European colonists died within a year of arrival for this reason. Indigenous peoples were instrumental in their coming to understand the cultural and behavioral changes that needed to be made for Europeans to survive in America at the technological level they were at. This did not foster a communal spirit, however; the general rule seems to be that European diseases decimated Indigenous populations, and many (though not all) of the survivors were slaughtered in land disputes. Curiously, there are cases up and down the East Coast of European-Native American integration; it would be interesting to see why they were different, and where the tipping point between true communal integration and simple appopriation is when survival is on the line.

That also seemed to be the norm in northern Spain not so long ago, none of my grandparents (maternal/paternal side) locked their doors, even at night.

That was also the case in France at least till the 50/60s

It wasn't that long ago when there were only 4 unique keys in the world and a thief had a skeleton key that would replace them all. In those days nobody locked their door because there was no point. As lock technology got better people in places of crime installed good locks and told their friends to do the same. Most people have no need to lock their door, but nobody knows if they are the exception.

With all respect, I call bullshit to your "4 unique keys" theory. Locks have a long and varied history all around the world. There is no way a single skeleton key would even fit into an Arabic, Chinese, Indian, Venetian, Swiss, or German lock.

For practical purposes you are wrong. In any given city 4 door locks is about right. There are padlocks and other types of lock, but the subject here is door locks in one location so4 is close enough and was the truth in the US where my grandparents grew up.

Until not long ago all locks were bad

People don’t lock their doors in many parts of America either like safe suburbs.

My house growing up couldn’t really even be properly locked up. You could lock the door but the first floor windows and sliding door on the deck didn’t lock at all.

I haven't ever locked my door unless I'm leaving for a several day trip.

If I notice the door is unlocked before bed I’ll lock it, but my neighborhood is very safe and I’m sure the locks often go unlocked before we go to sleep.

Before we moved here after our daughter was born, we lived in a rougher part of town and would instinctively lock the doors any time we went in our out. Our neighbor got robbed while she was at work, and my wife was at home when it happened, so we were very cautious. As a last resort we had a gun, which luckily we never had occasion to use.

It’s amazing how moving 10 miles away was such a huge stress reducer for me and my family.

Where I grew up in the US - Appalachia - in the 1980s and 1990s it was common to not lock your house or car. Crime was rare, murder was non-existent, homelessness didn't exist, and drugs weren't a problem yet. In my neighborhood everybody knew everybody else, all working class types (mixture of middle class and lower middle class mostly), it simply wasn't much of a concern.

Small groups of people with intimacy and a culture of low rates of crime. Violence or crime would make you an immediate outcast.

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