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Comment by TheSpiceIsLife | Hacker News Reader

Finland's population is about the same as Melbourne's, Estonia about the same as Adelaide.

I'd suspect it's likely that in countries with much larger populations, socio-cultural-economo class-like variance is probably higher, and inertia greater, so change is more difficult.

I live in Tasmania, half the adult population is functionally illiterate, and voting is compulsory, so we have a situation where the pool of talent to select from for society wide decision making is more limited, perhaps, and the decisions being made have to be somewhat tolerated by the population.

Agree in the general sense though, we should be looking to model our systems more on places like Finland and Estonia, rather than US / UK.

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The comparison with Australia is quite ironic. I would argue implementing drastic changes in a school system in a place like Australia would be much easier than Finland. These things work much better with the economies of scales afforded by large cities. The population density of Melbourne is orders of magnitude higher than that of Finland and let's not forget, more than half the OZ population lives in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide.

I found that Australians (in terms of politicians) are particularly probe to make these arguments how things can't be done here. The irony is that they go often both ways, either it can't be done because Australia is too big, or because its too small. High speed rail is another example, supposedly it's not feasible because of the low population density, completely ignoring the fact that the density is actually very concentrated, which is ideal for high speed rail. Just a connection Melbourne-Sydney would be perfect, that's (one of?) the busiest air routes in the world. This is all about political will, not feasibility.

I hear that same "can't do spirit" often from American conservatives. I think the only true obstacle is a lack of political will.

I’m actually largely on board with can’t do in the us. It’s cultural. People want institutions to

1) work the relay they think they are supposed to work but have no idea

2) cost exactly zero dollars

3) function perfectly all the time

4) take their feedback and ignore the feedback of everyone else

American governance is so trapped by human paradoxes that it’s bound to function poorly. That’s particular to hear and particular to the societal narratives that we ((especially the right) ascribe to

Do you think places like the USA or Australia actually lack political will?

Far from it, there is plenty of political will in both countries. What's missing is any sort of coherent political will to drive good and beneficial change.

Ay least in so far as I'm able to discern what good and beneficial are. Certainly isn't the direction either country is headed.

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply it can't be done, and I don't think I actually did write that anywhere.

Your reply is to my point. Australia is pretty divided politically, and it seems there's a not insignificant portion of the population who are intent on railing hard against anything that benefit someone else.

Yeah, it's political, and I think my point was something like: bigger populations distributed over large areas are difficult to appease.

About half the population of Australia doesn't live in the big cities.

True, they are smaller, but the key is they managed this shift. Their education was not always top notch - it changed by careful and wise policy design over ~2 decades.

And while Estonia is small (1.4Mio), that still means we are talking about 600+ schools spread over an entire country (land area of the average US state), with a very low budget and vast differences by region, e.g. an impoverished east with Russian speakers, some very rural areas, and Tallinn and Tartu as major university towns with startup scenes.

Finland is a bit bigger in population but even more population diversity, from a significant Swedish and Russian minority in the cities and east to finns spread out over rural and city areas, up to nomadic reindeer herders with their own unique language in the far north. So definitely an entire education system with its own challenges, which was not always good.

> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Estonia

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