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Comment by dahfizz | Hacker News Reader

Enjoy your homogenous, high trust society. We are all jealous.

> Enjoy your homogenous, high trust society

"Homogeneous" in what way?

Because in my experience the sort of "homogeneity" that leads to high trust is that of wealth/income, and it requires a generous social net.

Most ways, as the research of Robert Putnam has documented well.

https://wcfia.harvard.edu/publications/downside-diversity

I see no mention of whether they adjusted for age and urban vs rural settings. Dense metropolitan cores, where most economic activity happens, tend to be both younger and highly diverse ethnically as the jobs there attract migrant flows. It is unsurprising that younger people in dense metropolitan "the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects". That's what retired people do.

And to be completely transparent about where I'm coming from: I'm the father of two mixed-race children and all this talk of "homogeneous societies" reeks to me of plain old racism that will hurt my kids. And I grew up in one of those European "homogeneous" countries that right-leaning racists love to talk about, too.

Turns out, like almost all things, homogeneity has positive aspects, too. Weirdly enough, this almost seems like forbidden knowledge depending on what political side you are on.

Also, as Denmark recently discovered, homogeneity is not simply dependent on a social safety net but exists within a symbiotic relationship with the latter.

One of the biggest hurdles to getting a social safety net past public perception in the US is that people are easily swayed against it if they're told that people of other races will benefit from it. A certain portion of the population automatically sorts any public benefit into a weird racial zero-sum game, where any support given to <people of that race> is a dollar specifically taken away from <people of my race>.

It's a big part of why we've historically had such a hard time implementing any sort of reasonable social benefits, and why the much lauded Nordic countries started cutting down on theirs the second they got a significant (racially different) refugee population.

Nah, don't worry. Theft at self checkouts is turning into a national hobby¹.

1: https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2024/01/05/de-diefstalcijfers-stij...

Every time I read one of these articles the naivety and tone-deafness from supermarkets over these self-checkouts amazes me.

"In order to make more money we made customers self-report their purchases during a cost-of-living crisis while we were booking record high profits and now these customers are _under reporting_ their purchases, how dare they!!"

They should've seen this coming from miles away.

The way you phrase it (but maybe I get you wrong) suggests that the customers are somehow in their (moral if not lawful) right to do this because of previous policies from the supermarkets. They (supermarkets) may have been wrong, but so is stealing. They don't cancel each other out, nor do two wrongs become a right.

I'd say stealing is always a net negative effect for the whole.

But if you're saying that the entire context explains a lot of the behaviour, and could possibly be predicted, then yes I agree.

> booking record high profits

According to the opening paragraph of that article that's doesn't seem to be the case. €80 million in profit (with €100 million theft) is not all that much.

Dubai also has self-checkout machines that don't require you to weigh anything, just scan and go, and it's an extremely heterogeneous, low-trust society. People are just very afraid of the police and being deported.

Seems to work similarly in Singapore. Low trust can work when there are harsh punishments for violations. But do we really want to live in that type of society?

Do I want to live in a society in which criminals suffer the consequences of their crime? Is this a serious question?

Whenever I see anyone use "homogeneous" in this context I always consider them a racist...

Meanwhile Netherlands elected an anti-immigration right-wing government in their last elections: https://time.com/6339173/dutch-election-results-geert-wilder...

23% did, just to be clear.

Being conservative on immigration (and in general) is not necessarily the product of racism.

Except it's neither homogenous nor high trust.

It's not exactly Japan-level high trust, but it is compared to most other countries in the world.

It really depends; in some areas it's exceedingly low-trust, almost paranoid. In some other areas it's probably not too bad.

Previous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36933489

I used to live in Indonesia and things are much more "high trust" in many aspects. On the other hand Indonesia also has a lot of problems with corruption and that sort of thing. "High trust/low trust" is too simplistic.

I don't have 200 other countries to compare it to, but by and large, Western countries are much less high-trust in many areas than people assume. This often becomes painfully obvious once you stray outside of the "standard happy path".

Sam's Club does this in the US and it is great.

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