The Nordic countries are probably the best-governed in the world
economist.com
economist.com
Of course, if you're a native in these lands, that still leaves your people under-represented.
It's more like if you rated everyone on the planet on "does this person make the place where he lives a better place or not", Scandinavians (and their descendants) would score perfect 10s.
A geneticist friend of mine has an explanation for this: he thinks that adaption to civilization makes us more nepotistic. He contrasts guest-rights in Northern Europe with "my brother against my cousin, my cousin against the stranger," of Egypt. When he gets melancholy, he will tell you that future of civilization is Mesopotamia -- where we have been civilized the longest. And Idiocracy.
Minnesota is not like Switzerland at all. Nor are Minnesotans Yankees. "Yankee Switzerland" is a pretty bad phrase for describing Minnesota.
But I have a feeling, Minnesota's "Yankee Switzerland" status has more to do with public education than with its demographic makeup.
You mean like
http://www.betterbankruptcy.com/bankruptcy-blog/2011/07/the-...
From the article at that URL:
"Minnesota government was forced to shut down Friday, July 1, for the second time in 6 years after Minnesota lawmakers could not reach an agreement for the state’s budget."
Mmmmmmm...sounds like paradise.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_foreign-bo...
Some foreign born people are immigrants, though "immigrant" is an ambiguous term which can include the native born descendants of foreign-born people. The term foreign born also includes non-immigrants, like temporary ex-pats working overseas for 5 years and students getting a foreign education.
The term "foreign born" is used in part so as to avoid the debate you are attempting to provoke.
The situation seems to be happening in Malmö - like in other cities in Europe. Yesterday I stumbled on that link : http://www.city-data.com/forum/europe/1278859-good-bye-swede...
> I have spent much time in Sweden, mostly in Stockholm and the surrounding area. However, I have been to Malmö and I really like it. It has a grit about it that most other Swedish cities lack albeit being charming at the same time. Malmö is also a visibly mixed city and there are ethnic swedes and "new-swedes" alike, often in each others company. I found Malmö to be pleasant, refreshingly integrated ( despite the fact that there are parts of the city that are indeed segregated in Swedish standards), and nothing like these articles that I have been reading that are persuading the reader that Malmö is an ethnic mix-up disaster and the lead example of Sweden's cultural fate.
I left Europe. I was initialy from the french city where the jihadist killer short jewish schoolchildren - along with their professor. My mom still lives there. She was attacked twice these last 2 years.
Europe is full of hate and hatred - no wonder why guns are outlawed. It keeps some balance.
I pray and hope I will never ever again have to live there - ever.
I dunno, you've lived in a smallish city in France (a country known for not being particularly welcoming of foreign folks) and you're generalising your experience to a fucking huge continent. Frankly it sounds like something else has pissed you off and I'd be really interested to know what.
Personally I live in the Czech Republic, itself seen as being rather insular and apprensive about outsiders particularly in the less-visited regions (I live in Brno, a few hours from Prague). Hate and Hatred are in short supply here, curiousity and unfamiliarity yes but not hatred. Although I'm Scottish, in my local (completely non-English speaking, outside the centre) pub I'm fondly received and often a subject of interest, particularly with my Indian girlfriend. I reckon you should reconsider whether or not your experience is a weird anomaly or post something slightly more critical of a particular area rather than an entire continent.
Except in Bulgaria, resentment seems more direct against people who left than people who came.
I'm not pissed of about anything. At a time, I also believed I had a bad experience but should not jump to any conclusion.
Many isolated experiences point to another conclusion.
I'm not sure I fully understand what is happening, but something definitely is. And It just feels like a really really bad idea to stay in a place where trouble is brewing.
In any case, your guesstimate is silly, for three reasons. One: you can research it easy, so there's no need to guesstimate. If you want a serious discussion, then give actual numbers.
Two: the US is probably also less than 10%, given the restrictions you placed and using the actual definition of 'foreign born.' Of the 31,107,890 foreign born US residents for the 2000 census, 9,177,485 were from Mexico and 820,770 from Canada. The population of the US in 2000 was 250,314,015, so excluding neighboring countries, giving a non-neighboring-foreign-born population of 8.4%.
And three: you paint Eastern Europe with a wide brush. Look even at the languages. Romanian is a Romance language, Hungarian is the most widely spoken non-Indo-European language in Europe, Czech is a Slavic language. And as to culturally homogeneity in general? English has a phrase to describe the patchwork of cultures in south-eastern Europe - "Balkanization."
> Balkanization, or Balkanisation, is a geopolitical term, originally used to describe the process of fragmentation or division of a region or state into smaller regions or states that are often hostile or non-cooperative with each other.
Have you perhaps forgotten the Yugoslavian wars?
> The wars were complex: characterized by bitter ethnic conflicts among the peoples of the former Yugoslavia, mostly between Serbs (and to a lesser extent, Montenegrins) on the one side and Croats and Bosniaks (and to a lesser degree, Slovenes) on the other; but also between Bosniaks and Croats in Bosnia
Your idea that there "seems to be a strong homogeneity in eastern europe" now is a complete denial of the observed facts.
The eastern european countries I was referring to were the former communist countries now part of (or soon to be part of) Europe - to which the Czech republic belongs.
Yugoslavia is not part of it, even if Slovenia could be considered as a edge case as it was part of Yugoslavia and is now part of the EU.
The definition I proposed may look strange, but it's the best explicative variable I have for the situation in Europe - and you're right, it's quite shocking that the second generation should be considered foreign. It is shocking to me. Yet that's how european seems to think and self classify.
If with the given definition the US has a "diversity" of less than 10%, while troubled european countries such as France do have a greater number, then maybe this definition is in fact explicative and predictive of the situation in Europe - except Yugoslavia, which I totally agree is a special example.
I was born and raised in Miami which, during the early 1980s, had the highest murder rate in the US. A cop was killed a few blocks from our home, and a car chase ended on the street in front of our house. During college, two of my roommates were mugged, and once someone tried to break in while I was asleep, and threatened me with a pistol. My house has been robbed twice since then.
So... What's your point? That violence from poverty or greed is somehow better than violence from hatred?
As someone from France you must surely know that there is a large diversity in Europe. The Nordic countries, up there in the corner and with no inter-country wars for many generations, have mostly escaped the deep antagonisms of mainland Europe. They have also managed to escape the guest-worker trap that France fell in, where native-born children of immigrant parents are denied citizen status.
Also, you haven't been keeping up with the US rhetoric. "It doesn't help to ban guns because a killer can always find another way to kill people."
There is something else- more pervasive. It's hard to express.
The best analysis I have is people like to classify themselves and others. For some reason, many people - especially in France - want to self identify as 'not the same as the local people' if given the chance, and this is reinforced by how most people see them and judge them.
I know about diversity - hell, I'm only partially french myself - I could want to do that.
Luck or fate didn't make me do that - I do not classify myself as anything. But I notice people are sorting themselves like booleans - 'french' or 'not', regardless of any other variable such as money, origins or citizenship status. Even people I've known for a long time and who would have no reason to. And I've seen the same thing happening in the neighbouring coutries.
It is not like the US - where for some reason, the heavy majority people born in the US from different countries and background become proud of being associated with the country and claim themselves as americans, and do not hate the other - at least not too much. Not as much as I've seen in Europe - replace 'french' / 'not french' and it seems to work the same way.
I currently live in a french oversea departement, where I'm the visible minority. >90% of the population is african american, but for some reason, it all goes well, there are not major trouble. People are proud of themselves and do not self classify as anything. There is a strong unemployment and poverty. There are factual reasons why, according to the theories I had (similar to yours: poverty, greed) there should be some serious trouble.
It's no paradise, but yet it goes well, there is a kind of unity. So I don't believe it is just about social issues.
It's as if the "homogeneity" played a positive role - as in, people can relate to eachother and don't feel threatned by eachother, a kind of trust in the social contract, enforced by this homogeneity, a positive reinforcement.
I'm not sure this is the right explanation. I'm still trying to understand - if only for my own good!
Something very different is happening in Europe at the moment. It's a bit scary. I could be wrong, but I sincerely believe something bad is going to happen there - clans are forming, clans of people who hate eachother.
I do not want to take side, or to be classified on any side at all. The reasonable way is not being there.
And BTW You're right, banning weapons do not work. People with enough hate will find clever ways around that - boxcutters or anything will do.
In any case, I concur with smcl. You are incorrectly extrapolating your regional attitudes based on French culture to the entire continent. It does not much apply to Sweden, where I live, nor to what I understand about Norway and likely the other Nordic countries.
"People like to classify themselves and others". Yes. The US author Vonnegut even termed the phrase "granfalloon" for "a group of people who imagine they have a connection that does not really exist." This includes football fans, who self-identify, say, as Man U fans.
"Homogeneity" is different than "relate to each other and don't feel threatned by each other." Some of the bitterest rivals can be between different members of the same family. While Switzerland is surely an example of a successful non-homogenous country in Europe.
If that's the case, then why not argue that the ability to relate to each other and not feel threatened is the key? Homogeneity seems like a false and bland goal.
Homogeneity is just a proxy - but if people can better relate to eachother if they look the same and/or believe in the same things, maybe it's a valuable proxy?
But you're right, the ability to relate to eachother is more important in the end - and some countries do better on this, even with less homogeneity.
I'd call that the "social contract" - I don't know if there is a better way to understand it.
Why do I even have to point this out?
Population size on the other hand it is clear difference but I don't know if that is significant.
This is speculation, though; I don't really consider it evidence until people have studies and analyses done and such.
Meanwhile: "103,077 African-born people were resident in Sweden as of 2009." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_immigrants_to_Sweden) which means that more than 1 % of residents were actually _born_ in Africa, while your link refers to residents that are descendants, sometimes since many generations.
All Swedish-speaking Finns I know consider themselves exactly that: Finns who speak Swedish. Aaland is an exception though, having more of a Swedish identity, but also regionally separate.
Note that there is a spectacularly heterogenous country at the top of the same list.
I have no clue.
Norway: 148,746 sq mi
Finland: 130,596 sq mi
Denmark: 16,562 sq mi
Singapore: 274 sq mi
Norway: 5,033,675
Finland: 5,421,827
Denmark: 5,580,413
Singapore: 5,312,400
This is a meme that should die, because it isn't based in any fact, but is mere speculation. A quick look down any statistics for immigration (as other posters have pointed out) will show very little difference between the US and other "Western" countries. The assertion that multiculturalism restricts good governance clearly does not hold up to scrutiny. Canada, for example, compares well to Scandinavian countries on certain metrics (education, economy, formerly healthcare...), and nobody can plausibly argue that Canada is not at least as multi-ethnic as the US.
There is nothing like the US difference between "red state" and "blue state" outlooks. There aren't huge debates over whether creationism should be taught in schools. You don't have people in the national legislature with radically different beliefs about facts like how old the Earth is. Of course it's going to be easier to govern.
I use Canada as an example because I think it's interesting how two countries that were basically founded by the same people (European settlers, mostly British in the early years) have diverged so greatly in both governance and ideology.
it is only now in the internet age that these cultural distances have begun to erode
Perhaps. I think it's basically a product of separation of church and state. If everybody is free to practice whatever religion they choose, a fair number will choose religions that have nutty beliefs.
I don't think institutions like schools have fostered these kinds of divisions; if anything they have reduced them, by putting everyone through the same indoctrination. As much as the US seems politically divided now, it was more so in the 19th century, before compulsory public education.
The problem is the assertion that it's not correlative is just as baseless as the one that asserts the opposite. You simply cannot measure either one on a 1-10 scale.
Homogeneity states that individuals within the composotion of a greater whole are uniform in composition and character. You state very clearly factors of composition - ethnicity and culture, but ignore all of the other characteristics such as opinion, thoughts, religion, adherence, etc, (this list will go on forever) that you and I simply cannot throw together into a pot and draw a conclusion.
nobody can plausibly argue that Canada is not at least as multi-ethnic as the US
What evidence do you have to support that claim?
I thought the immigration rate of blacks to the US were rather low, so what point are you trying to make there? Shouldn't you also include the First Nations peoples in Canada, and the Native Americans in the US?
And as for Canada ... Canada has a high Asian immigrant population. Pulling up a 2006 report:
> Among the more than 1.1 million recent immigrants who arrived between 2001 and 2006, almost 6 in 10 (58.3%) were born in Asian countries, including the Middle East. ... The share of recent immigrants born in Asia (including the Middle East) had increased steadily since the late 1970s. But in 2006, the share (58.3%) was virtually unchanged from 59.4% in 2001.
Granted, the US classifies people from the Middle East as "white", but to outright ignore the significant immigration from the Far East into Canada makes your objection weak.
Also note the comparative reversal of inequity. During the 20th century, Sweden worked very hard to address it. Whereas since the 70s, the USA has been working very hard to undo the progressive New Deal reforms, allowing inequity to get much worse.
I can't imagine a well governed state with gross inequity.
Looking at a list of countries by population,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population
I am reminded that Sweden is the most populous Nordic country and that the Nordic countries rank about the same in the world rankings as Singapore, an amazingly multi-ethnic country.
It is hard to remember anymore that Singapore was a very, very poor country when it achieved independence (after being expelled from the Federation of Malaysia in 1965). Singapore was settled earliest by ethnic groups similar to those in current Malaysia, with a big influx of wretchedly poor agricultural laborers for plantation labor during the British colonial period. It was not expected in the pre-independence period (which extended into my lifetime) that Singapore would ever be prosperous. (You can watch a videotape of the movie Saint Jack, which was filmed in Singapore, for a reminder of the poverty in Singapore as recently as in the early 1970s.)
But the early leadership of independent Singapore strongly emphasized effective generally available primary education (without at first even making school attendance compulsory) and studied the best international examples of sound textbooks and effective teaching practice.
http://www.merga.net.au/documents/RP182006.pdf
School pupils in Singapore from my generation (born in the late 1950s) grew up in a country that was extremely poor (it's hard to remember that about Singapore, but until the 1970s Singapore was definitely part of the Third World). People from Singapore are so ethnically diverse that Singapore has four official languages from four different language families. All the school pupils were educated in a foreign language (the language of schooling in Singapore has long been English, but the home languages of most Singaporeans are south Chinese languages like my wife's native Hokkien or Austronesian languages like Malay or Indian languages like Tamil). Official surveys by the Singapore government
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Singapore#Langu...
show that as recently as 1990, Singapore had no majority language among the various languages that people speak in their homes, and the plurality language category was category including more than one language, none of which are even one of the offical languages of Singapore. Yet young people growing in that generation, going to school in a language they generally didn't speak at home, received very thorough instruction in mathematics and science and other subjects.
Today Singapore is prosperous, and one set of projections suggests it is on track to be the richest country in the world on a per-capita basis by 2050.
http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2012/08/15/singapore...
Some examples:
• It's been essentially a one-party state its entire existence
• English is the official language but almost no-one's traditional/family language, making English a non-negotiable and somewhat neutral focal point for cooperation, rather than a issue of contention/dominance
• Immigrants have been filtered, within living memory, based on their willingness to embrace the Singapore bargain: political stability/homogeneity for wealth and safety. (And comparisons of much-worse-off cousins in neighboring countries are easily available, unlike other countries where the Nth-generation poor maintly see better-off countrymen.)
• 85% (!) of all residents live in high-quality public housing, but the proportion of residents per development is carefully managed with quotas to prevent the formation of ethnic-activism political blocks
• Death to drug traffickers! And until recently, lashings for spitting-on-the-sidewalk. Plus the various kinds of libel suits which keep criticism of the government/party/housing-board/governing-investment-funds on a short leash.
It looks to me that Singapore has tamed some of the governance problems that come with radical ethnic diversity by using heavy-handed techniques that couldn't be used in other diverse competitive democracies.
"Universal free education allows students of all backgrounds to achieve their potential. Separate taxation of spouses puts wives on an equal footing with their husbands. Universal day care for children makes it possible for both parents to work full-time."
In fact the conclusion of the article was this:
"Economists frequently express puzzlement about the Nordic countries’ recent economic success, given that their governments are so big... Goran Persson, a former Swedish prime minister, once compared Sweden’s economy with a bumblebee—“with its overly heavy body and little wings, supposedly it should not be able to fly—but it does.” Today it is fighting fit and flying better than it has done for decades."
At least two others in the past day! http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5152160 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5149821
This week it happens to be the Nordics but in the past it has done China, the USA, France, Singapore, etc.
The previous special report was on offshoring and outsourcing. http://www.economist.com/printedition/specialreports
Hence why I believe HN link curation has become popular.
The difference however, is that they willingly(and democratically) choose to provide all those social benefits. Good for them.
There is a large public sector in the Nordic countries but this is run off the taxes from these successful capitalist companies and their employees. So a better name would be welfare capitalism, not socialism.
I've been to Sweden and stayed with a family there and got the impression that they are mostly an intelligent and compassionate people that tend to think alike. However the drive that set the U.S. apart (back then at least) was for innovation, business, and capitalism, while the Scandinavian/Nordics were making furniture and high quality items without really caring about making a lot of money from mass production, so their GDP was much lower.
To say now that they are well-governed because the U.S. is starting to suck economically based on biased stats? Worthless info, imo.
H&M: 1947, Ericsson: 1876, Volvo: 1927, Ikea: 1943, ABB (formerly ACEA): 1883, AstraZeneca (formerly Astra AB): 1913, SAAB: 1937, Electrolux: 1919, etc
These have been the backbone of Swedish innovation for a long time, but we can't count on them anymore. We need more Google's and Apple's. There's Spotify, Digital Illusions (now EA), Skype (sort of), but there are no big successes anymore.
That is not a fair assessment. The social landscape in both regions is very different. The nordic region does not have the same influx of immigrants as North America. And increasingly, North African and Middle Eastern (primarily Muslim) immigrants (and born-citizen second generations) are being marginalized [1].
I wonder how the Nordic nations will react when more and more immigrants start moving there to start businesses, if that turns out to be the case in the future.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/world/europe/14dutch.html?...
[1] http://www.smh.com.au/world/norwegian-schools-segregation-sp...
For example, do you think that is common practice in Norway? I read elsewhere that the policy was quickly abandoned once it was made public. Do you think the 50 students who demonstrated in protest show that this was an unexpected practice? Might the comment of "school captain Helena Skagen" .. "what they did was wrong because you can't split the students according to their culture" might indicate that this was an unusual event, and hence newsworthy?
Sweden has accepted a huge number of people from the Middle East. I live in Sweden. Today I went to a hamburger place owned by someone from Iraq. Another person there came from Lebanon. My wife just went across the street to get a pizza, where the owner is also from the Middle East.
Sweden started opening up to immigrants (as I understand the history) back in the 1970s. They took in people fleeing the dictatorship in Chile. (They also accepted US draft dodgers in the 1960s and people fleeing the Soviet bloc.) There are currently some 126,000 people born in Iraq who now live in Sweden, and 64,000 from Iran. That alone is 3% of the country. The total immigrant (non-Sweden born) population is about 1.5 million out of 9.5 million, or 16%.
That's about the same as the US, where about 12% of the population was born in another country.
And why did you post that link to the NYT? That talks about The Netherlands, which is not a Nordic country. ("Amid Rise of Multiculturalism, Dutch Confront Their Questions of Identity")
There is a real trojan horse here. In the last two decades the Arab population has swelled to over 600,000. They hive the highest birth rate of any other group. They live in neighborhoods where police all but refuse to go. Fiercely anti-semitic, some attack the Jewish community in Malmo--to the point where Jews are leaving.
The've let in a population of people that has no interest in learning the language, integrating, or adopting local customs. The next decade will be interesting to see how this is handled.
That's my point, yeah? "We're so stuck up" is just as ignorantly self-centered as "We're so industrious" or whatever else Americans say about ourselves. We're mostly just normal.
It's the same crap as "Danes" (or whoever) are the happiest people in the world. It's just a silly meme that people don't bother to scrutinize to understand.
I got the feeling that the Swedish (as well as the UK and German) economy is unsustainable.
While you may very well be right about the economy being unsustainable, a hunch just isn't enough. Especially not in cases like these.
Population of Norway: 5 million
Population of Sweden: 10 million
Population of Finland: 5 million
Population of USA: 315 million
That's gotta factor into it at least a little...
I believe that these small Nordic governments can be effective and accountable, but that doesn't mean that it will translate to something 30-60 times as large. For comparison, Kaiser in California (one health care provider in one state) serves 8.9 million patients.
There's not much to be said against Sweden and Denmark though: one could sum up their success by saying that they simply never went down the road of screwing the population in order to be able to reduce corporation tax, which is all too common nowdays (see Ireland, USA, even Germany).
If oil wealth was all you needed to have good government, then the arab world would look drastically different from how it does today. I'd say that natural resource wealth actually makes it HARDER to have a good government, as it'd be a more tempting target to corrupt.
> There's not much to be said against Sweden and Denmark though: one could sum up their success by saying that they simply never went down the road of screwing the population in order to be able to reduce corporation tax
Sweden actually has a quite low corporation tax.
Tl;dr: A country with lots of income from natural resources won't become a democracy -- Norway already was a democracy when the oil money started flowing. It is too lucrative for the politicians to keep the population down, get external enemies etc and steal the money. (Also, too much free money distorts the economy -- this goes for Norway.)
It's not all you need. But if good intentions are there, it makes a little difference whether you have a $700b oil fund (for a population of 5 million) or not. In other words, many other countries might be similarly well governed, but lacking financing.
> Sweden actually has a quite low corporation tax.
It was higher than the EU average until Jan 1st 2013.
Trust is a more general concept than just perceived lack of corruption, but I would guess the two are closely related (though which direction the causality goes in is an interesting question).
- US policy is decidedly against it
- Lots of money in selling munitions, and definitely lives involved
- Norway organized it and locals campaigned for it
For someone living in Sweden the idea that a woman affiliated with LO (Workers Union) would go the errands of the US government trying to get Assange convicted for sexual harassment is unbelievable.