I see this stated all the time, but I've never seen a good explanation of why that is.
You could also make all kinds of claims about why a small and sparsely populated country like Norway or Sweden could never be prosperous - they don't have the economies of scale to attract investment, they speak languages that not many people outside of those countries know, etc. But they seem to have figured it out.
Rather than just giving up and saying that we cannot replicate their success, maybe we should be looking for novel ways of implementing such a system (after first confirming that what they're doing actually doesn't work in a much larger country, rather than just taking it as fact).
Would you say in a job interview that you think a problem 30 times larger is just 30 times as hard to solve...? (That is a different class of problem.)
That depends entirely on whether the problem scales linearly, sublinearly, or superlinearly.
Your response is just another example of the defeatist attitude that most Americans have when it comes to comparisons with Scandinavian countries that have solved many of the social problems that plague the US these days. You can give no concrete reason why it would be so difficult to replicate these solutions in the US, instead repeatedly stating that it won't work because there are 30x as many people.
If we had taken the same attitude when it came to building out the interstate highway system after WW2 just because we have significantly more land area than European nations, we would have never been able to connect the whole country. But instead, we came up with workable solutions and successfully implemented them.
I am from Sweden, please check so personal attacks are relevant first!
I try to make this point: The Scandinavian systems do have big problems too, which isn't that publicized. I wouldn't recommend anyone to carbon copy it. Look at e.g. the German implementation instead, larger population and (from the outside) it seems to work less bad than in Sweden.
See my other comments. (And yes, the US health care is uniquely fubar:ed.)
Re scaling:
Nothing I've ever seen says that organising big groups of people in complex endeavours (companies, societies etc) scale [sub]linearily! (Consider network effects of people. And all the differing areas/cultures. And organized crime/gangs in USA.)
But sure, I am certainly no specialist. References welcome?
Just assuming a more social system wouldn't work just because the U.S. is larger seems rather speculative to me. Have they tried, and did they fail?
I am also not swedish :P
True, but not are as populous as a Scandinavian country. Additionally, it would take a massive (massive!) restructuring of the tax code across the federal, state, and local levels to allow the states to increases taxes enough to provide sufficient services on their own. The federal government would also need to cede a fair of power to the states (think education, health care, social services).
I'm not necessarily suggesting this is a bad idea--there are just considerable obstacles to implement such a policy shift.
Each war and crisis has ratcheted up centralized power, typically by way of granting war time powers that never seem to completely fade away.
To help illustrate, money is an important proxy to government power, and the federal government spends roughly twice that of all state governments combined ($3.8T vs $2T).
> Have they tried, and did they fail?
The federal government has welfare programs that can be augmented by the states. California, for example, does this with food stamps (SNAP to CalFresh), health care for the poor (Medicaid to MediCal), and welfare for families (TANF to CalWORKS). To fund these, among other services (e.g., the University of California system), California has the highest state income tax in the nation (topping out at 13.3% for those earning over $1M).
I imagine that some states do not go much beyond the minimal federal programs.
For example, starting in 2014, Medicaid (health care for the poor) was expanded to cover those earning under 138% of the poverty line (a perfect example of the confusing way in which assistance is determined). Many states chose not to expand Medicaid, so they will not receive additional federal funding for the program. States that did, however, will.
On the health care front, some states have attempted to introduce universal health care. California successfully passed a bill, only to be vetoed by Arnold Schwarzenegger. Only two successful instances come to mind: Vermont and Massachusetts.
Vermont passed a single-payer universal health care system in 2011. Unfortunately, I am ignorant of details on its implementation.
Massachusetts has "RomneyCare," which has since been augmented to strongly resemble (in my eyes) the Swiss health care scheme. Insurance is mandatory, but coverage cannot be denied. Private insurance is subsidized by government. Health care costs are heavily regulated.
It's worth noting that the law as written, did not leave much of an option for the states to not expand Medicare. However, the law was gutted by the court system, so most of the right-leaning states chose not to expand it.