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Comment by vasilipupkin | Hacker News Reader

Note that just because something works in a country of 10mln, that doesn't mean it will work just as well in a country of 300mln. It's unlikely that Scandinavian style policies scale linearly. You can always find a sample of 10mln Americans that does just as well on all metrics as Sweden or better.

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Last time I checked, the US had 50 states, giving 6 mln people per state on average. I think such solutions implemented on state level should work exactly as well as for a country of 10mln.

maybe. We just don't know. To assume that cultural factors have zero influence on success of such policies is probably incorrect.

haha. Why did I get downvoted for this? I am not implying anything racial or anything like that. I am talking about culture specifically. Illinois has a political culture of corruption that is probably worse than Sweden, as an example.

Probably because most people think there are too many prisoners in the US and everyone who implies it should stay that way is seen dense/backward.

Didn't downvote, but I have the same opinion as those people.

I agree with you but that has little to do with swedish style welfare. Too many prisoners is due to draconian drug policies which are thankfully changing

> It's unlikely that Scandinavian style policies scale linearly.

I think it's likely. In fact, by default policies should scale linearly from 10 millions upwards.

This is pretty reductive and ignores the fact that America is exceptionally racially, culturally, and economically different from region to region, state to state, city to city, et al.

Policy that works great in NYC isn't guaranteed to work great in LA. Laws that work well in Dallas or San Antonio might have negative effects in Detroit, Chicago, or St. Louis.

By default? What default are you talking about? Sounds like fairy-tale default. Saying policies can just scale linearly from 17m people in the Netherlands to 1300m in China, needs an explanation a little more elaborate than 'it's the default'.

Policies scale by compartmentalisation. A population of 1300m is not administered as one big lump of people. Nor is a 17m one.

The point is, when you compartmentalize 10m people in 10x 1m provinces with local governments, it's relatively easy to have these 10 provinces be directed by a singular governmental policy. But when you try the same for a 100m population, or a 1000m population, you'd get 10 compartments of 100m, 100 compartments of 10m below this, and 1000 compartments of 1m. To expect each to follow the national policy is very difficult to do. You either need a strong dictatorship, or you need to accept that different compartments may elect radically different policies, which is why I don't think you can just implement and scale a policy to 1300m as easy as one can to 17m.

That's why you see huge differences for example between states even in things we expect to all agree on. There's very few national policies that simply scale to all states exactly the same, the military probably being a big one. But things like education, police or fire departments, housing, healthcare or even marriage, can be radically different. But here in the Netherlands? On tons of topics like education, police, healthcare or marriage, it's exactly the same in every single province, because we're pretty much one big state, despite quite large differences between provinces. e.g. 2 hours north-east, I can't understand the local language, here it's mostly protestant but two hours south is mostly catholic. But despite big differences in culture, language, religion, but also industries and demographics, it's extremely homogeneous in policies. To me that says that you can't just scale a policy to 300m like you can to 17m.

Policies scale because resources scale linearly to the size of the population.

unfortunately for us, human behaviour doesn't scale linearly.

Why don't the Americans do it on state or city level then?

Sincerely Swede

because of a complex interplay between Federal and state welfare programs. But also, they do more in some states and less in others. What I am saying is, if every state went to a Swedish model, it's not necessarily true that we would be better off. Paradoxically, the Swedes themselves could become worse off. Americans consume more because they have more disposable income, which means they can import things from Europe. What will happen if taxes are so high that Americans start consuming a lot less ?

A huge boom in the middle class, as witnessed by the end of the Great Depression through the 1970s, during which time tax rates were incredibly high on high income as compared to today.

Also closing gaps in income inequality, and continued spending by that larger percentage of middle-class population.

Or so history teaches us, which we're rather happy to ignore now.

absolutely, you are right that US tax rates on the very highest incomes were high. But overall tax burden was never as high. Remember, Sweden has both higher income taxes on the middle class than US ever had and high consumption taxes.

I would argue the economy boomed during that period in spite of the high taxes, not because of them.

Absent any evidence, I could argue that's an absurd position to take, based on a desire for something to be the exact opposite of the truth, just to fill a flawed political bent.

Taxes in the US are not nearly as much lower than in Scandinavia as people like to think, though of course it varies quite a bit depending on state income taxes. When you take into account "necessary but privatised " bits like health insurance, it erases most of the remaining difference.

The thing about health care is that it doesn't feel necessary when you're young, and healthy. Its when you're old, or are having children that you start to care about the health care system.... and by then its too late to revolt.

I don't think that's accurate, Swedish overall tax burden is something like 45% of GDP

For comparison US taxes are 24-27% of GDP according to Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_revenu...

I don't disagree, but experimentation should still be on the table. Maybe a certain state or municipality should be sponsored to try policies more along the scandinavian kind. Of course this is problematic. How do you for example stop everyone from moving into that particular priviliged district, etc?

states do have very different welfare policies. Some more generous than others. Texas has comparatively little relative to Massachusetts. Guess which way the net flow of people that are supposed to benefit from those policies happens

Poor people don't have the resources to move around the country.

Wealthy people are the ones who relocate and they don't benefit much from social welfare programs (if you ignore tangential benefits like not getting your car broken into by someone who needs money to eat).

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