Comment by jeswin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jeswin | Hacker News Reader

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> After reading this article, I wonder why these kinds of differences between countries exist.

The US has high per-capita income (lower than Norway, but not by much), but that average hides a lot of income disparity. This percolates to other disciplines as well; lots of highly educated people but also a large disinterested population; plenty of artistic talent but also a majority which is not able to fully appreciate aesthetics.

Some level of homogeneity (which is the true form of equality) is perhaps a characteristic of sophisticated future societies.

Add: Among wealthy nations, Norway, Finland, Sweden and Japan sit at the bottom of income disparity indexes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equ....

Just because someone's taste differs from yours doesn't make them "not able to fully appreciate aesthetics".

Sigh.

Norway is homogenous in part because it's small. Its population is a touch larger than Alabama's.

I imagine it's easy to be homogenous when you're small with a low immigrant population. I'm not sure it's because they are more sophisticated than other countries.

If one is making those comments about homogeneity and sophistication, it's always interesting to look at small but diverse Singapore.

You can also turn that income equality into something useful:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6c/Social_m...

Isn't the relationship in the graph simply the result of how income inequality and social mobility are defined? The lower the income inequality the less you need to earn (relative to the baseline income) to move up the social ladder (defined in terms of income).

It is usually a strong welfare states that helps children of lower classes achieve the same as those of upper classes.

But the strong welfare state reduces the spread between lower and upper classes and reduces the delta required to be "mobile".

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