What they seem to be glossing over is that homogeneity plays a large factor in this. Whether it's tribes, races or just plain ol' religion, a lot of inherent instability comes about as a result of people disagreeing the bajeezus out of each other for no real reason other than... "I'm not them".
Of course, if you're a native in these lands, that still leaves your people under-represented.
Actually no. The non-homogeneous states in America with lots of Nordic peoples tend to be the best governed as well. Think Minnesota ("think Minnesota" is the answer to every statistic comparing Europe to the States, crime, gun control, healthcare, etc., because Minnesota is basically Yankee Switzerland on every statistic). Almost as if it's not about the legal structure, but rather the people.
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.
The Nordicism of Minnesota is a bit of mythology perpetrated by Garrison Keillor and the locals. It's more German than Nordic, as are the the other well run states such as Wyoming, North Dakota & Iowa. Vermont is also generally in the top five of "best governed" states and the largest ethnic group is French Canadian, not a group renowned for their skills of governance.
Minnesota is not like Switzerland at all. Nor are Minnesotans Yankees. "Yankee Switzerland" is a pretty bad phrase for describing Minnesota.
"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."
On the other hand, there tends to be an inverse correlation between a European ethnic group's IQ scores in Europe and their IQ scores in the United States. Germans and Dutch score higher than the Europe-wide average, German-Americans and Dutch-Americans score lower than US-wide average.
Every time an article like this comes up, someone immediately pops up to say something like "the listed countries aren't multi-ethnic like the USA!"
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.
You're conflating immigration, multi-ethnicity, and multicultural. The key factor in homogeneity, which is what translates to ease of governance, is limiting the number of subcultures. Scandinavia and Canada have far fewer subcultures than the US; yes, people may be of different ethnic backgrounds, but they all basically think the same.
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.
Is it the institutions that cause divisions, or is it the divisions that cause the institutions? I don't think this answer is as clear as you suggest, because a great deal of beliefs and ideologies are passed down by institutions such as schools, which are of course mostly government controlled. Is it merely a historical artifact that the US has so many creationists?
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.
The fact that two groups are both European settlers does not mean they're basically the same people. Would you say that the Barbadian slaveowners who founded Charleston, South Carolina, and heavily influenced the culture of the South, are basically the same people as the Quakers and Puritans who founded colonies further north? They did not see themselves as the same people, and ended up fighting a bloody war over it, which they've been refighting politically ever since.
Is it merely a historical artifact that the US has so many creationists?
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.
i think it's geography. people don't realize how significant geography (and geology) is in the determination of culture. in the case of the U.S., "cultural diffusion" is restricted by the geographic distance between towns/cities
it is only now in the internet age that these cultural distances have begun to erode
The correlation has more to do with solidarity of individuals in those countries, which supports a concept of very tight linked individuals in a uniform fashion.
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
You are being completely misleading. Of the foreign-born in Nordic countries, most are white. The black and Hispanic population are almost nonexistent. Canada also has a very small percentage of blacks and Hispanics.
How very odd. What difference does that make? Is there some intrinsic tie between a (white) Iraqi or (white) Irani and a (white) Swede which does not exist between a (Hispanic) Mexican and (white) American?
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.
As of 2005 the U.S. had a foreign-born population of 12.8%; Sweden 12.3% (Norway and Finland were 7.4% and 3.0%, respectively) [1]. They aren't as strikingly homogenous as one would think.
You forgot a possible outcome : if the parent prediction about homogeneity is correct, then the nordic countries performance will decrease as the foreign born (or the home born but self identifying as foreign) population increase, and Sweden should be stuck first.
That link is a bunch of people talking on a forum, with no numbers or analysis. As a counter-example to your thesis, one of the comments in the link you posted to starts:
> 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.
Good for him - then what most people say abpit And Biskopsgården/Hammarkullen/Angered or Rosengård or Rinkeby/Sundbyberg must be wrong too.
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.
"Europe is full of hate and hatred - no wonder why guns are outlawed. It keeps some balance"
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.
There seems to be a strong homogeneity in eastern europe (what's the percentage of foreign born - totalling first and second generation not coming from neighbouring countries? I'd guesstimate it would be <10%).
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.
"Foreign born" does not include the second generation. As someone brought up in the US, the idea that someone who is second generation should be considered "foreign" is a strange concept. Someone born and raised in the US is an American. They might be a Cuban-American, Filipino-American, or Irish-American, but they are American. It wasn't until I visited Europe where I heard people regard the second- and even third-generation descendants as a foreigner. I still find it to be an odd and slightly disparaging view.
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.
Don't make any mistake - I'd love to be proven wrong, and you have great points.
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.
Yes, "what they say" is often different than reality. That was my point. The given link is worthless as a way to confirm or even strengthen your thesis.
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."
It's not about poverty and greed. There is a large social support system in european countries. It's not about being denied citizen status - most of the people who get themselves in trouble have been born in France, and by jus sanguinis are french citizen with valid IDs and passport all. It's not even about 'race' - many people from visible minorities, in mainland France and mostly in oversea french departments are quite happy about who they are and how they live, and their culture.
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.
I'm talking about poverty and greed in the US. Poverty helps lead to petty crime (mugging and home robberies). Greed helps lead to the murders I mentioned (in Miami in the early 1980s, mostly due to the illegal drug trade).
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.
"Foreign born" has a specific, well-defined meaning. It refers to a person born someplace other than the person's country of residence.
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.
Looking back a single generation might be too short a timespan to get a good gauge of homogeneity, but I think going back five hundred years, several hundred years before the foundation of the nation would be far less meaningful, to the point of absurdity.
I probably phrased it poorly. I was trying to point out that populations in the US mostly come from somewhere else and how quickly each group homogenize with the rest of the population differs greatly per group and region.
The Nordic countries aren't ethnically homogenous, not even when disregarding recent developments in migration. For example, there's a very large Swedish ethnic minority in Finland and vica versa. Swedish and Finnish people are ethnically very different, Swedish people being of Germanic origin while Finns having Uralic origins. There is an excellent relationship between them these days but this wasn't always the case.
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.
I do not have scientific data about this, but shouldn't smaller territories and city-states (Singapore, Hongkong etc) be easier to govern compared to actual big countries?
I was referring to geographical size. And as I said, while I do not have scientific evidence, I have a hunch that managing same size of population over a vastly smaller area should be easier.
It is a huge reason, as well is the small populations. Doesn't mean that one shouldn't commend them though. There are other parts of the world with small, homogeneous populations and they havent' done the same.
The type of immigrant matters, too, I'd suspect. The United States has 13.6% Africans whereas Norway has 1.4, Sweden has 0.8, and Finland has 0.37. [1] I have also suspected that the availability of pioneer country has made it easier for Americans to refuse integration, or the "I don't like the people here; I'll vote with my feet" effect.
This is speculation, though; I don't really consider it evidence until people have studies and analyses done and such.
From your link: "The term has been historically applied in particular to the descendants of the West and Central Africans who were enslaved and shipped to the Americas by way of the Atlantic slave trade"
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.
Most countries are relatively homogeneous. Some of the most homogeneous countries are the most horribly governed: North Korea, Albania, Algeria, Haiti, Lebanon, Libya... the list goes on and on.
How do you consider Lebanon to be homogeneous? The religious divide there is so deep and long-standing that it is enshrined in law, with power in the government divided along confessional lines.
Yes, Lebanon is a bad example. I was going with the fact that most people are technically Arab, ethnically. But you are correct, that doesn't have much bearing on the actual divisions in the country.
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.
You're going to have to be very specific about what you mean by "homogeneity" to tighten up this argument. Other comments farther down-thread precede mine in time, but I thought I would group some discussion of some of the disputed factual points here, because I agree with a thoughtful earlier comment that "This is a meme that should die, because it isn't based in any fact, but is mere speculation." Show the work if you want us to believe that this is a significant issue.
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.
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
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.
There is much to learn from Singapore, but its internal diversity isn't quite comparable to that elsewhere. As an outsider non-expert (and I'm sure you can fill in more details), much of its policy seems designed (and effective) to suppress ethnicity-as-a-source-of-political-strife.
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.
I love it how The Economist often runs articles trying to prove that excellent living conditions in nordic countries are all about "pro-business reforms" and have nothing to do with their well known welfare states. Ahh, The Economist...
That article mentioned plenty of welfare policies.
"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."
If you would read the articles you would see that they emphasize the change in policy in the last 20 years. That is the main thing I think you should take away from them - it is clear to me when the following outside discourse that the view of politics in Sweden is coloured by how it worked 40-20 years ago. It works radically different now, and the change started somewhere between 1990 and 1994 - coinciding with first a tax reform, then 3 year conservative-liberal government and a banking crisis. I don't mean that one caused the other, but these reforms together put Sweden on a path that obviously is not that well known abroad.
More of than once a quarter, for special reports. But if I should abstain for all technology reporting for a quarter, the "Technology Quarterly" of the Economist is the one I would not like to miss.
One pattern I've noticed lately is that if some topic gets popular people tend to just beat it with a dead horse (reddit works a lot like this). It's a bit like the 24/7 news cycle.
Hence why I believe HN link curation has become popular.
They are also closest to the real socialism, no Soviet country got even close to what they are doing - and I am saying that as a person coming from a former soviet republic.
The difference however, is that they willingly(and democratically) choose to provide all those social benefits.
Good for them.
This is just plain wrong. The means of production in Sweden have always been held in private hands, the one attempt to change this ended in spectacular failure. The big exception would be LKAB which is the owner of the iron ore mines in northern Sweden. A country where private equity companies owns schools is not socialist.
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.
This reminds me of the U.S. News and World Report rankings. They were taken seriously for years before people realized that they were seriously skewed and biased against some larger state universities.
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.
Aren't Swedish companies like Ericsson, Volvo, Scania, Saab, etc into innovation and mass production? I would say that for example Spotify (and many other Nordic companies) are quite innovative as well.
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.
I agree, and a problem is that many of the promising companies are sold (for example Dice, Skype and TAT) to large, usually foreign, corporations before they get the chance to grow.
Right, and not only that, a large number of companies move their headquarters elsewhere, such as Ikea to the Netherlands, Spotify to London etc. If I ever start my own company, I'll make sure never to be that greedy. I see the welfare state as an investment in people and businesses. Investment relies on getting paid by a few outliers. What is essentially happening is that when a company becomes successful it just says "well thanks for all the support and opportunity, but now that we're successful we don't really want to pay you back, so we're just going to go somewhere else, problem?".
H&M as a huge, multinational success-story is not that old. It was listed in 1974, and the first store outside of Scandinavia opened in 1976. It is older than Apple, but I say it is a different generation than the other companies in your list.
> they have also largely escaped the social ills that plague America.
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.
"According to Washington-based Refugees International the U.S. has admitted fewer than 800 Iraqi refugees since the invasion, Sweden had accepted 18,000 and Australia had resettled almost 6,000."
I do not question the charity and helpfulness of these nations. Neither do I find any issues with their foreign policies. My point was directed more to how the society (not the government) deals with the immigrants [1].
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?
Except that the immigrants there are not starting businesses. They do not integrate and instead are a drain on social services. Sweden's immigration policy with regards to refugees has been far too liberal, and now they have problem ghettos in Stockholm and Malmo.
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.
Please do more research. Your views may have been true two generations ago. They are not now.
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")
Perhaps more interesting is the USA is ranked 8, just behind all the obvious Nordic, Swiss and Singaporean contenders. The general tone of most mass media and internet commentary would suggest it should be somewhere behind Russia and Mexico.
That's American exceptionalism for you. I imagine it gives us a sense of purpose to believe we live in the most corrupt, illiterate, violent country in the world.
In my experience, the people who talk about America being the most violent, the most corrupt, etc. are the ones who also like to decry 'American exceptionalism'. And if you think that non-Americans don't think about Americans that much, I suggest you listen to the BBC.
> In my experience, the people who talk about America being the most violent, the most corrupt, etc. are the ones who also like to decry 'American exceptionalism'.
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.
I'm no economist but I wonder if the Nordic model is sustainable without external innovation and cheap labour (going on in countries like the USA and China respectively -- who perhaps pay a price in terms of 'social ills').
Using "probably" is such a weasel word, which is part of the reason it bothers me so immensely on their "it's always greener on the other side" piece on the Nordic countries.
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.
To quote Hans Rosling: “The problem is, we’re rightly concerned about the world, we rightly have ideological views and emotional feelings about the world, but we need to upgrade the facts,” via http://www.forbes.com/sites/ashoka/2013/01/30/why-facts-not-...
While you may very well be right about the economy being unsustainable, a hunch just isn't enough. Especially not in cases like these.
Running a perennial trade surplus is unsustainable if the country belongs to an area with fixed exchange rates, unless all the other countries also run a big trade surplus.
"Yet it is hard to see the Nordic model of government spreading quickly, mainly because the Nordic talent for government is sui generis. Nordic government arose from a combination of difficult geography and benign history. All the Nordic countries have small populations, which means that members of the ruling elites have to get on with each other. Their monarchs lived in relatively modest places and their barons had to strike bargains with independent-minded peasants and seafarers."
People on here who have worked at both big companies and startups should really appreciate how hard it is to manage large organizations efficiently. Things that work great at small scale fall apart as they grow (both organizationally and technologically).
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.
Not only that, but the sheer size and wealth of the US means there are some corrupting forces at work that are also much larger. After all, you still only have to wave money in front of a small number of people, but a country with larger, wealthier forces can wave a lot more of it... and the inequality is likely to get worse as a result as well, which makes good government even more challenging.
I find it a bit hard to swallow that "corruption perceptions" is an objective metric. And let's not forget that Norway's wealth - and thus the ease with which the government can improve other factors - is due to its natural resources, i.e. oil. If Switzerland is exemplary, go look up when it allowed women to vote.
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
> If oil wealth was all you needed to have good government, then the arab world would look drastically different
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.
Check the resource curse on Wikipedia, regarding other oil countries.
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.)
Full women's suffrage in Switzerland came mindbogglingly late, but more relevant would be ways in which they still fail today, not twenty years ago. Is the the system that failed to enforce rights nationwide is still in place, or has EU membership changed that?
In my opinion, you should be able to measure how well a country is governed by the amount of trust the people put in their government. I think the Nordic countries would score fairly high in that, but honestly, there are huge problems in those countries as well. Every country is run by imperfect and irrational people.
The corruption perceptions index, which is one of the factors the Economist ranking takes into account, is one possible proxy for the level of trust people have in their government: http://cpi.transparency.org/cpi2012/results/
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).
What have Sweden done to Assange? He's been accused of "sexuellt ofredande" by a private citizen and refused to appear in court. But that is not the fault of the state is it?
I agree that I think the Pirate Bay case has been handled badly.* However, the Assange case (sexual harrasment) is totally unrelated to Wikileaks.
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.
You have to realize that small countries in the west, like Sweden, Denmark and Norway, are de facto ruled by the US. All important decisions have to go by the embassy, and when told to jump, they will ask how high.
You don't think it's true? Have you in your lifetime ever experienced your government go against US interests, even when it's very clear that doing so is in the interest of the people they govern?
A clear overreach by the FBI, very clumsily handled. Also not all that interesting to the locals. Try issues where lives or large sums of money are involved.
Of course, if you're a native in these lands, that still leaves your people under-represented.