
Ask HN: the northern European Edens (Finland, Norway, Sweden)? - nnq
How comes any time there's a comparison of education or healthcare or overall "social health" or development of the northern European countries (Finland, Norway, Sweden) with any other country in the world, the northeners are always better? How did they manage to get so many "social" problems so right? Does anyone know of a good case-study about how these countries reached their current level?<p>The thing that actually overfilled my "glass of curiosity" was Linus Torvalds's comparison of public education in US and Finland. And I've read so many such opinions lately, not only comparing things with the US but also with other countries that I have to ask: <i>is this northern Eden a myth? or are they really doing something right and they are doing it right for over half a century?</i>
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soneca
That is definetely not a myth, but also there is not a simple answer. First,
their taxes rate are the highest in the world. And they are "social welfare
state", and this is hard to balance, they are very expensive states. Norway,
because of oil, has funds sufficient to guarantee the wealth of the next 10
generations, but not the other two. Also they are the most equal countries in
the world. You may check any Gini index rank. This is incredibly important for
me, but some people may find weird when a CEO has a salary only few times
bigger than the average worker of his company. This equal, expensive, social
welfare state demands a lot of unity of the population political view.
Something that sounds impossible on big countries. These countries have a LOT
to teach regarding public education and public health, but they are not copy
and paste solutions, their solutions are very hard to emulate.

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ExpiredLink
Some countries invest in education others in armed forces and tax reductions
for the rich.

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rdouble
The Economist had an issue about this topic 2 months ago. Every article was
posted to hacker news. You could probably search and find the previous
discussions.

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anderspetersson
We pay 33% income tax...

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nnq
I don't think this is about how much money in taxes the state collects. I
think the average tax revenue per citizen is higher for the US than for, let's
say, Finland (please correct me if I'm wrong). It _might_ be about how this
money are distributed to education vs healthcare vs army vs ... But my hunch
is that it's not even this, it's about how the system spends the money and not
about how much money (for healthcare it's definitely not, as I don't think
anyone spends more than the US on average per citizen, but for education I
really don't know anything about the figures, that's one of the reason I've
asked this...).

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wattson12
according to [http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-
book/background/numb...](http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-
book/background/numbers/international.cfm), the US has one of the lowest tax
rates, while scandinavian countries are all towards the high end of the list

There is definitely an issue of how much money is distributed to welfare /
infrastructure / education etc compared to military but the lower tax rate
means there is less to spend to begin with (per capita at least)

