
We Could Be Denmark - ergot
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/01/denmark-nordic-welfare-universal-social-democracy-workers-solidarity-race/
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bhups
Ethnic homogeneity isn't the only reason comparing the US to Denmark doesn't
make much sense, it's also due to population. Denmark is a tiny country with a
population of 5.7 million people. That's about the population of Wisconsin.

The United States is a federation of self-governing states within which there
are open borders and free trade...just like the European Union. The United
States has a population of 320 million people, while the EU has a population
of a similar order of magnitude: around 500 million. To many voters, the idea
of enacting broad social welfare programs in the United States sounds just as
infeasible as enacting similar programs in the whole European Union.
California is different from Ohio, both of which are different from Georgia.

If we want to use Denmark and the Nordic countries as examples for our
policies, we should move towards the republican (small r) idea of
decentralization so that the states can enact such systems. Today, I pay
roughly 30% of my income in taxes to the federal government, and 10% of my
income in taxes to the state government. This should be the other way around -
10% to the Federal government and maybe 30% to my state. Maybe Wisconsin can
have a single payer healthcare system, California can have a universal multi-
payer system (like Germany), and Texas can have a universal multi-payer system
like that in Switzerland.

TL;DR - We could be more like the European Union.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
The EU has actual laws about things like paid time off, wages, and health-care
though. Oh, and privacy, and human rights. And it has parliamentary systems
that represent people more than the current American system.

I agree with the article that we ought to be able to impose some useful
minimums in the USA, just like in the EU.

~~~
lend000
"...it has parliamentary systems that represent people more than the current
American system."

The EU is composed of seven major institutions, only one of which has direct
representation by voters (the EU parliament), and the number of
representatives of each country is roughly proportional to their size, so any
given voter of a small EU country has effectively zero representation (not
good). Not defending America where our unelected bureaucrats often have more
control over citizen's lives than elected officials, but the EU is very far
from a democratic, representative system.

~~~
PaulHoule
Note the U.S. has survived 240 yrs including the existential crisis of the
civil war as well as many lesser challenges. It's proven.

The EU has been around for a much shorter time but it is in crisis now as much
as it would like to deny it.

~~~
dogma1138
The US and the EU were founded on very very different principals.

The EU started as a trade agreement and when the EU was officially founded one
of the founding principals was that it would never attempt to supersede or
replace national sovereignty, which has clearly not been the case for the past
decade if not longer.

The EU also has fundamental flaws in it's institution and probably the worse
monetary institution currently in existence which is the ECB.

The EU needs to either scale back and go back to it's trade agreement roots or
stop pretending it's not a quasi federation and just go on with it.

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Eupolemos
Dane here.

Our health insurance - an important part of our welfare system - started out
as a guild benefit for workers, then it were a part of unions and finally
something on a national level (I skipped a few steps).

The absolutely must have part is "solidarity". What does that even mean? It
means you feel part of something tight where you owe the others, in that
"something", your help and compassion, even financially.

Ethnic homogeneity isn't needed, but solidarity is. It is a feeling nurtured
and grown over many years and it is easily broken if abused. It requires
eternal vigilance, to keep that feeling of "we owe each other" alive despite
all the distrust.

It is a constant battle against unpleasant emotions and real abuse, and you
need to pick the fight in a way that ensures that you can win it. Denmark is
almost too big to keep that alive.

~~~
kiliantics
Yep, there are many good articles that cover this: the working and living
conditions in Europe and the US diverged thanks to the gutting of the big
unions in the 70s, while they stayed strong in places like Germany. There are
several metrics that correlate to support this idea.

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hprotagonist
I'm pretty convinced that there are critical upper bounds to population size
and national surface area that guarantee that approaches that work great for
small, tractable nations just cannot scale.

So step 0: Reduce the population of the US to the population of the metro
Atlanta area (5.7 million in 2010).

Step 1: reduce the area of the US to the state of Maine (roughly).

~~~
vorotato
So you mean we can do it on a state level and it'll work?

~~~
hprotagonist
To some extent. Ever visited Vermont?

~~~
bhups
Were states to implement such systems at the state level, I fully expect the
smaller states to consolidate and form alliances of their welfare systems so
as to achieve economies of scale faster.

~~~
hprotagonist
Hey, that's almost like an _exchange_ of some kind...

~~~
bhups
My hypothetical was for them to socialize it with a shared single-payer
system. Think about it this way: all of the small states in New England decide
to create a government run insurance (like Denmark) by pooling all of their
taxpayers.

An exchange would be more like a multi-payer system rather than a single-payer
system.

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fedups
The tradeoffs of homeogeneity and diversity in democracy strikes me as an
extremely important topic now, and I was looking forward to the article
addressing the most comprehensive study on the issue (that I know of) by
Robert Putnam [0].

Unfortunately it seems the author simply acknowledges this as the predominant
view, takes a single study on immigration to "prove(!)" the idea wrong, and
then credits Nordic success to the "Class struggle" as a mere assertion. But
perhaps I missed something.

[0]-
[http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9477.2007....](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9477.2007.00176.x/abstract)

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lacampbell
Alternate title: We Could Be Venezuela.

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nitwit005
It's tempting to think we can mimic the example of a small country, but it's
unfortunately quite difficult to know if the policies mattered, or if it has
to do with cultural and economic forces that the government doesn't have much
influence over.

Imagine you take the US, and you just cut it into small "nations" arbitrarily.
Despite having the same laws and policies, you'd see a huge amount of
diversity when it comes to crime rates, wealth, income distribution, and so
on.

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chvid
Maybe. But identity politics mixed with big welfare surely is a recipe for
disaster.

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fdsaaf
While it's true that, a priori, there's no reason that ethnic homogeneity
should be a prerequisite for a welfare state, this idea is misleading because
it supposes that all ethnic groups contribute to the welfare state equally. I
know that it's modern dogma that all groups are equal in all respects, but
hear me out: what if they're not?

What if, for whatever reason, ethnic group A subsidizes B's existence? This
difference will damage the social cohesion necessary for a welfare state to
exist. In the real world, we observe huge group differences in productivity,
educational attainment, conscientiousness, fecundity, and other
characteristics, and in the real world, we see that mixing groups does indeed
damage social cohesion. I understand that this observation is unpopular ---
but this unpopularity doesn't make it wrong.

I don't think it's politically possible to create a strong welfare state in a
country populated by identifiable groups with differing socioeconomic
contributions to the common good.

Others have commented that it's the size of the country that makes welfare
impossible --- that it just doesn't work over a certain size. As a practical
theory, I think that's true, but I don't think size itself is the root cause.
I think that as a country's population increases, the visibility of low-
contributing groups increases, and it's this visibility that reduces the will
to create a global welfare state.

~~~
troels
I think this is quite right. But this is even true if the racism is unfounded.
The mere illusion that some ethnic groups are low-contributing will weaken the
cohesion of society. So in this backwards way, racism becomes a self-
fulfilling prophecy.

~~~
fdsaaf
The way out of this trap is to emphasize the shared identity of people in the
country instead of encouraging them to think of themselves as members of
distinct ethnic groups within that country.

It's for that reason that the identity politics of today's social justice
advocates infuriates me. These activists can't see that their divisiveness is
actually bringing them further from their goals.

~~~
aaron-lebo
It's too bad that you can't voice the opinion that unity is a good thing
without getting downvoted or criticized.

