My insight: it's the degree of integration of society. No disenfranchised sections.
Besides Iceland, two other countries stand up: Japan an Switzerland. In the former, not even police or yakuza bear fire arms, things are solved mainly on reputation. In the latter, every citizen has to know how to operate a firearm, on account of not having an army.
So it's not the availability or lack of thereof of guns. It's the "social tension" (what exists between people) that binds people together. A society of strangers and cvasi-anonymous people leads to higher violence. When people are separated, they don't prevent each other from falling into a life of crime.
A society where whole swaths of people are in poverty believing they have no chance to succeed leads to the worst cases of violence. Even the slight idea that there is a path from poverty to success, even if it is an illusion, keeps the violence down.
But when people are convinced that the system is stacked against them no matter what they do, then they dissociate from the large society, form a new attitude - that they don't need to play by the rules, they don't need to have compassion, because the rich have all the power and resources anyway and they actively block the poor from raising up. That's basically whet the shit hits the fan.
Remember the French arab revolt from a few years back, in Paris? Same thing. Arabs emigrated in France after WWII for work. They remained in France and had children. Now french people don't need them any more, but the kids are born in France, they have no idea of the countries their parents came from. They don't want to leave, but they are not welcome in France either. They are without a place of their own. Thus, feeling of racial discrimination and violent protest.
French arab revolt? As a french I'm quite shocked to see it named like that. There has been a lot of violence, it's true, but it wasn't closed at all to a revolt. I knew some medias as Fox News exagerated the facts but I was hoping most people would be better informed.
Once you're in prison I dunno, but the Japanese police in general are pretty low-key and community oriented, and seem to try hard to resolve problems without officially involving "the justice system." They're quite palpably less threatening than American police in my experience.
It's not just violent crime (something which might be affected by harsh penalties for such) which is rare in Japan, but petty crime as well. As far as I can figure, it's because of strong societal bonds and low income disparities, and that there's less of the sort of sense of disenfranchisement/alienation which seems so common in e.g. the U.S.
Ha! There are loads of accounts of the falsely accused getting locked up with zero due process. You can find yourself in an unheated cell and forced to kneel on the floor face against the wall for hours a day under threat of beatings before things are sorted out weeks later. Read about the death penalty in Japan for a taste of how they operate. You get killed in secret and your execution is announced months after the fact. None of this years of appeals stuff.
The basic point is that people in Japan aren't scared of the police, and in fact the police are often thought of as being kind of wimpy and ineffective; most people consider them "those guys you ask for directions when you're lost." Their relationship with the general public is hugely different than that of American police.
So while the Japanese justice system may have some bad habits, that is not an explanation for very low Japanese crime rates.
Right. The general sense I've gotten from the American public is that the police are a paramilitary organization sanctified by the government. You don't ask the police to settle a dispute; you call the police to start a war.
Last year, New Hampshire's murder rate was 1.3. Since 1996, like Iceland, its murder rate has never gone above 1.8. New Hampshire is four times as big as Iceland. Why is violent crime so rare in New Hampshire?
A couple of the major reasons the article puts forward also apply to New Hampshire. First, we have lots of guns here. In fact our state's constitution requires the state to give a concealed carry permit to anyone who passes a background check and sends in the form with $10.
Since gun ownership has a controversial effect on crime, perhaps a more compelling reason is that we only have 2 major cities in NH. And neither of them are really big enough to have an "inner city". We have one of the lowest GINI coefficients (a measure of income inequality) in the nation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_Gini_co...
Yeah, maybe I shouldn't have thrown in income equality. I meant to emphasize that most of the people live in similarly sparse environments. It's not like we have remote farmers and people who live their whole lives in a city who never meet the likes of each other.
Boston is less than 2 hours' drive from New Hampshire and has plenty of violence.
I think New Hampshire's cities are small and just don't really have ghettos the way most large American cities do. The violence happens in bigger cities that are pretty nearby, but happen to be outside NH's borders. Southern NH is kind of like an extended suburb of Boston.
(2011):
National rate: 4.7
Northeast rate: 3.9
MA rate: 2.8
NH rate: 1.3
MA's rate is lower than the national average and lower than the Northeast regional average, but more than double than NH's average.
My argument is that NH has a particularly low murder rate because it doesn't really have any big cities--the populated areas are mostly suburban. High murder rates correlate with high population density (and poverty). If the nearby metropolis of Boston were inside NH's borders, then I think NH would have the higher murder rate. Do you disagree with that assessment?
I personally think northern countries have less crime because you can't survive alone in the cold. His anecdote about the stranger picking him up should have been a clue.
People in a critical situation tend to help each other more and when you are in an hostile environment 6 to 8 months a year, it tends to grow on you.
"With a population of 200,852, Greater Reykjavík comprises over 60% of the population of Iceland in an area that is only just over 1% of the total size of the country."
Congratulations, you won today's "reply to a statistical generalization with a single outlying datapoint/anecdote" no-prize! Write in for your fabulous reward.
And 100 HN points to you for spotting the fallacy! Well done, but you don't really believe the suggestion that after controlling for all else, closeness to Canada ends up being correlated with educational outcomes and crime rates, do you? It's obviously a joke.
Biology. Icelanders in the U.S. don't murder people very often either. Nordics make good neighbors.
Then again, if you've read the Icelandic Sagas, you'll find that they used to be bloodthirsty enough in pre-modernity. Culture matters too. Just not as much (in the range of societies that exist in the first world today).
I do not believe that there exists any evidence that there is a biologic difference between Icelandic or Nordic people in general and other groups of humans that correlates strong enough to explain the crime rate statistics of Iceland.
Also, the fact that you mention 'nordics make good neighbors' in the same comment as acknowledging that nordics raped and pillaged my people for hundreds of years.. (edit: sorry I'm a bit tired I had some insulting line here I hope no one read)
I recall several news stories around a month ago about the Icelandic government creating a smartphone app that lets Icelanders check to see if the person they are dating is a relative. Apparently the small population and low immigration rate means that a given random pair of Icelanders are likely to be more closely related than a given random pair of people from most other countries.
I wonder if the increased risk that your victim might be a relative might have some deterrent effect?
My suspicion is that it's due to a number of factors. Economic equality (real or perceived) is probably one thing; cultural homogeneity is probably another; if I infer correctly from the article that Icelanders see dealing with crime as a matter for all citizens, not just agents of the state, then that probably is as well.
The homicide rate is not too low. For example, my state Kerala which has the highest recorded crime rate (read mostly petty) in India, has a homicide rate of 1.09 - Much less than Iceland even with 100x population.
You seem to be claiming Kerala as the norm rather than an outlier. You're certainly welcome to compare crime rates between the two and/or suggest explanations/compare living conditions, but saying that very low crime rate is the norm is simply false [1]
No - I said Kerala has a high crime rate - but a relatively low homicide rate. Kerala is definitely an outlier in many respects in India. What I am trying to hint is it is not exceptional to have low homicide rates - there are several parts of the world where it is the norm. It may be better to consider high homicide rates in some developed, high HDI regions as an anomaly and analyze the reasons.
This is not the answer HN is looking for, but Iceland is safe because it's full of Icelanders. England was safe when it was full of Englishmen. Not anymore. Sweden was safe when it was full of Swedes. Not anymore. Etc.
This is actually my intuition, too: most of the Scandinavian countries' successes are better attributed to racial homogeneity than to actually being institutionally sounder.
I can't prove that, though; there have been discussions before about immigration similarities, but nothing that I found convincing enough to remember.
You have an irrationally racist intuition, peoples hostility to racism should be your first clue to criticising your own opinion before voicing it.
Criminality has always been strongly linked to economic class differences. If you look at how immigration injects low economic class workers into medium/high class environments, it is only logical that crime numbers rise.
Racial arguments stem from self-preservationary superiority feelings, and have in the past also been used against Irish and Italian immigrants.
Yeah, I didn't fully spell out my intuition, which was based on the fact that Scandinavian countries are more democratic. This allows for a stronger welfare state, which reduces economic inequalities, thus resulting in a lower crime rate.
My intuition is that the stronger democratic nature of these cultures is due to racial homogeneity, rather than magical Scandinavian white sauce. There are cases in Africa where this can be seen (notion of "it takes a village" have generally come from African communities), but I honestly don't know enough about them to verify: have they scaled to an extent where they're comparable to the ultra-democratic bloc? Have they sufficiently negated the influences of Euro-American imperialism such that we can claim their democratic impulses are original rather than imposed?
The corollary to this is that most of the failures of American democracy can be traced back to the slave trade, from the Three-Fifths Compromise to the present day litany of anti-black sentiment. Irish and Italian immigrants did have problems, but they've been largely integrated into the American melting pot in the present day. Chinese people, such as myself, have had more trouble but have nonetheless integrated better than blacks did, possibly because our enslavement didn't have the same level of cultural momentum, possibly because of an imperialistic cultural history of our own; it's unclear to me.
The failures, thus, come from these struggles. These are struggles that, as far as I am aware, did not happen in Scandinavian history. They have humorous nationalistic jibes between each other, but they did not have the kind of wildly divisive events that led up to the Mason-Dixon line and the Reconstruction, which reinforced these divisions to the detriment of democratic institutions.
In other words, it's not actually that Scandinavians are better people. They're not more democratic because they're less racist. They're more democratic because there were no significant populations of brown people to oppress during their formative periods. Denmark is an interesting edge case, in that they participated in the Colonial Age, but nevertheless built strong democratic structures and were then enveloped in the firestorm over depictions of Mohammed. Or maybe that supports my intuition. Who can tell.
But that's how it is in political science; half of them seem ready to watch democracy deflate like a rubber ducky in the Hong Kong harbor.
Anyways, this was all off-topic, but I thought it was unfair to let an ad hominem stand.
My apologies for the ad hominem. I have a bit of a strong reaction whenever societal problems are linked to racial differences.
The biggest issue with it is that it's always better to look for a different cause, because any solution to a problem that has racial inhomogenity as a cause can only be solved by racial seggregation of one form of another.
If instead solutions are sought in equalizing social economic status and other external factors then the results can only be positive (as I believe social economic factors are dominant anyway).
I don't follow your arguments about the relation between democracy and populations of ethnical minorities at all. All countries that participated in the Colonial Age built strong democratic structures.
Many european countries welcomed a lot of north-african/arabian immigrant workers after the war, Denmark was not one of those. These workers are for a large share muslim. Because Denmark lacks this large muslim population a national paper actually dared show the images, with backlash from the islamic world as a result.
All other European countries had similar issues with mohammed depictions, but none of those made major news outlets (because of fear).
> I have a bit of a strong reaction whenever societal problems are linked to racial differences.
Except that I'm not talking about problems at all. I'm talking about the original question, which was "Why are Scandinavian countries doing so well?" Or put differently, "Why the hell aren't they having our problems?"
Or, the most actionable, "Should we copy their policies? Will those policies work for us?" And as Obamacare has helpfully demonstrated, the attempt to do so provides fuel for the fires of divisiveness. "Sweden did it" isn't a sufficient argument; we need to know why Sweden did it successfully. (For healthcare in particular, it's probably more helpful to look at the UK, since there are fewer differences.)
> I don't follow your arguments about the relation between democracy and populations of ethnical minorities at all. All countries that participated in the Colonial Age built strong democratic structures.
Denmark and other Scandinavian countries are generally accepted to be the strongest bastions of democracy internationally (when you ignore American patriotic "we were first and best" arguments, anyways). We, in this discussion, haven't come up with a useful measure for saying "strong versus weak democracy"; I suspect that I'm more strict than you are, but I also suspect that my notions are inconsistent, since the whole point of this is that I'm saying "strong but fragile", which smells contradictory.
Here's the thing: democracies are really, really hard when you have highly heterogeneous groups. As soon as that heterogeneity becomes a point of contention, your democracy is going to face some severe trauma. The last hundred years of American domestic politics have literally been a struggle with the fallout from the Civil War. For a different example, see Sudan. Or rather, Sudan and South Sudan.
> Because Denmark lacks this large muslim population a national paper actually dared show the images, with backlash from the islamic world as a result.
And this is my point. Denmark's democratic structures are held up as a guiding light for other nations. But if we actually look at how they got there, it's not because they successfully navigated the traumas that resulted from heterogeneity; it's because they never had to.
Immigration is pretty low in Scandinavia. Coming from Paris, it's quite bizarre to visit Copenhagen or Árhus and wonder what happened to the non-white people.
There are actually a lot of refugees/immigrants in the Norway/Sweden/Denmark/Netherlands from Islamic countries, now. And, those communities tend to commit a disproportionate number of crimes, although this could be for a variety of reasons -- poverty before moving, poverty after moving, culture, age, ... (Biology seems like the least likely, especially given how bloodthirsty the vikings were only 50 generations ago)
You're welcome to show increasing percentages of non-white people in Scandinavian countries instead of spouting vitriol like an insulting and borderline racist ass.
Scandinavian countries also didn't go around colonizing others, or getting involved in slave trading, or importing cheap labor when convenient, or generally meddling in other countries affairs.
Actually at least Sweden was involved in slave trading, out of a slave fort in Ghana called Carolusborg. I'm pretty sure there was one or a few short lived attempts at colonies as well, somewhere in the Carribean.
You should be careful when posting such statistics. People might think you have racist sentiments, or worse they might enforce their own racist sentiments.
Statistics like that should come with an explanation on how these graphs correlate very strongly with social economic status and other societal effects on lower economic class communities and that actual correlation between race and criminal behaviour is not nearly as dramatic as implied here.
I would imagine the homogeneity in most forms (race, creed, income status, class, political views, etc) reduce conflict and crime. Such homogeneity is not always a good thing though; in the US, at least, we ostensibly follow the "melting pot" philosophy.
I agree with your sentiment, but note that the white English "working" class has descended into much higher criminality and violence over the last fifty years. So there are other factors at work. In contrast this has not happened to nearly such an extent in the USA, for one example.
Besides Iceland, two other countries stand up: Japan an Switzerland. In the former, not even police or yakuza bear fire arms, things are solved mainly on reputation. In the latter, every citizen has to know how to operate a firearm, on account of not having an army.
So it's not the availability or lack of thereof of guns. It's the "social tension" (what exists between people) that binds people together. A society of strangers and cvasi-anonymous people leads to higher violence. When people are separated, they don't prevent each other from falling into a life of crime.
A society where whole swaths of people are in poverty believing they have no chance to succeed leads to the worst cases of violence. Even the slight idea that there is a path from poverty to success, even if it is an illusion, keeps the violence down.
But when people are convinced that the system is stacked against them no matter what they do, then they dissociate from the large society, form a new attitude - that they don't need to play by the rules, they don't need to have compassion, because the rich have all the power and resources anyway and they actively block the poor from raising up. That's basically whet the shit hits the fan.
Remember the French arab revolt from a few years back, in Paris? Same thing. Arabs emigrated in France after WWII for work. They remained in France and had children. Now french people don't need them any more, but the kids are born in France, they have no idea of the countries their parents came from. They don't want to leave, but they are not welcome in France either. They are without a place of their own. Thus, feeling of racial discrimination and violent protest.