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Comment by ThomPete | Hacker News Reader

Problem is that a country like Denmark have all those things more or less and we still have more or less the same issues although to lesser degree.

The solution to the problem isn't hiding in what we already know although many of these things of course would be hugely beneficial to people.

The underlying problem. Technology is still going to be there.

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I don't know enough about Denmark to evaluate your comment, but stipulate that it's true, and then, if you'd like to reframe my list as "a list of things startups could do to use the market to make the US more like Denmark", I would have no objection.

Sure but Basic Income is about something else, something bigger. It's about solving the fact that everyone is going to be out of a job. If you only go to it by thinking you have to find a solution to the current workforce and income distribution problem then you are missing the real problem. Denmark pays a lot in taxes, free healthcare, free education (even university), students get paid to study, redistribute wealth quite a lot and so on.

Problem is still there. The rich get richer compared to the poor while everyone is getting richer overall.

I'm not interested in litigating basic income; I'm confining my responses to the terms 'sama set up: "things startups can conceivably do". That doesn't mean I believe startups are the most important vector in improving public policy.

I'd say the bottom 50% live much more prosperously in Denmark than in the US.

Is there a good way to quantify that?

A cursory search doesn't reveal a where-to-be-born [1] or human development [2] index for the lower half or quartile of a given nation's population. It would indeed be an interesting thing to view. I suspect that there's something to be said about the mean score vs the spread of values across the various quartiles of the populations of the countries.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where-to-be-born_Index [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index

The population of Denmark is lower than the Bay Area. Some things are just easier with a small population and land area and relatively homogenous population.

I understand why a homogenous population helps - more social cohesion, etc. But why does a smaller population and land area make any difference?

The same reason smaller teams can accomplish things that large teams can't. The solutions don't scale. Corruption, fraud, abuse, bureacracy and enforcing regulation gets in the way of actually addressing or better yet SOLVING the problem. This is why large companies cannot innovate but instead buy small companies that do and that government does not actually solve problems.

Maybe. I'm not sure the analogy to companies holds, however. Small companies are innovative since they are growing, usually out of startups -- there really isn't an analogy of a "startup" for governments. At the very least, Denmark doesn't match that description.

BTW I was curious and looked at list of US states by human development index. There's no obvious correlation between size of a state and its ranking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_America...

The distance issues becomes a problem. What works for the Bay Area doesn't work for North East. It's both because all politics and business is regional, and because information flows are affected by distance.

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