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Comment by kryogen1c | Hacker News Reader

Not really an option. The largest scandanavian country, sweden, is a little larger than Los Angeles and the rest are much smaller. They have little emigration and immigration, and although their gdp per capita is similar, the huge population difference means their economies/gdp are of a totally different scale.

Apples to oranges.

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There is more emigration and immigration in Sweden than in the US (relative to the population).

I don't see why scale would matter that much. If it works for 12 millions why wouldn't it work for 2times more, or 10 times more ? Or 30 times more ?

It would require some real argument about why size matters and prevents the policy from working. Because right now the US has an economic repartition similar to Israel, which is even smaller than Sweden.

Anecdata: I work within a large Scandinavian bank. I've met a lot of people (maybe 20?) from our Copenhagen office, but I've yet to met a single Dane among them. It's a mix of Eastern Europeans, Western Europeans, Southern Europeans, other Scandinavians Indians, Chinese, UK, US etc.

Your rationale for the Nordic model being inapplicable to the US is a common one among conservatives, but it baffles me.

Of course the Nordics are smaller than the US, but all of the economic variables in question should scale on a per-capita basis. Specifically, what is it about a population difference that makes a strong safety net inapplicable?

"America is bigger than X" is a thought terminating cliche to make people stop asking awkward questions like "why is quality of life better in X?"

Except it's baloney, the EU even has a bigger population than the US and has universal healthcare, public transit, etc.

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