Norway: population of 5M people. Incredible oil wealth. Massachusetts is larger in population that Norway. It's not a reasonable comparison.

Sweden: population of 10M people. Roughly the population of Michigan, for example. Just elected a rightward moving parliament on a law and order and immigration-restriction agenda.

Denmark: population of 5M people - again - compared to Massachusetts (which is larger by population), not a particularly exceptional place.

I admire all of these EU countries but you just can't compare them to the size, geographic distribution, and non-uniformity of the entire US.

Why is it no one ever compares Hungary, Latvia, Cyprus .. or other less prosperous EU nations to the US? And never compares highly successful states to the EU as a whole?

The Nordics are very comparable to New Hampshire in terms of demographics, education, wealth and outcomes. Everyone likes to say “the US should be like the Nordics” but no one ever says “the US should be like New Hampshire”.

Tiny, homogeneous, monocultured, de facto ethnostates that make it very easy to do business and/or have robust fossil fuel reserves are not comparable to massive, diverse, multicultural states with wildly different ethics and values across any number of demographics.