Quote:
Originally Posted by Trolly McTrollson
, I'm not suggesting we bring that back, but maybe we need to take a hard look at places like Norway or wherever and see how they're making things work --I'm taking your word for it that Scandinavian societies have figured this out, don't really have any experience as to what life is like there. As a casual observer it does seem like ethnonationalism is making disturbing inroads in a lot of Europeland.
I've spend a lot of time in northern Europe and it certainly is much better than the US; however:
1) Norway is a bit of a bad example because they are basically just awash in oil money that funds everything
2) they actually still have a pretty vibrant labor union movement (e.g., ~65% of Sweden / Denmark is part of a union, compared to ~10% in the US) that does a very good job of ultimately protecting worker interests. This is a bulwark against hyper competitive economic schemes that take their toll on the national psyche, they can all count on health care, pensions, stipends to attend higher education, long maternity/paternity leaves and the basic provisions of life without huge amounts of stress that exist in the US at the middle class and down levels. Related, they have better consumer protections so they aren't feeling the stresses of constant manipulation like American consumers do.
3) Things degrade to varying degrees in different parts of northern Europe (e.g., Finland, Belgium, Netherlands, the UK) aren't thriving like Scandinavia
4) these are much smaller countries geographically, spatially; for instance, almost 90% of Danes live in urban areas. The whole county is less than 6 million people. ~40% of the population lives around Copenhagen. Consider then even simple institutions like a local newspaper or local radio can do to maintain social cohesion. I write so much **** here but I'm sure I've got ~25 posts over the past few years about the US, the interstate highway system, far flung suburbs, exurbs, and the geopolitical / spatial problems that the US has which are somewhat exceptional to the US. We're a huge ****ing country with a lot of people. The resultant social cohesion problems we see are not separable from the size and geographic diversity of the US. If you got to cut out like the entirety of the United States and judged us by just how New York City + Long Island + Lower Hudson Valley, and THEN compared us to Denmark, you'd have a comparable data set.
5) their youth are also largely suffering from floating around meaninglessly, and restive, and alt-right style politics and nativism are a bit ascendant, they aren't immune from a lot of the same political concerns we're talking about here
Last edited by DVaut1; 10-19-2018 at 08:51 AM.