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.

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