> The recipe can't be reproduced.

Yes it can. According to Wikipedia, Sweden has lower economic inequality than Norway does. [0] And the percentage of income held by the poorest 10% is nearly the same across Nordic countries. [1]

I have quite a few friends from the Nordic countries (Norway, Sweden, Finland) and they are quick to tell you that things aren't perfect there, but I think you can say that government policies can create a more equal society even in countries without petromoney (e.g. Sweden).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_inequality

[1] http://www.viewsoftheworld.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Eu...

The key complaint many will have against the various progressive policies in Scandinavia when applied to the US is not the petromoney but the reality of a more homogeneous and educated citizenry.

Despite AWS' claims otherwise, you can't just extend a service designed for 10 million to 320 million and expect even remotely the same performance.

The Nordic model we know today was developed and implemented in the 1970s.

Obviously this kind of transformation takes time, and I have heard from Finnish friends that the education system quality is falling (it used to be within top-3 in the world for test scores, now they're only top-10).

I'm sure when people thought of the model in the '70s, there were many people saying it would never work for a country of 5 million people, but 40 years later it still mostly works.

> Despite AWS' claims otherwise, you can't just extend a service designed for 10 million to 320 million and expect even remotely the same performance.

Are you saying the cost is too high, or it is simply infeasible to improve the lives of this many people?

For the improvement of quality of life, see India's current efforts. Which I would argue are even more ambitious (e.g. bring water and electricity to nearly half a billion people) and, while not perfect, are going about as well as anticipated.

For the financial argument, well there's a reason why everything in the Nordic countries is very expensive and people complain about the high taxes.

>Are you saying the cost is too high, or it is simply infeasible to improve the lives of this many people?

I'm saying a system designed for 10 million users cannot simply be extended to 320 million, particularly when that larger population is substantially more diverse.

Consider a social science study looking at the same populations. Would you really expect any given finding in the Scandinavian populations to map to the US?

Implement policies in the State level then? Wasn't that the original idea of United States of A?

Only 10 of your States has more people than Sweden.

Roughly 20 states has a population more than 5.5 million, which is the ballpark where Denmark, Finland and Norway are. So 30 States have less population than a typical Nordic country.

Sweden is likely more diverse than at least 15-20 of your states - a bit hard to compare due to different kind of demography statistics.

And we have free movement of workforce in EU/Schengen, so that ain't too different from US.

If there is a will, there's a way.

Democrats don't want to let individual states decide for themselves (Republicans for the most part don't want to either). They want national control over as much as they can get.

That is a political problem - totally different (and fixable if people want) than claimed issue that the Nordic model couldn't work in the US because difference in the size of population

That's part of it. The other part is that people are in favor of local control, even down to the most local level--until the local government and/or local voters (especially if it's their government and/or local voters) do something that they strongly disagree with.

>Implement policies in the State level then? Wasn't that the original idea of United States of A?

Yes, it was. That's why they had a confederation, not a union, organized under the Articles of Confederation. It was an abject failure. Nothing was able to get done because the states couldn't agree on anything, and the central government wasn't powerful enough to force them to do anything.

That's why the Constitution was invented instead.

It's a bit similar to the EU: the central government is too weak to force the members to adhere to its policies, so it's falling apart.

The Finnish government is cutting the education budget pretty heavily (especially higher education). I would still say that the fall in education rankings during the past years is more due to many Asian countries getting better and better instead of Finland getting worse.

Ok, lets assume that the benefits of economies of scale don't apply here and take that it doesn't work for systems with hundreds of millions of people as a premise.

We know it works for systems of up to ~50m people because those are the larger EU countries. In that case I submit that it would also work at state level in the US. I feel that you can't even make a good argument that the reason it can't work at state level is because of the federal government because we're also a de facto federation within the EU and it works for the most part.

edit: I'm likely missing or wildly underestimating something here but I just can't shake the impression that what prevents the US from having all the nice things we get are cultural and historical issues, not economical ones.

The biggest obstacle that prevents humans from doing anything is their own culture. Resources can be found if there is a will.

Here is no different. Many people hate the very concept of public education, let alone throwing more money at it. And when people do agree that we should do it, they inevitably disagree on the hows and the whats.

The issue with scale isn't logistical or so... metric based. It is as simple (and insurmountable) as getting such a diverse population to agree at all.

I'm forced to agree.

The citizens were not always educated. Betting on education results in, you know, educated citizens.

This, yes.

The US has per capita more natural resource money than Norway. It just got privatized.

You don't deserve the downvotes. This is one of the main reasons, if the not the main reason that this kind of economics is hard. You can't, in general, take the institutions from one place, apply them to another and expect the same result -- or even similar results.

Aren't other petro countries stunningly unequal? Equitorial Guinea, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela.

If anything you'd think the oil would cause higher inequality rather than lower.

Denmark, Sweden, etc, beg to differ.

capitalism promotes the inequality.