When a country accomplishes something really great, it’s not because they are small and the US is big. It’s because they are smart and we are dumb.
We hear this all the time. Portugal legalized drugs and it worked, but they’re small. Iceland forged their own path after the banking collapse, but they’re small. The Nordic countries have great education systems that cost less, but they’re small.
Always a great excuse when you really don’t want to learn from others.
Actually, if USAians used as many watts per person as Costa Rica(8x fewer - 1683 wpp vs 207 wpp[1]), our renewable infrastructure would be able to support us entirely(currently 13% of total generation)[2], and infact we would have power to spare.
Yes, but here in Costa Rica we do not need to spend energy warming our buildings in winter. Many businesses use air conditioner in the warmer zones, though. For example, in Guanacaste and Puntarenas.
If that were true China would be the most diverse nation on the planet, and the hardest to manage.
The problem in the US is the opposite - national policy is almost exclusively influenced by interest groups with very limited intellectual and cultural diversity.
There could easily have been a crash space-race type of program of renewables development at any time from the mid-70s onwards.
If that had happened, it's likely there would have been astounding developments in collection efficiency and energy storage.
But the Jurassic energy cos were never going the loss of face, I mean loss of profits, that would have led to.
You start out implying that China _isn't_ diverse, an dthen seem to argue that the US's problem is that we're more diverse. But you got it right the first time: China, especially in terms of leadership, doesn't listen to a bunch of diverse groups. They centrally control it without much concern for the whining of the luggage industry, or the furniture industry, or the cotton farmers. In the US, we listen to special interests because 1. we listen to those who talk and 2. special interests are very interested in a small thing that the general public doesn't care about.
A very small luggage industry can demand absurd luggage protectionism because people in that industry care a lot, and people outside of it are barely even aware that it's a thing. I won't change my vote based on whether you put massive tariffs on foreign-made suitcases, but people whose jobs depend on it will.
China avoids this by not caring about what people say.
This always drives me nuts. It shows up often in all sorts of arguments. Socialized health care is a prominent one. Yeah, the US may have ten times the population, but we also have ten times the resources to put into it. There certainly exist problems that don't scale, but there are very few problems that can scale to, say, 30 million people but not 300 million people.
I wouldn't even phrase it as smart versus dumb. They accomplished it because they wanted to, and we don't because we don't. Maybe we don't want to because we're dumb, but I think it's good to frame it as "We could if we wanted to. Do we want to? Maybe we should want to."
The problem is less population and more population density.
It would be a small problem to provide socialized health care in Boston or San Francisco relative to West Virginia, for example. It would be a bigger problem to provide equivalent care. It is a bigger problem still to handle the bureaucracy to provide optimal care based on the problems each see.
I want socialized health care, but I don't pretend it is merely an issue of will.
There are places with low population density and socialized health care. Like large parts of Canada, for example.
You can always find something that's different, of course. Scale shouldn't matter, but the US is less densely populated than all those European countries. Canada doesn't count because 90% of the population is crammed against the southern border.
In one respect, these are very difficult problems, so you're right that it's not just an issue of will. In another respect, they have been solved, so we know it can be done. In that sense, is it not just an issue of will? If you decide to do it, and you put sufficient resources behind it, you know it can be done. If you're not doing it, it's because you ultimately don't want to.
And yet it does. Try administering all the various socialized healthcare systems in Europe strictly from Brussels. Get back to me when the whole thing has become a shambles.
> If you decide to do it, and you put sufficient resources behind it, you know it can be done.
The point isn't "can it be done" but rather "can it be done efficiently" because right now the spending in the US is only about 2x as bad as anywhere else. Shameful and embarrassing for sure! But the problem is largely one of economics, not will. Maybe we socialized and costs go down 50%, or maybe they only go down 20%, or maybe they go up 30%. There's no way to know until we try it.
As far as I can tell there's been no country thus far that's done socialized healthcare with the kind of genetic diversity that the US has. The US has sizable populations of people from all over the earth, so we have the "good fortune" to have to specialize in basically every genetic condition, predisposition, etc. That absolutely does increase costs.
I'm not saying that the healthcare model that the US has is optimal, or even good. But to suggest that it can't get any worse is to show a prodigious lack of imagination.
You really can't imagine a world where healthcare is worse than it already is in the US? I don't think it's really that hard.
Imagine that everything is the same as it is right now, but that insurance companies manage to get the various 80-90% payout laws overturned and start paying out at only a 50% rate. That means premiums nearly double in very short order.
Or maybe a new law that really makes the electronic records requirements stick gets passed, but it's done in such a poor fashion that all of our records end up getting sold to bankers, who then figure out a way to make bets on people (ala Walmart's life insurance "scandal") and then the insurance companies get wind of this and start dropping people once their bank calculated risk profile gets too high.
You're the one who said I lack imagination. I'm not agreeing with you. I'm just saying that if you're going to state that I'm inherently incapable of even comprehending your argument, then the conversation is over. There's no point in attempting to have a discussion who thinks that my opinion is a result of some inherent flaw in me.
Suggesting that "it can't get any worse" is basically always a losing battle because it can always get worse.
I was trying to preempt the inevitable "but things are so bad here in the US, surely making any change would be an improvement!" argument that always seems to get trotted out the second healthcare gets discussed.
And you seemed to be making that argument, in the very beginning.
> They accomplished it because they wanted to, and we don't because we don't.
If you truly can't imagine any possible way in which healthcare in American could get worse, then I really do stand by my statement. Further, I would suggest that you actually can imagine how it could be worse, but you're pretending that you can't to make a point. And if we're going to do that, then point willfully ignored.
Where did I say it can't get any worse? Where am I pretending I can't imagine it could get worse? I'm looking through my previous comments in this thread and I can't find anything even remotely close to that. Please, enlighten me.
Well, there are pockets of America that are as good as all the examples that you state. There are states and school districts that perform as well or better than Nordic states (e.g. Massachusetts). There are states and cities that have recovered better than Iceland after economic collapses (e.g. Pittsburgh). A few things:
1. With size comes disparity and diversity. Iceland, Portugal, Nordic countries are definitely ideals to work towards. But failure to reach the ideals as a monolithic country doesn't mean things are bad.
2. Federal policies are much harder to change because it is like steering a ship that is also not a rigid body! Size plays a role here because it brings with it diversity. In smaller countries, you do not have equivalents for under-performing components of the whole, such as Mississippi, tea party, and inner-city neighborhoods, that are often out of reach of federal policies / majority opinions.
> The Nordic countries have great education systems that cost less, but they’re small.
While there may be much to learn from Nordic schools, they do have the advantages (in education) of a smaller scale. Studies show that larger school sizes are less effective[0][1].
I feel like there's a confusion between school size, scale, and country size.
Imagine a Norway with a single high school, which is a boarding school for all of the high school students in the country. In that case Norway is small, compared to the US, and the school system is small, with a single very large high school.
Or the other way around, if the average school in Sweden has 20 students per grade, while the "small" schools for NYC have ~80 students per grade (both papers use ~100 as the threshold between small and not-small), then since the population of Sweden and NYC are about the same, this would mean that Sweden would have more schools, and so work on a larger scale than NYC.
Without knowing what the school sizes for the Nordic countries, I don't think you can make a conclusion from the information you presented.
> The average school size in our sample was about 450 in 1986, decreasing to about 400 students in the middle of the 1990s (mainly due to small birth cohorts born in the 1980s) and then increasing to 450 again in 2004,
The schools in that Danish study cover grades 0-9, so fall well into the "small" category. They conclude (emphasis is mine)
> With these reservations in mind, we find that for students attending grade 9 in Danish public schools, school size tends to have no effect or even a positive effect on educational outcomes and earnings later in life, at the age of 30. This result is different from the results found in a number of studies from mainly the UK and the US. However, Danish schools are on average much smaller than schools in the US and the UK. The average school size in this study which covers almost all public schools with grade 9 in Denmark was about 460 students. Another interesting result is that the positive effects of school size tend to be larger for boys when we consider educational outcomes like the probability of completing high school or a vocational education and training program, and for children who have fathers with a low education level. Thus, students who are traditionally considered more vulnerable seem to benefit from larger schools. Finally, part of the non-negative or positive school size effect seems to be driven by schools in urban areas contrary to rural areas.
In Nordics, the authorities attempt to create larger schools because they think they are more effective. (I'm suspicious, though, and your references are interesting).
I think that the reason for better results in Nordic schools is that they have not as many students who are unable to understand teaching language. The population is ethnically rather uniform and there is relatively strong social cohesion.
Sweden has taken in a lot of immigrants. 15.9% of the population are immigrants, compared to 14.3% in the US. Most of these immigrants don't know Swedish.
http://ftp.iza.org/dp8032.pdf has commentary on school sizes in Denmark. They are much smaller than in the US and UK. It describes some of the reasons that people think larger schools are better:
> Policymakers often appear to prefer large schools due to scale economies associated with administrative costs. In addition large schools are generally able to offer a broader curriculum and better career prospects for teachers. This may attract more experienced and more qualified teachers. The students (and teachers) in larger schools typically come from larger geographical areas and may have a more diverse social background. To the extent that diversity and being exposed to students and teachers with different social and demographic background is a positive production factor in the human capital production function, this may be an argument for large schools. Further, in large schools it may be easier for students and teachers to change classrooms or peer groups if, for example, a match between a teacher and the students in a given class is not optimal.
The problem is likely not so much the size of the schools, but the size of the classes.
Never mind that at least in Norway there have over the years developed a perverse incentive to transport kids for hours to centralized schools because the transport costs are covered by a different administrative tier than the schools themselves.
Thus a few large schools supposedly save on administration and maintenance costs by punting the transport costs onto a different office.
School size has nothing to do with the scale of the overall system country-sized, though. A small education system can use a small number of large schools, and a large education can use a large number of small schools.
For such big countries, a divide-and-conquer approach to argument would place responsibility at the state level rather than at the country level (i.e. think globally, act locally kind-of-argument).
We hear this all the time. Portugal legalized drugs and it worked, but they’re small. Iceland forged their own path after the banking collapse, but they’re small. The Nordic countries have great education systems that cost less, but they’re small.
Always a great excuse when you really don’t want to learn from others.