Yeah, well, Finland's federal government can subsidize homes for the homeless, healthcare for all, food for the poor, etc., but one cannot do a comparison of the Finnish 6 million person culture to the U.S. 350 million person multi-culture and expect a similar result ... not even close (too much corruption). It ends up in an ineconomy of scale. Maybe do a podcast on that.
Why can't we leave the federal government out of it? Is there even a remote chance we can go back to the federal government only doing what was authorized in the constitution and everything else left to the states? Then maybe we can have state subsidized homes, state subsidized healthcare, state subsidized food, etc., and see what works. Massachusetts and Missouri can each see what they can do for their 6-7 million people and compare it to Finland.
I’ve lived in the same community my namesake moved to in 1745 my whole life. My paternal grandmother’s people go back to the initial settlement 20 years earlier. Born in 1987. From 1980 to now the county population has doubled. Here are my thoughts, I know that drives up prices for land. I know that the promised tax revenue is never enough to cover the 500 million in roadwork the county needs to get the infrastructure where it needs to be at for the new population, the county budget is about 275-300 million a year. I know a good portion of the people moving down here are the great great grandchildren and nieces/nephews of the people in Sherman’s army that came through and burned several communities here down. And yes. That matters to me as somebody partially raised by my grandfather who was partially raised by his grandfather who lived through reconstruction. I know regardless of race when I hear an accent like mine that’s someone who was born here. I know that everyone I talk to that’s from here would rather have people from Mexico, Central and South America move in instead of people from Ohio, New York and New Jersey when the subject of the changes in the past 50 years comes up. They’re a better fit is the general consensus.
I also know that every election the margin by which tax increases at the county level get voted down is shrinking. I also know that despite the fact that they just got here 5 months ago, every new arrival suddenly gets as much a say in the government over the community than someone born here. That’s not about voting red or blue. The republican primary is still the election for every race on the ballot.
Building high social trust is very interesting to me, so I am glad to hear so much devoted to it in this episode. My thesis is that it is difficult to build and easy to destroy. When you are cultivating a relationship with an individual, whether it be a co-worker, neighbor or new friend, you can judge and treat them as an individual. You offer cooperation, see it reciprocated, and the relationship improves. When you are dealing with a stranger, social trust is going to be dependent on the perception of the likelihood of reciprocal cooperation. Said differently, instincts informed by stereotypes are the primary method to achieve high social trust. The thing about filters is they are imperfect, often letting in what you don't want and keeping out what you do want. More on that later.
Cultural attitudes at scale are mediated by the context in which they formed. Small communities can have a memory of cooperation playing out over generations, supporting high social trust. As small communities coalesce into a larger society, racial homogeneity can be a proxy for discovering shared attitudes leading to high social trust, but the attitudes have to be shared. There are dozens of countries in Africa, Eastern Europe and Asia that have a high degree of racial homogeneity but are disinclined to cooperation to such a degree that they have low social trust. The reasons for this are very complicated, but to a common degree it is because the people in those societies, at scale, are not capable of running a useful piece of software known as liberalism. Of course outliers exist, but not to the degree that you can just install liberalism for any people in any country at any time.
Much of what we associate with the liberal attitude, openness to cooperation and a high sense of fairness to non-kin and racial outgroups, is essentially a product of the largely protestant northern and western parts of Europe. If you wanted to build a new, high trust society, those with liberal attitudes would be the one to do it, but not all of them are capable. Liberalism doesn't have an immune system. For that you need the subset of highly disagreeable liberals. They will err on having a more restrictive barrier to entry and a higher floor for expectations of those who are granted entry. For these reasons and more, immigration and social trust are entwined, and I think those with liberal attitudes discount that at their peril. You want to extend cooperation to only those who can and will reciprocate.
Trust in institutions is secondary to social trust. To cultivate that, I will quote from one of my favorite Murray Rothbard essays. "Further: We must reject once and for all the Modal Libertarian view that all government-operated resources must be cesspools. We must try, short of ultimate privatization, to operate government facilities in a manner most conducive to a business, or to neighborhood control." This has been an area in which I have changed my mind the most in recent years. If the government operates a thing, understand how it can be operated as close as possible to what market competition would provide, because running something into ruin is unserious and likely to create a demand for more government intervention, not less.
Good episode! I always find it interesting to call the cradle to grave welfare program as a "safety net" as the net under the trapeze artists is meant to be a very temporary location. While many countries have a lot of people in these so-called safety nets from cradle to grave.
EDIT: I had to pause the program yesterday, because I felt I needed to get the following out, but now that I started it up again I hear you covering some of my points below.
EDIT 2: I just wanted to comment on the taxing rich people thing. I believe you already know this quite well, but the Nordics don't tax the rich that much more heavily than other places do, it's more that we tax absolutely everyone, through a VAT and a decently high income tax.
I do think the sociological aspects of the Nordic Model, relating to demographics, are part of it, but I think perhaps you're forgetting about how the electoral system shapes politics.
Now, I know you're strongly in favour of Ranked Choice Voting, but I don't think that would help much to fix the affective polarisation going on in the US. The predominantly white Anglosphere is a bit of an example here. The United States, Canada, The United Kingdom, and even Australia, all use single member districts when electing members of their House of Representatives or House of Commons. Now, Australia uses Ranked Choice Voting, known to them as the Alternative Vote (AV), and the United States has many variations such as a two round system in Georgia, top two open primaries in California, and a top four open primary in Alaska. What they all share is that for any given district only one person can win, and thus around half or more of the district is unrepresented, their votes thrown in the trash, even though Australia and the named US States at least ensure that the winner has an actual majority.
Two other predominantly white English speaking countries do things differently. Ireland elects members to their lower chamber using multi winner ranked choice voting (known to them as Single Transferable Vote, or STV) while New Zealand uses mixed member proportional for elections to their Parliament. The main difference between Ireland and New Zealand on one end, and the other countries on the other, is that almost every voter in these two countries have a representative they can tolerate, and their vote almost always matters.
This is the case for the five Nordic countries too, though under some variation of a party list proportional system. What this enables is that in one district multiple candidates win, from multiple parties, and the nationwide seat distribution roughly aligns with the percentage of votes that a party gets. This, as you pointed out, leads to dominant parties inching towards the centre, where in the US the only two meaningful parties run to each end of the spectrum. But what is key, is that in the Nordics, we also have fringe parties, they're just not in control over one of the dominant parties.
Essentially, what would be MAGA in the Nordics have their own party, while the good old fashioned right wing parties stay reasonable and moderate. What would be the progressive and radical wing of the Democratic Party forms their own small to mid sized socialist party to the left. The US has no mechanism to allow this to happen, as if more parties started to pop up and gain traction, you'd get what we see in Canada and the UK, where the electoral system rewards the party that's the biggest at any given time, with unprecedented majorities in Parliament/Congress, with lower and lower vote counts. The Conservatives in the UK won a majority in 2015 with 36.9 per cent of the vote, while the Labour Party won a significant majority of the House of Commons last year with only 33.7 per cent of the vote.
It's irrational for a voter to keep supporting a small to mid sized party in the US or the UK long term, when that might result in their worst fear winning a majority of seats with a tiny plurality of votes, so typically a multi party system collapses in on itself over time if the electoral system doesn't change. I'm really curious to see if the Labour government decides to amend their electoral system before the next election, in fear that the Reform Party might win the way it looks right now.
In conclusion, to have a healthier, more pragmatic, more centrist democracy, where the fringes are still represented but not in charge, the US shouldn't just switch to Ranked Choice Voting or the Approval Voting system, but to one of the menu of options offered in the Nordics, Ireland, or New Zealand.
Ending commentary was especially entertaining.
Yeah, well, Finland's federal government can subsidize homes for the homeless, healthcare for all, food for the poor, etc., but one cannot do a comparison of the Finnish 6 million person culture to the U.S. 350 million person multi-culture and expect a similar result ... not even close (too much corruption). It ends up in an ineconomy of scale. Maybe do a podcast on that.
Why can't we leave the federal government out of it? Is there even a remote chance we can go back to the federal government only doing what was authorized in the constitution and everything else left to the states? Then maybe we can have state subsidized homes, state subsidized healthcare, state subsidized food, etc., and see what works. Massachusetts and Missouri can each see what they can do for their 6-7 million people and compare it to Finland.
Good episode. Thanks for sharing your experience.
Would a tourist wear a cowboy hat to Finland? No, clearly this man is on a tax-deductible business trip!
I’ve lived in the same community my namesake moved to in 1745 my whole life. My paternal grandmother’s people go back to the initial settlement 20 years earlier. Born in 1987. From 1980 to now the county population has doubled. Here are my thoughts, I know that drives up prices for land. I know that the promised tax revenue is never enough to cover the 500 million in roadwork the county needs to get the infrastructure where it needs to be at for the new population, the county budget is about 275-300 million a year. I know a good portion of the people moving down here are the great great grandchildren and nieces/nephews of the people in Sherman’s army that came through and burned several communities here down. And yes. That matters to me as somebody partially raised by my grandfather who was partially raised by his grandfather who lived through reconstruction. I know regardless of race when I hear an accent like mine that’s someone who was born here. I know that everyone I talk to that’s from here would rather have people from Mexico, Central and South America move in instead of people from Ohio, New York and New Jersey when the subject of the changes in the past 50 years comes up. They’re a better fit is the general consensus.
I also know that every election the margin by which tax increases at the county level get voted down is shrinking. I also know that despite the fact that they just got here 5 months ago, every new arrival suddenly gets as much a say in the government over the community than someone born here. That’s not about voting red or blue. The republican primary is still the election for every race on the ballot.
Building high social trust is very interesting to me, so I am glad to hear so much devoted to it in this episode. My thesis is that it is difficult to build and easy to destroy. When you are cultivating a relationship with an individual, whether it be a co-worker, neighbor or new friend, you can judge and treat them as an individual. You offer cooperation, see it reciprocated, and the relationship improves. When you are dealing with a stranger, social trust is going to be dependent on the perception of the likelihood of reciprocal cooperation. Said differently, instincts informed by stereotypes are the primary method to achieve high social trust. The thing about filters is they are imperfect, often letting in what you don't want and keeping out what you do want. More on that later.
Cultural attitudes at scale are mediated by the context in which they formed. Small communities can have a memory of cooperation playing out over generations, supporting high social trust. As small communities coalesce into a larger society, racial homogeneity can be a proxy for discovering shared attitudes leading to high social trust, but the attitudes have to be shared. There are dozens of countries in Africa, Eastern Europe and Asia that have a high degree of racial homogeneity but are disinclined to cooperation to such a degree that they have low social trust. The reasons for this are very complicated, but to a common degree it is because the people in those societies, at scale, are not capable of running a useful piece of software known as liberalism. Of course outliers exist, but not to the degree that you can just install liberalism for any people in any country at any time.
Much of what we associate with the liberal attitude, openness to cooperation and a high sense of fairness to non-kin and racial outgroups, is essentially a product of the largely protestant northern and western parts of Europe. If you wanted to build a new, high trust society, those with liberal attitudes would be the one to do it, but not all of them are capable. Liberalism doesn't have an immune system. For that you need the subset of highly disagreeable liberals. They will err on having a more restrictive barrier to entry and a higher floor for expectations of those who are granted entry. For these reasons and more, immigration and social trust are entwined, and I think those with liberal attitudes discount that at their peril. You want to extend cooperation to only those who can and will reciprocate.
Trust in institutions is secondary to social trust. To cultivate that, I will quote from one of my favorite Murray Rothbard essays. "Further: We must reject once and for all the Modal Libertarian view that all government-operated resources must be cesspools. We must try, short of ultimate privatization, to operate government facilities in a manner most conducive to a business, or to neighborhood control." This has been an area in which I have changed my mind the most in recent years. If the government operates a thing, understand how it can be operated as close as possible to what market competition would provide, because running something into ruin is unserious and likely to create a demand for more government intervention, not less.
Good episode! I always find it interesting to call the cradle to grave welfare program as a "safety net" as the net under the trapeze artists is meant to be a very temporary location. While many countries have a lot of people in these so-called safety nets from cradle to grave.
That’s a good point!
EDIT: I had to pause the program yesterday, because I felt I needed to get the following out, but now that I started it up again I hear you covering some of my points below.
EDIT 2: I just wanted to comment on the taxing rich people thing. I believe you already know this quite well, but the Nordics don't tax the rich that much more heavily than other places do, it's more that we tax absolutely everyone, through a VAT and a decently high income tax.
I do think the sociological aspects of the Nordic Model, relating to demographics, are part of it, but I think perhaps you're forgetting about how the electoral system shapes politics.
Now, I know you're strongly in favour of Ranked Choice Voting, but I don't think that would help much to fix the affective polarisation going on in the US. The predominantly white Anglosphere is a bit of an example here. The United States, Canada, The United Kingdom, and even Australia, all use single member districts when electing members of their House of Representatives or House of Commons. Now, Australia uses Ranked Choice Voting, known to them as the Alternative Vote (AV), and the United States has many variations such as a two round system in Georgia, top two open primaries in California, and a top four open primary in Alaska. What they all share is that for any given district only one person can win, and thus around half or more of the district is unrepresented, their votes thrown in the trash, even though Australia and the named US States at least ensure that the winner has an actual majority.
Two other predominantly white English speaking countries do things differently. Ireland elects members to their lower chamber using multi winner ranked choice voting (known to them as Single Transferable Vote, or STV) while New Zealand uses mixed member proportional for elections to their Parliament. The main difference between Ireland and New Zealand on one end, and the other countries on the other, is that almost every voter in these two countries have a representative they can tolerate, and their vote almost always matters.
This is the case for the five Nordic countries too, though under some variation of a party list proportional system. What this enables is that in one district multiple candidates win, from multiple parties, and the nationwide seat distribution roughly aligns with the percentage of votes that a party gets. This, as you pointed out, leads to dominant parties inching towards the centre, where in the US the only two meaningful parties run to each end of the spectrum. But what is key, is that in the Nordics, we also have fringe parties, they're just not in control over one of the dominant parties.
Essentially, what would be MAGA in the Nordics have their own party, while the good old fashioned right wing parties stay reasonable and moderate. What would be the progressive and radical wing of the Democratic Party forms their own small to mid sized socialist party to the left. The US has no mechanism to allow this to happen, as if more parties started to pop up and gain traction, you'd get what we see in Canada and the UK, where the electoral system rewards the party that's the biggest at any given time, with unprecedented majorities in Parliament/Congress, with lower and lower vote counts. The Conservatives in the UK won a majority in 2015 with 36.9 per cent of the vote, while the Labour Party won a significant majority of the House of Commons last year with only 33.7 per cent of the vote.
It's irrational for a voter to keep supporting a small to mid sized party in the US or the UK long term, when that might result in their worst fear winning a majority of seats with a tiny plurality of votes, so typically a multi party system collapses in on itself over time if the electoral system doesn't change. I'm really curious to see if the Labour government decides to amend their electoral system before the next election, in fear that the Reform Party might win the way it looks right now.
In conclusion, to have a healthier, more pragmatic, more centrist democracy, where the fringes are still represented but not in charge, the US shouldn't just switch to Ranked Choice Voting or the Approval Voting system, but to one of the menu of options offered in the Nordics, Ireland, or New Zealand.