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Ask HN: the northern European Edens (Finland, Norway, Sweden)?

8 points by nnq ↗ HN
How comes any time there's a comparison of education or healthcare or overall "social health" or development of the northern European countries (Finland, Norway, Sweden) with any other country in the world, the northeners are always better? How did they manage to get so many "social" problems so right? Does anyone know of a good case-study about how these countries reached their current level?

The thing that actually overfilled my "glass of curiosity" was Linus Torvalds's comparison of public education in US and Finland. And I've read so many such opinions lately, not only comparing things with the US but also with other countries that I have to ask: is this northern Eden a myth? or are they really doing something right and they are doing it right for over half a century?

9 comments

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ExpiredLink
Some countries invest in education others in armed forces and tax reductions for the rich.
anderspetersson
We pay 33% income tax...
nnq
I don't think this is about how much money in taxes the state collects. I think the average tax revenue per citizen is higher for the US than for, let's say, Finland (please correct me if I'm wrong). It might be about how this money are distributed to education vs healthcare vs army vs ... But my hunch is that it's not even this, it's about how the system spends the money and not about how much money (for healthcare it's definitely not, as I don't think anyone spends more than the US on average per citizen, but for education I really don't know anything about the figures, that's one of the reason I've asked this...).
wattson12
according to http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/background/numb..., the US has one of the lowest tax rates, while scandinavian countries are all towards the high end of the list

There is definitely an issue of how much money is distributed to welfare / infrastructure / education etc compared to military but the lower tax rate means there is less to spend to begin with (per capita at least)

ExpiredLink
33? I guess you pay a little more.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_rates_of_Europe

bjourne
Note that the article says "This article's factual accuracy is disputed. Please help to ensure that disputed statements are reliably sourced." Wikipedia is a really horrible source for topics people may bicker about. In practice, no one pays over 50% of their income in income tax like that article implies.
ohashi
VAT was also quite high as well (at least in Sweden)
soneca
That is definetely not a myth, but also there is not a simple answer. First, their taxes rate are the highest in the world. And they are "social welfare state", and this is hard to balance, they are very expensive states. Norway, because of oil, has funds sufficient to guarantee the wealth of the next 10 generations, but not the other two. Also they are the most equal countries in the world. You may check any Gini index rank. This is incredibly important for me, but some people may find weird when a CEO has a salary only few times bigger than the average worker of his company. This equal, expensive, social welfare state demands a lot of unity of the population political view. Something that sounds impossible on big countries. These countries have a LOT to teach regarding public education and public health, but they are not copy and paste solutions, their solutions are very hard to emulate.
rdouble
The Economist had an issue about this topic 2 months ago. Every article was posted to hacker news. You could probably search and find the previous discussions.