You Can't Have Denmark Without Danes

Foreign born includes Danes and Norwegians so trying to disprove the claim that Sweden is socially homogenous by pointing out that there are Finns and Danes, doesn’t make your argument convincing.

I think what makes a comparison difficult with the US is the difference race and ethnicity make between countries (eg, Sweden and US). In the US there are many negative correlations with race and ethnicity that make diversity comparisons simple to make (although not necessarily accurate). So people can easily look for diversity by just checking race demographics. It’s also difficult because some people talking about race are racists who have incorrect beliefs, but it’s hard to tell who’s who at first.

When looking at Sweden it’s not straightforward to look at race and I couldn’t even find solid numbers that describe Sweden by race, although only spent a few minutes googling. But in the US, racial demographics are immediately available.

If you compare nation of birth != Sweden that’s not necessarily useful comparing to the US as it includes other culturally similar peoples (eg, Norwegians). It would be like saying New York is diverse because it includes lots of people born in Connecticut while not breaking out those born in Somalia.

The comparison that is relevant is what are the diverse cultures, specifically those from lower socioeconomic status. Unless you can check that mix, then it’s not very useful to compare and make claims.

Of course, the purpose of comparison isn’t to achieve some sort of purity goal, that’s insane. But to identify what interventions are most effective based on cultural composition. While theoretically a country would higher social cohesion by getting rid of all the different peoples (Denmark pretty much did this is WW2 with the help of the Nazis). This is short sighted (hurts World to help country) and immoral (genocide is bad).

>Trust is hard to build, and our government is increasingly looking towards control and surveillance to ensure safety instead. Stores are moving certain items up to the register, because thieve simply walk out with entire boxes of Nutella or instant coffee.

I'm reminded of "The Evolution of Trust" [0], a fun and interesting online simulation of agent-based cooperation with iterated Prisoner's Dilemmas. Of course no society is perfectly uniformly cooperate/cooperate, but some have an equilibrium that is more in that direction than others. It's a property that can be eroded by the exploitation of group norms you describe, and the system has to adapt by assuming more malice on the part of others.

I wonder if anyone has written deeply on the trend toward externalizing and formalizing implicit/informal trust structures. Of course it's not a new thing (think of Renaissance-era credit systems that were arising that allowed for wide-ranging merchant trade in the absence of face-to-face individual trust), but the rise of the police state, cryptocurrencies, and even the new Amazon Go stores that outsource anti-theft trust to computer vision all seem to be an increasing trend toward assuming that informal trust is impossible in our new environment and that alternate formal systems are necessary.

[0] http://ncase.me/trust/

> Teaching a Romanian immigrant, or a refugee from the middle east that it's completely safe to trust others is extremely hard

Am Romanian, reading how the author was robbed on the bus because he had the invalid impression that because it was a Danish bus there would be no thieves in it almost made me start out laughing. One of the first reflexes I developed when I moved to Bucharest as a freshman student almost 20 years ago was to always check my back-pocket for my wallet (and later my front-left pocket for the phone). I still do that gesture up to the present day. I could also tell you how about 10-12 years ago a woman tried to convince me, my ex-wife and my ex-MIL that her son was badly injured in a Bucharest hospital, about to die, and that she needed some money in that very moment, she was crying out in the middle of the street just in front of us. My ex-wife would have given said lady money, but something seemed suspicious to both me and to my ex-MIL and we didn't. We returned to the same area about 15-20 minutes later and said women was still in the same place, this time not crying, calm, waiting for another "victim" to pick.

Not trusting people by default is not bad, it's an evolutionary trait that has helped us as a social species over the millennia. I'm just reading a wonderful book that it's based on not trusting people and which, nevertheless, has had an immense positive influence, I'm talking about the collection of articles called "The Federalist Papers" by Madison, Hamilton and Jay.

Regarding taxes: In Sweden this is a rather recent change pushed through by right-wing parties. This wasn't the case when the foundations of social-democracy was set.

It doesn't even require taxes to vanish into black holes, waste and corruption for this to fall apart; all it requires is that those taxes are being spent on people who aren't like us in some sense, who are too far away or too culturally different. You can see this with, for example, the griping from Californians about how unfair it is that they're forced to subsidise other states which aren't the economic success story that California is. (Where economic success is measured by something like GDP, and much of California is so expensive that only the best-paid people and industries can afford to set up shop there.)