Reply to Why so many human development indices favor Scandinavian countries?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I really don't think this is a difficult analysis. A strong social safety net including universal healthcare and a guaranteed pension, plus strong worker's rights including guaranteed sick leave, vacation leave, parental leave, etc. And generally high government standards against corruption couple with a belief that government is in existence to work for the people.

Homogeneity definitely helps, but the issue with immigrants isn't just that they look different. It's that many of them don't want to assimilate and embrace the culture of their adopted country. [/quote]

It's funny how Americans are so quick to jump to "they don't want to assimilate and embrace the culture of their adopted country" while forgetting that they probably have an immigrant Italian nonna who came to America at 20 years old yet went to the grave at 80 still barely speaking a lick of English.  They forget that in the 1920s most of the major cities in America had newspapers that were published in German, or Italian, or Polish, or a number of other languages, reflecting the language and culture of the immigrants.   Assimilation doesn't happen overnight.  It didn't for your own ancestors, either.[/quote]

Not really.  Very few immigrants in the early 20th century failed to learn at least spoken English.   Relatively few passed their native tongue to the next generation.[/quote]
This is so crazy wrong!  :lol:  I’m a descendant of primarily Norwegian and German ancestors and I live in the upper Midwest. Norwegian language newspapers lived on into the 1960s in some areas (Decorah, Iowa represent). White immigrants ghettoized themselves if they weren’t ghettoized by others and their kids learned the language, too. My grandpa and his siblings were all born here to German immigrants and they all spoke fluent German. [/quote]

My Norwegian great-grandmother emigrated to Minnesota at age 14 and barely spoke any English when she died in her 90s.  Her family left Norway because they were desperately poor, and it was a class-based society where there could be no upward mobility and no opportunity.  Norway's wealth is very new, and it is because they have oil.  That's it. Norway invests profits from its oil and gas industry into a sovereign wealth fund, and the returns on those investments account for about 20% of its government's budget. Americans would never accept this because apparently we think our natural resources belong to whoever has the money and resources to extract them, and not as resources that belong to us all and to the generations that follow.  [/quote]

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