Ethnic homogeneity isn't the only reason comparing the US to Denmark doesn't make much sense, it's also due to population. Denmark is a tiny country with a population of 5.7 million people. That's about the population of Wisconsin.<p>The United States is a federation of self-governing states within which there are open borders and free trade...just like the European Union. The United States has a population of 320 million people, while the EU has a population of a similar order of magnitude: around 500 million. To many voters, the idea of enacting broad social welfare programs in the United States sounds just as infeasible as enacting similar programs in the whole European Union. California is different from Ohio, both of which are different from Georgia.<p>If we want to use Denmark and the Nordic countries as examples for our policies, we should move towards the republican (small r) idea of decentralization so that the states can enact such systems. Today, I pay roughly 30% of my income in taxes to the federal government, and 10% of my income in taxes to the state government. This should be the other way around - 10% to the Federal government and maybe 30% to my state. Maybe Wisconsin can have a single payer healthcare system, California can have a universal multi-payer system (like Germany), and Texas can have a universal multi-payer system like that in Switzerland.<p>TL;DR - We could be more like the European Union.
Dane here.<p>Our health insurance - an important part of our welfare system - started out as a guild benefit for workers, then it were a part of unions and finally something on a national level (I skipped a few steps).<p>The absolutely must have part is "solidarity". What does that even mean? It means you feel part of something tight where you owe the others, in that "something", your help and compassion, even financially.<p>Ethnic homogeneity isn't needed, but solidarity is. It is a feeling nurtured and grown over many years and it is easily broken if abused. It requires eternal vigilance, to keep that feeling of "we owe each other" alive despite all the distrust.<p>It is a constant battle against unpleasant emotions and real abuse, and you need to pick the fight in a way that ensures that you can win it. Denmark is almost too big to keep that alive.
I'm pretty convinced that there are critical upper bounds to population size and national surface area that guarantee that approaches that work great for small, tractable nations just cannot scale.<p>So step 0: Reduce the population of the US to the population of the metro Atlanta area (5.7 million in 2010).<p>Step 1: reduce the area of the US to the state of Maine (roughly).
The tradeoffs of homeogeneity and diversity in democracy strikes me as an extremely important topic now, and I was looking forward to the article addressing the most comprehensive study on the issue (that I know of) by Robert Putnam [0].<p>Unfortunately it seems the author simply acknowledges this as the predominant view, takes a single study on immigration to "prove(!)" the idea wrong, and then credits Nordic success to the "Class struggle" as a mere assertion. But perhaps I missed something.<p>[0]- <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9477.2007.00176.x/abstract" rel="nofollow">http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9477.2007....</a>
It's tempting to think we can mimic the example of a small country, but it's unfortunately quite difficult to know if the policies mattered, or if it has to do with cultural and economic forces that the government doesn't have much influence over.<p>Imagine you take the US, and you just cut it into small "nations" arbitrarily. Despite having the same laws and policies, you'd see a huge amount of diversity when it comes to crime rates, wealth, income distribution, and so on.
While it's true that, a priori, there's no reason that ethnic homogeneity should be a prerequisite for a welfare state, this idea is misleading because it supposes that all ethnic groups contribute to the welfare state equally. I know that it's modern dogma that all groups are equal in all respects, but hear me out: what if they're not?<p>What if, for whatever reason, ethnic group A subsidizes B's existence? This difference will damage the social cohesion necessary for a welfare state to exist. In the real world, we observe huge group differences in productivity, educational attainment, conscientiousness, fecundity, and other characteristics, and in the real world, we see that mixing groups does indeed damage social cohesion. I understand that this observation is unpopular --- but this unpopularity doesn't make it wrong.<p>I don't think it's politically possible to create a strong welfare state in a country populated by identifiable groups with differing socioeconomic contributions to the common good.<p>Others have commented that it's the size of the country that makes welfare impossible --- that it just doesn't work over a certain size. As a practical theory, I think that's true, but I don't think size itself is the root cause. I think that as a country's population increases, the visibility of low-contributing groups increases, and it's this visibility that reduces the will to create a global welfare state.