I’m looking for perspectives on which countries most effectively combine high quality of life with low social and economic inequality.
None of them.
Pretty much all high quality of life countries have large economic inequality, and life is great if you’re in the top quarter of the economic strata, and everyone else is often struggling.
Also if you want to emigrate, you better have a high paying specialist career.
Looking at this data Norway seems to have low levels of economic inequality, low rates of poverty, and a high median disposable income (behind Luxembourg but around that of France and Austria).
Its far from perfect, but I imagine social inequality for stuff like gender and race is pretty low, officially speaking at least. I get the feeling that Scandinavians can be a big negative about foreigners, but I have zero firsthand knowledge on that.
Norway admittedly has gigantic, relatively recent, oil and gas reserves that allow it to fund all sorts of social programs. Not saying those are bad or anything, just not a particularly exportable model.
The only reason their society is that way is because it’s not diverse.
all the scandavaian counrties are having issues because of increasing immigration is destroying their social harmony. the natives don’t want to give the new immigrants the benefits they get, and the immigrants dont’ want to assimilate to the scandavian values/lifestyle.
Do you have sources you can cite?
In English if possible. Though I’ll understand if not, and make due with what you have.I lived in Sweden for a bit and have travelled through most of Scandinavia over the years, what that person is saying is true. Saw it first hand and it had only gotten more of any issue in the last 20 years.
99% homogenous culture with 99% literacy rate with a big social safety net and high taxes to pay for all the high quality of living. Then you take in refugees over and over again in the past 30 years. The refugees are being put into the same neighborhoods, they form communities since they are all suffering the trauma of displacement together. The communities want access to the huge social safety net but not have to pay taxes or assimilate/learn the native language. Both sides feels abused by the other and the problem just gets bigger and bigger over time.
It makes sense and every Scandinavian country has been dealing with it for a while now; it is a huge struggle for them. It is a challenging hurdle that none of them have been able to figure out how to resolve it.
Take Sweden for example, you have 9mil people living in a country about the size of California. Lots of room, resources and stability. Then 200k refugees need a place to call home. They have pride for their homeland and don’t want to forget it. The Swedes have just fundamentally altered the foundation of their society in a statistically significant way by bringing a very different cultural heritage, background, traditions and people it a mostly unchanged political system based on hundreds of years of tradition. There is a lot that both sides have to adapt to as it is a new paradigm for each to accept.
That’s a tough nut to crack and historically speaking one that is usually solved over a few generations as tensions calm and the two cultures mix. The ones who grew up with the two cultures always being present are usually the ones who resolve it once they are decision makers. Or it is constant tension until violence erupts and everyone always hates each other from then on. Flip a coin but I have my fingers crossed that Scandinavia figures it out. It is a beautiful part of the world that could use a bit of outside influence to spice up their geometric architecture and people.
PS I can’t remember the population of Sweden off the top of my head so I just guesstimated. No idea on # of refugees, just picked that one out of a hat to illustrate a point. 200k could be about right, could be lower or could be higher. ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯
I’m a Norwegian living in Denmark, and can confirm that the views stated are true, unfortunately. The racism is increasing really fast, buy do is the inequality for the general population, and there are many (not all, but many) refugees who refuse to learn Norwegian. There are even refugees who’s been in Norway for 30 years who don’t speak a lick of Norwegian, while their kids sounds like Norwegian native speakers.
As a non-EU person in Denmark, I can confirn, that the “everyone is equal” club is not available for everyone
Plus immigrant friendly, I guess.
Plus immigrant friendly, I guess.
I mean, this is exactly why I kinda side-eye Lemmings when they are like “why did you choose to move to 'such a shithole’¹ like the US, isn’t China much better”, (¹their words btw, not mine) like… (first of all, I didn’t even choose, my parent did) lol I’d go to Norway if they took us, but no they don’t lmao, the US was our only option for emigration… it was either this or stay in mainland China with all that pollution stuff and Hukou bullshit and crowded, and hard to find income.
… and there goes most of them.
I don’t know from experience, and I haven’t researched it, but that kinda sounds like Canada.
Maybe Germany.
Canada has a lot of immgration that has brought about increasing inequality.
Canada was going to have the inequality anyway. The immigration is a scapegoat for the declining quality of life but many policy decisions outside of immigration were already impacting quality of life. The housing bubble and oligarchy/monopoly of major sectors (grocceries, telecommunications etc) are the main issues driving inequality in Canada.
Canada could support its ambitious immigration goals if it were willing to invest in the country to support them, such as extensive public transit overhauls and nationalizing essential services like rail, communications, and energy.
I’d recommend researching quality of life metrics and cross referencing with nations’ gini coefficients.
Xandar
Is that real or is it like Narnia?
There are graphs in the book The Spirit Level which show exactly this. The two things correlate. From memory Iceland, Japan and maybe Poland do well, or at least they were when the book was published.
Sir Thomas Moore’s Utopia fits this bill if we assume for the moment that slaves don’t count toward the equality aspect, beings slaves and all.
Most European countries.
You and tubulartittyfrog have basically the exact opposite comments
