That 20% is dominated by Finns (their neighbor). Wow, super diverse.
ethnic groups: Swedish 89,3%; Finn & Sami (Lapp) 3%; Yugoslav 0,8%; Iranian 0,6%; other 6,3% languages: Swedish religious affiliation: Evangelical Lutheran 94%; Roman Catholic 2%; Pentecostal 1%; other 3%
Soooo diverse brah.
Belgium, same deal.
This page breaks it out nicely, I just used CTRL F to get around
So how many charts should I produce until you understand that you are wrong? 5 more? 10? You did see that the second chart has exactly the same same countries on the same positions of almost the same axis, right?
Here is a very simple explanation:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/the-great-gatsby-curve/?_r=0
“On the vertical axis is the intergenerational elasticity of income — how much a 1 percent rise in your father’s income affects your expected income; the higher this number, the lower is social mobility”
From this point on please use google
YES!!! let the hate flow through you.
See the point I made to Geo. If you want to compare us to tiny backwater municipalities (IE nordic countries) you’re wasting your time. There’s nothing to be gained from that. Most studies show us very close to the UK, Italy and other larger countries. In the end it’s more a factor of us have greater dispersion, IE more possibility and also a greater more powerful, more diverse economy. Not everyone aspires to be a municipal senior clerk at Denmark
You’re depressing me. You seem like a reasonable fellow, and I don’t mind having differing views with reasonable people. But, Krugman? Paul fooking Krugman? Damn it.
Before we go any further, let me as an American(I’ll speak for all of us, thanks) let any non-Americans know that unlike the non-judgmental picture that Black Swan is trying to paint, I do sit in not-so-silent judgement of you. I know dangerously little about your people or cultures but that will not stop me from painting with the broadest of brushes.
I didn’t read every single post but I don’t think anyone said the US is inferior. I will agree with everything you said except the bolded paragraph above. The US are always poking their noses in other countries’ business but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, being a world superpower and all.
Yeah, yeah I know, I cringed too when I saw the link but I didn’t have much time and I was just looking for an easy explanation that would go through the thickest of skulls and this one seemed simple enough. The source is questionable but that does not make the chart less accurate, its not his chart after all and it’s used heavily in many other publications as well.
No worries, I will be sure to keep my views to myself in the future unless of course it concerns my own country and culture directly. Got it.
open floor plans at work bother me. i don’t want to hear people typing and generally make awkward eye contact with people but also and more importantly don’t want people seeing my computer while i’m here on AF.
How can anyone in cube land comfortably slack off?
This from the guy that compares a country with 64 times the population and 228 times the space to some backwater country like Denmark (5 million people) like there’s something to be gained. No wonder they need the welfare, per capita GDP and median income there is about 80% of the US. Land of opportunity to take a pay cut maybe. Anyhow, lets just focus on one random metric in a country who’s biggest industry is boat building and call it an analysis. Let’s ignore the fact that in a country with “better” maternity laws, people have 20% fewer babies per household.
Connecticut and New Jersey both share similar populations to Denmark with 30% higher median income. So basically we can cherry pick geographic pockets too if we wanted to try to reach bogus conclusions. Anyhow, to my point, more dispersion = more opportunity.
But then again, that’s why the US economy which more directly compares to that of the European Union by landmass, diversity and population is larger on both an absolute and per capita basis, with higher growth rates, greater innovation and lower unemployment making it the true land of opportunity.
I never said the word inferior or made that claim.
In my last job, where slacking off was the only logical thing to do because my manager didn’t care that I exceeded my objectives, I arranged my laptop and monitors one day on a Saturday by sitting at his desk to learn his view and minimizing the amount of screen space he could see. And he claims I wasn’t motivated… I simply acted rationally.
This is how fighting for a decent maternity leave in US feels like
^ I got your back.
Come on princess, it’s not like any other thread in the WC doesn’t go off on a tangent. The point I was making in that thread was that the discussion seems totally bizarre from a non US perspective. At no point did I claim the US was backward, just that the particular issue of gun control and the zeal that certain segments of the population display when arguing against it evolved from something that was brought in during very different times.
I’d be very surprised if this ever happens. Random strangers just wander up and confront you to tell you that the US is inferior? If that’s true you’re quite right to be annoyed by it.
The thing that a lot of Europeans find humourous about some Americans is their inability to take any sort of criticism of their way of doing things. Only Italians rival you on that one. Most other nationalities understand that their way isn’t always the best way.
I’ve had it happen more than once minding my own business over seas. Particularly bars overseas, people see you’re American and start in. It was worst in the early 2000’s. A more public example was the Dutch speed skating coach a few years ago. He may have had valid points, but he was rude, obnoxious, uninvited and largely European in his tirade. Give a country a few medals in one sport and they throw themselves a parade.
I’m not saying it’s a travesty that you did that, I was just citing examples to point out that it does happen pretty frequently because people seem so out of touch with the why the US gets sick of it. Getting irritated at criticism of your country from foreigners is pretty universal. If I went to France and the U.K. and started in you’d get the same response.
It’s like trying to have a discussion with my 2 year old nephew. Just pointless. Yes, you did claim that somebody called the US inferior, look at the quote from hei.so, just like you called me an idiot. Both these comments and many others you later changed, again and again. It’s hard to take your seriously at this point.
I never directly compared the US to Denmark or Sweden, so keep your straw man, thanks. I merely pointed out that in the peer group of developed nations, the US stands out in it’s policy on maternity leave, just as it stands out in social immobility. This is obvious not just compared against tiny countries like the ones you obsess with but also against the EU as a whole or Germany, France and even the UK to a smaller extent. You can rank all developed nations on a spectrum and I believe the ranking would be similar for both variables. It seems the most socially mobile societies are those that have also very developed social policies. I thought it could be interesting to discuss a possible link between the two.
There is clearly no right or wrong but it shouldn’t be a question of national pride to discuss pros and cons of different systems and disagreeing with another approach shouldn’t be construed as an insult.
Is your nephew smarter than you? I softened the idiot comment to avoid hurting your feelings and I often edit posts to cut down on number by addressing multiple people at once. I was looking at her bolded paragraph which was the one she referenced and didn’t see the term inferior there. There was a lot going on at the time (at work and in the thread).
You may have been grouped in with Geo at times, but the overall points stand. Overall, it’s hard to take the social mobility metric seriously when it pretty much correlates to wealth disparity and tiny populations. As the economist pointed out, since social mobility references movement from the bottom to top quartile, it’s easier to move between the two when your top quartile is much lower.
There are many reasons for the wealth disparity, one of which being relatively weaker economies by nearly every metric in those backwater nations or lack of innovation. Our richest are simply richer due to the level of technological innovation and it’s impact on wealth distribution. If you’re not from the US, you’re communicating with me on a US website, run on US built servers operated on US software, through a US designed OS on a computer likely built in Asia. Again, it’s not hard to go from clerk to senior clerk at your local munipality in Denmark if you want to call that social mobility. Or maybe as I’ve pointed out, the lack of defined materinity benefits stems from the fact that we have one of the highest per capita GDP’s of any large developed nation so our citizens don’t require the subsidies those royal subjects over in Europe do to survive. We also have higher birth rates which may play a role as well.
But you as well have ignored addressing those points raised repeatedly at all (other than guessing the result may hold) and instead focused on one chart, hence my own frustration.