Ignoring the Evidence: Nordics Are City-States

Matt Bruenig is ignoring the evidence I’ve presented, presumably willfully. This is not argument in good faith. He again shows his chart comparing the U.S. vs. the Nordics, quotes my bit where I point out the importance of thinking about what we mean by rurality, then skips all of my actual arguments! He respond to my pointing out that Denmark and Luxembourg have fairly comparable rurality by… ignoring it and saying that Denmark has “just” 6 percent less rural population.

If I told you that Denmark had a 33% lower rate of rurality than the U.S., would you think it important? Think of it this way: if the rural population (which was about 80% Trump-voting) was 33% smaller, would it impact the United States? Yes? Okay. Then we can see how incorrect Matt’s sense of scale is here.

Meanwhile, we can think about the role of geographic dispersion in healthcare administration. If a huge share of the population all resides in a single city (which is the case for all the Nordics), then you can consolidate services. And if, in fact, the urban structure is terribly lopsided in favor of just one city, you can justify concentrating and clustering services, as the Nordics do. Reykjavik is Iceland and Iceland is Reykjavik, at least as far as managing hi-cost government services go. You can easily supervise to reduce corruption and mismanagement, you can easily change policies due to fewer and more concentrated participants, you can more easily solve access problems, etc.

But when you’re dealing with a far more dispersed population, both in terms of rurality and the number of economically, demographically, and politically important cities, the costs are higher. Policy changes that solve an access problem in City A may worsen it in City B. Organizing information and resources to optimize management for government services across diverse environments is a costly and knowledge-intensive problem. Because Nordic populations are extremely concentrated, non-rural, and centralized around political hubs, these transaction costs are lower.

So, if Matt wants the Minneapolis Metropolitan Council to implement a Nordic single-payer system, I say knock yourself out! That’s an optimal area! Plus, it’s demographically similar on a huge range of factors! There is no more perfect testbed for the exportability of Nordic social democracy to the United States than Minnesota, with Vermont and Utah in a tie for 2nd place.

But doing this Federally is much harder. Matt is avoiding acknowledging that by ignoring the actual evidence I presented about the actual distributions of Nordic populations. Frickin Greenland is less rural than the United States, and it is literally covered in ice. Only Sweden has comparable rurality, and even it still has a far less diversified urban network, which honestly may matter even more than pure rurality.

So: the Nordics use urbanization to juke their stats, but aside from that, their population distribution dramatically reduces administrative complexity, information costs, and transaction costs.