Quite possibly the worst comparison I've ever seen. You're taking a country that not only has an incredibly low crime rate (they had 5 homicides in the entire country in 2009) and only has a population around 5 million. By comparison, Chicago has close to 3 million people just in the city.
To try and compare our reaction to terrorism and how the Norwegians reacted to their recent mass killing is completely absurd.
First, Breivik's acts in Norway were terrorism. Don't pretend that because he's Norwegian he wasn't trying to use fear and violence to cause political change.
Second, I'm sorry, but as an American who currently lives in Oslo (and was at work 2 blocks from where the bomb exploded last year), the comparison to how America has reacted to terrorism compared to how Norway reacted to this event is entirely fair.
Immediately after the bombing, nobody knew who was responsible, but many people immediately started theorizing that it must have been Muslim extremists (Norway is active in the international community, and not everyone is happy with them based on their attempts to help with negotiations between Israel/Palestine, opposing forces in Sri Lanka, and not to mention their ongoing attempts to figure out what to do with Mullah Krekar).
After the attacks, the government could very easily have made changes to the law and done so very quickly (look at how the U.S. was able to pass the horrible Patriot Act in less than a month after 9/11). Instead they had a very reasoned response. --The army was deployed to several locations around Oslo for two days (to help keep people out of areas with heavy damage after the bomb, around their parliament, palace, and a few other locations), and then they were gone. Very few new laws have been introduced - the only big one is the one to allow them to hold Breivik in prison even if he is declared insane, although they're now considering laws to allow more internet monitoring, which I hope will not pass.
In comparison, the U.S. reaction to 9/11 (which resulted in fewer deaths and injuries per capita than in Norway) include the Patriot Act, the Department of Homeland Security, and military tribunals where defendants and their legal counsel aren't even allowed to see the evidence against them.
I had a lot of friends and relatives asking me if I wanted to move back to the States after the attack, and I've always been able to point to the reasonable response Norway had to a horrific attack vs how the U.S. responded and easily say no.
Still very low, but 580% more than five. That said, I agree that the idea of comparing a country with 5 million inhabitants to the US is not entirely right, given to
(a) The heterogeneity of the US population and,
(b) The US being two orders of magnitude more populated. It really is more of a continent than a country.
In response to a Swedish economist noting that there was no poverty in Scandinavia, Milton Friedman once said that in America there was no poverty among Scandinavians either.
Probably apocryphal, but it does draw attention to the role that cultural differences play in what sort of rules you can implement in organizing a society.
Agreed. (and of course you were downvoted here). People love to hold Scandanavia up as an example as how the rest of the world "could be." However, I think that is such a naive point of view, and one that needs changing. Their populations are too small and lack diversity to make a realistic comparison to the USA or even their larger European neighbors.
I usually like Mr. Schriener's work, but this post is a little off.
There's a middle ground between the wholesale Scandinavian worship (of which I have been guilty) and totally insular American exceptionalism (of which I have also been guilty).
There are many things that are done differently in other parts of the world, to great success, that we could adapt and learn from.
The "lack of diversity" in Scandinavia comes up now and then even on HN, but:
In 2010, there were 1.33 million foreign-born residents in Sweden, corresponding
to 14.3% of the total population. Of these, 859 000 (9.2%) were born outside
the EU and 477 000 (5.1%) were born in another EU Member State.
This does not include second or third generation immigrants, nor minorities with a longer presence.
The number of immigrants in Norway is approximately 550,000.
The total "immigrant population", which includes Norwegian-born children
to immigrant parents, is 655,170, corresponding to 13.1 percent of the
total population (2011).
In the US our foreign born population is roughly similar about 13% foreign born in 2009. However the percent of foreign born people in the US has historically been very high.
Wikipedia points immigration to Norway has risen very recently because of it's membership in the European Economic Area. It is entirely possible that united states has issues caused by continued high levels of immigration that Scandinavia has not had time to experience.
Since our foreign born populations are similar, adjusting for that shows that when native born Scandinavians and Americans are considered, Scandinavia is much more ethnically/racially homogenous than the United States.
Furthermore Scandinavia doesn't have a recent history of institutionalized oppression of a very sizable racial minority. There is still a generation of people alive here who actually lived under forced segregation, and more generations who were raised by them.
I'm sure if America was composed only of people who's ancestors came here voluntarily, and who weren't kept as second class citizens for decades, we wouldn't have many of the problems we do.
You make an excellent point regarding diversity. Being a brown person in America is not easy (During the roughly 25 + flights I have done this year, I have been asked to do a "random" TSA extended check every single time). However, I can easily put this experience in context to other more homogenous countries I have lived in in other continents. The magnitude of the problem makes it excessively hard to make a realistic solution that works well for tiny populations scale well to the diversity and size that America operates in.
It's always greener on the other side; Denmark is the happiest country in the world (not really); Finland has the best K12 school system in the world (maybe). And so on and so on.
There is a lot to be learnt from other countries, and I am sure it's not always easy to say that there are countries that do things better than the United States, but people tend to make it sound as if it's all rainbows and ponies, as soon as you get off the plane in Northern Europe.
It's not like they don't have their own problems to wrestle with in areas where the United States does better.
He's commenting on a BBC article, don't read too much into it.
Sure, we Norwegians like to blow our own horn and preach peace and tolerance, and can sometimes be shocked when we travel the world and discover how other people think. It won't stop us from preaching socialism and believing that the world can be a better place, though.
Interesting that you make a point about diversity - that was one of the things Breivik was fighting (or multiculturalism, specifically).
To try and compare our reaction to terrorism and how the Norwegians reacted to their recent mass killing is completely absurd.