[deong]

I lived and worked in Iceland for five years, and they have a virtually 100% unionization rate. It's handled at the industry level rather than individual companies, but when you start a job, you are pretty much automatically enrolled in the union relevant for your work. A little money comes out of your paycheck, and the union is there in case you have problems.

The unions also provide other benefits. For example, most of them own summer houses that any member can reserve to go spend a weekend away. You rarely hear the average Icelander on either side of the worker/manager divide complain about them at all. Everyone more or less views them as beneficial.

Once or twice a year they make headlines when one group of workers or another feels aggrieved and it escalates to a brief strike in some small sector of the economy, but on the whole, I don't think many Icelanders would trade their system of employment for ours.

Like so many other areas, I think the problem is that we in the US are just so very much worse at running our society and country than most other comparable countries. Look at health care. No one liked the ACA; no will will like the AHCA or whatever the Republicans pass. The problem isn't that it's impossible to do a decent job at a health care system. The problem is that we specifically suck. Put us in charge of anything, and we'll turn it into something awful that doesn't work, but provides some brief period of outsized shareholder value.

[puranjay]

I'm always skeptical whenever someone parades a Scandinavian country as an example of anything. The nature of their economies (Norway's massive oil wealth, for example) and the size of their populations means that lessons from these countries are rarely applicable to the US, China, India or other large countries.

[jacobsenscott]

The population of the US is 100x more than Iceland. There are a lot of well run small cities in the US. Iceland's policies would never scale up.

[kilotaras]

"German autobahn system would never work in US, it has 2x population and 25x area". - Someone in 1955, shortly before Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956

[taway_1212]

> The population of the US is 100x more than Iceland.

Actually, it's 1000x.

[jacobsenscott]

Oops. Thanks for the correction.

[Retra]

Why not?

[sqeaky]

"It wouldn't scale up" is common conservative response to progressive or liberal comparisons that involve suggestions of doing it (anything) some other way.

So while the EU plugs away making incremental improvements each year we keep jumping around in fits and spurts forward and backward. There is still a strong belief of American Exceptionalism even in fields where we are clearly inferior. Look at Healthcare Europe figured something out that we didn't and their is cheaper and better.

[Retra]

Well, there could be legitimate reason that it couldn't scale up, but... "necessity is the mother of invention" and I don't feel it should be left at that. (Particularly on HN, where people seem to take inordinate pride in their ability to find ways of scaling things up.)

[delazeur]

Right. If someone is going to make that argument, they should be expected to at least explain why something won't scale up.

[jacobsenscott]

Iceland is demographically homogenous (over 90% Icelandic), and 64% of their population lives in one city. It is fairly easy for that kind of grouping of people to reach agreement on things because they have a lot of common interests, and a shared history and culture.

As you "scale up" in diversity, population, and geographic distribution the set of things people can agree on falls off dramatically.

[losteric]

The US political system is inherently divisive, its no surprise we struggle with social cohesion required for a mature stable capitalist democracy.

We need new political platforms focused on consensus-based policies. Not distinguishing our groups from "the other"

[aeorgnoieang]

Comparing the US to Iceland is an extremely unfair comparison.