[Norse]

I read the size argument a lot. But I never hear it. It crops up on the internet a lot, but never in the serious debate. You always compare countries. Iceland to Austria to Italy to Britain to Germany to Japan. That is a lot of what people do in these areas.

No-ones ever pointed out a mechanism which would make it impossible to compare countries of varying sizes to each other. And normally, the advantage accrues to the larger one, with the bigger internal market.

In short, everything else being equal, you would expect the US to hasve more startups per cpaita, just based on the size advantage alone.

[ThomPete]

Sorry but serious debate?

The article talks about Norway as being socialist. How serious is that?

With regards to the number of startups I would like to see the actual data they use to derive at this number.

For instance government funded initiatives are often part of the scandinavian models to push startups. Which means a lot of cleaning companies and window polishers become part of the statistics.

Also a lot of people in the US would have a company if they could.

Of course size matters or are you saying that there is no difference between people living in a small village and people living in the big city? Are you saying that the social dynamics are completely the same if you have 200 million people vs. 5 million?

I think you are wrong.

[Norse]

I am saying that all the advantages go to the country with the biggest size. Economics of size. Bigger market. One language. One set of regulations. There is far better economic opportunity in the larger country, whn you just look at the size.

That is fact. Not an opinion.

Also, macroeconomics, public health, health care economics, etc compare countries all the time. Fact. The argument "It doesn't compare due to size" is something that crops up on the internet with people trotting it out as a reason for why their policies/countries/footballteams cannot possibly be expected to perform. There is never any reasoning for why size has this effect of excusing select objects from comparing to others of the same class. Nor any musings on whether the scaling can be compensated for. It is an internet thing, this cry of "SIZE! Can't be compared."

Menawhile, if yoy check out some serious research papers of a nmber of disciplines, you'll see they don't hesitiate to compare countries of widly differing sizes.