[sdf131]

I think we’re ignoring scale here. Is there a country with similar population levels that provides all that?

I’m Canadian and I am thankful for our benefits but our public services have been stretched for decades and I’m skeptical that our systems could handle 10x the population.

[handrous]

It's ignored because it hardly seems relevant. Is providing healthcare to ~80m people (France, Germany—numbers off the top of my head but I think that's close for both) or, what, 150m or so (Japan, again, IIRC) really that different from 350m? What part of the difference in scale makes it impossible for the country of 350m with a higher GDP-per-capita than those other examples? Some parts of our country are sparsely populated, yes, but it's not like passing that off to a mix of highly-funded public ventures and market forces (i.e. our current very, very expensive system) magically solves that problem, so how's that relevant to preventing us from having universal healthcare? Plus, Canada's got that problem nearly as bad as we do, no? I know most of the population's down near the border, but you've got the same issues with large areas that are still lightly populated, but you manage. So that can't be the reason.

[xboxnolifes]

Isn't the theory that 10x the population would mean 10x the tax revenue, and 10x the infrastructure? The same reason a lot of people like to look at per capita measurements over absolute figures?

Or looking at it another way: with the assumption that a country of 30M people can have good infrastructure, and is not an outlier, and there can exists more than one of such country, what is different between 10 countries of 30M people each with good infrastructure and 1 country of 300M having bad?

Governments are big, so it's difficult to just point a finger at a specific cause of an issue, but it would seem to me the issue is not continuously building out infrastructure. That, and poorly written, but possibly well meaning, legislation that leads to regulations massively increasing administration costs on every and all areas of our infrastructure (healthcare, general construction, transport, housing).

[jandrewrogers]

In the specific case of the US, it is the scale of the populated geography more than the number of people. This has created problems even in boring and non-controversial policy areas. For example, prior attempts to regulate highway speed limits nationally, which has since been devolved back to local control. At the scale of individual States, it works much more like it does in other countries.

Any national-scale policy will be poorly adapted for some major region of the US because it is simply too diverse geographically, culturally, historically, and economically.

[j_walter]

The bigger you are the harder it is to do things properly or react fast enough to changing conditions. This is why most companies get huge and then end up failing...they can't change fast enough to stay competitive.

It's one thing to be a Scandinavian country that has a homogenous culture and smaller population (and land mass)...and another to mix large amounts of different cultures across a giant nation of states and have everyone agree upon the same thing or be able to institute the same infrastructure.

[mabub24]

Scandinavian countries also have diverse and differing cultures depending on where you live. Just because everyone calls themselves "Swedish" doesn't mean they all agree.

I suspect the answer is somewhat different. Just look at their parliaments: they almost always have majority coalitions made up of multiple parties, and a diverse group of opposition parties.

What is exceptional about America is its calcification into a two party system, which I think is far more of an issue than the actual differences of opinion and culture in the American populace. In fact, polls regularly show that a majority of Americans generally agree on a number of issues, and broadly support a number of possible policies and programs. For instance, on abortion, a majority of Americans have long supported legalizing it some fashion up until recently. Through the 70's into the 90's, support even reached 60%. Only in the mid 90s did the discussion become wildly more combative and enter a stalemate.

Really, most of the extremely popular social safety net programs were created and institutionalized during the 40 years of continuous Democratic majority. What ended it, and brought about the modern Republican party and the current state of American politics, was the "Republican Revolution" in '94[0]. The 2 party system then ran into a brick wall as both parties froze into defensive turtling.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_Revolution

[m_ke]

There's also a reason why Google, Amazon and Microsoft are the only companies that can compete in cloud computing, it's called economies of scale.

[j_walter]

Sure, but why was Tesla able to start up and take a big portion of the EV market over the last few years? The big companies were too slow in reacting to changing demand. It took years to get something that was equivalent to what they are offering...and yet they still don't have anything close despite far more industry knowledge on how to mass manufacture cars.

[pjscott]

There are economies of scale. There are also diseconomies of scale:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diseconomies_of_scale

Inertia and institutional sclerosis are serious problems for organizations that are large, old, or both.