[HEmanZ]

The Bay Area is about the same population as Finland. And it has a higher gdp per capita than Finland.

I agree that we are working with more “technical debt” than Finland is, and copy-pasting exact policy won’t work. But strategically I don’t see a major difference.

[fragmede]

The Bay Area doesn't control immigration and cannot set its own monetary policy. Some problems need to be solved at the Federal level, but the Bay Area does not set Federal policy.

[disgruntledphd2]

Neither does Finland, the EU controls immigration from almost all of the surrounding countries, and the ECB controls monetary policy.

[Amezarak]

Population #s and GDP mean very little, and thinking we can move the needle on our favorite issues by looking at these needles is the source of a lot of problems. People think you can just spend more and more money on problems and fix them. There are things money cannot buy. And often, the processes behind the accumulation of the money are what contributed to the problem in the first place.

As an example of just one contributing factor, population churn has an extremely negative impact across nearly the whole spectrum of social issues. What is the population churn in SF vs Finland?