tlatophat:

You know…  I’m constantly baffled by how scale-blind people are.  I’m talking scale as in size, e.g. land mass, population, etc.  Americans look at Europe and forget that the largest of those countries is smaller than Texas.  They look at Denmark, for example, and don’t grasp that its population is smaller than the combined population of the five boroughs of New York City.

Conversely, Europeans look at the USA and don’t seem to realize that it takes 5 eight-hour days behind the wheel, with 4 overnight stops, to drive from Washington D.C. to Los Angeles.  Or that the average US State has 6.3 million residents, ranging from 582 thousand to over 38 million.  Or that the total population of the USA 400% - 500% larger than the most populous European nations.

And because no one seems to grasp the discrepancy and the vast differences in scale, they completely overlook the impact scale has on a nation in all spheres, from culture, to economics, to military, to geopolitics.  They don’t realize how impossible it is to apply what ‘works’ on one side of the scale to the other.  Some things fall apart when scaled up (like a supersized ant collapsing under its own weight), others are crippled when scaled down (similar to medical conditions like dwarfism).

You can’t point to a nation that’s 1/37th the size of yours and say ‘See, it works for them!  So just do that here!’ with no consideration for how the change in scale will drastically unhinge the system.  Likewise, you can’t point at a nation five times bigger than you and go, 'Why can’t we just take their system and implement it here?’ because some of those systems need to be a certain minimum size to function as designed.

Ignoring scale will lead to failure.  Most systems do not scale well when stretched or squashed beyond a certain deviation, and will fail critically under those stresses.  So either some kind of perfectly scalable system needs to be developed for any one sphere of national policy (good luck with that), or maybe it’s time to wake up and realize that a system that’s good for one country is probably not going to be good for another; and instead of trying to copy things from vastly different scales, try instead to develop systems that work domestically for our own respective scales.

You know.  Just a thought, from a guy who’s lived on both sides of the pond.