Finland is a happy and homogeneous little country of 5.5 million people. A consistently strong Winter Olympics performer. Heavily forested. Oh, and one more thing: it’s a “capitalist paradise,” at least according to a Sunday New York Times op-ed by Finnish-American journalist Anu Partanen. Dynamism and innovation coexist nicely with high supertaxes and a superbig welfare state. Partanen’s message to America: Be not afraid of universal healthcare, tuition-free college, and months of paid parental leave. Also the taxes. Your economy will be just fine with a much cozier version of capitalism.

And maybe she’s right. But why is it reasonable to automatically assume what works well in a tiny country full of Finns would work equally well in a big country not full of Finns? Different people, different geography, different history, different culture. As my AEI colleague Stan Veuger said in a 2016 podcast Q&A about the Nordic nations: “They’re relatively homogeneous, they have stable politics, they do not have a tradition of ethnic groups or racial groups that have long been disadvantaged. So that makes a lot of these programs more feasible and more affordable too.” And their egalitarian natures seem to predate their welfare states.

Then there’s the matter that Americans are richer than Finns. I mean, it seems worth mentioning that we are about a quarter richer based on nominal per capita GDP and about a third richer based on purchasing power. Nor does Finland have a single billionaire entrepreneur, in the tech sector or otherwise. As economists Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson, and Thierry Verdier explain in the 2012 paper “Can’t We All Be More Like Scandinavians?”: