Norway, with 0.07% of the world's population, has the world's best chess player ever. Two of the top ten bridge players. One of the very best soccer players under 25. And so on.
Basically, it's a very oil-rich country that uses its wealth to invest in its people. And we see the results in every field of endeavor.
Many other "rich" countries, whatever the source of their wealth, do not have the same people-investment attitude.
Funny: I learned recently that Norway's Ekofisk oil field almost ended up with Denmark. It came down to a negotiation that went Norway's way - against a drunk Danish minister.
It's a common myth, but he wasn't drunk, and the deal didn't happen that day. Several meetings later with several more officials and the deal went through 2 years after that negotiation. They basically placed the line in the middle, and the norwegians got lucky.
It fits so well with the Norwegian stereotyping of Danish people, which is likely the reason why so many believe in it. It's also worth noting that Denmark also have quite a large oil industry.
Another myth seems to be that Norway was a very poor nation before the discovery of oil. According to Jan Eivind Myhre[0], professor emeritus in history at the University of Oslo, this isn't true. Norway has been one of the wealthiest countries in Europe for hundreds of years. We had, and to some degree still have, a huge merchant fleet. We've always been big in shipping insurance, probably a by-product of the merchant fleet. The fishing industry has always been a huge part of the economy, same with raw materials.
It's an interesting read, but perhaps a bit more debatable than the myth about a drunk danish minister.
Fascinating. Maybe a similar mental model applies as in Switzerland. I am a foreigner living in wealthy Switzerland. They also talk about themselves as being very poor a few decades ago. Maybe it is that people really were poor back then, just not as poor as the other europeans, and this for them is hard to imagine.
According to the statistics that I can find, they have been one of the wealthiest european nations for 250 years now, with GDP per capita being 50% higher than the Netherlands consistently for the past 70 years.
Switzerland has no real natural resources, no access to the sea for trade routes, it's mostly just mountains. Many many years ago, Swiss people were so dirt poor, that they had to sell their life to the highest bidder. Thus it fielded one of the largest mercenary armies in Europe.
Why Switzerland is kinda rich now, is thanks to Napoleon and the congress of Vienna in 1815. There it was decided that Switzerland shall stay neutral forever.
Thanks to that it didn't got destroyed in the last two wars like the rest of Europe.
So it is not like that the Swiss were not as poor as the rest of Europe back then, but everyone else got royally screwed in the wars, except the Swiss. In that time they could catch up quite a bit, because after the war, Switzerland still had fully functioning factories and manufacturing.
This also provides some context to the current discussion about 'neutrality' and why many people want to keep it. After all, this policy has proven to be very beneficial for 208 years already.
Ha! The closest I've been to meeting Magnus Carlsen is that one time we both happened to be standing next to each other at the urinals. He adheres to normal urinal etiquette, if that's anything to go by.
The Logic of Political Survival predicts that any country with an already strong and healthy democracy which later discovers enormous natural resources will have a much better shot at overcoming the curse of resources than those where these trends are weaker. Selectorate theory is the real key here, and it's why Norway is probably going to knock it out of the park with its newly discovered phosphate deposits as well, which dwarf the oil profits several times over. The pre-discovery takeaway is to get that democratic process alive and healthy well ahead of time, no matter the circumstances.
On a totally unrelated note, if anyone wants to help me land my first gig over in Oslo, I'm conviniently next-next door in Finland. Have EU passport, likes keeping a good thing going, willing to learn Norwegian (Fosse's plays are great) -- will travel.
>if anyone wants to help me land my first gig over in Oslo, I'm conviniently next-next door in Finland
I made a website to help non-norwegian speakers find a tech/it/software job in Norway. All the job posts should be in English and only a few jobs require some Norwegian knowledge.
If you know Java, .NET or JavaScript/Typescript there are a lot of well(-enough) paid jobs in Norway.
Interesting but without salary ranges it's hard to know if it worth applying. What are typical bracket for software engineer as junior, 3 years, and 5 years of experience?
>What are typical bracket for software engineer as junior, 3 years, and 5 years of experience?
For Oslo the salary range is something like this, a bit lower in smaller cities. These are the "typical" brackets, but you can definitively get a lot more:
- 0 YOE - €45k-€60k
- 3 YOE - €55k-€90k
- 5 YOE - €70k-€150k and up
A "median" salary in Oslo for a developer with 3-8 YOE is around €70k-80k. Anyone who has 5 YOE and actually asks for a higher salary can easily get 1 million NOK or €90k++.
Expect a 32%-38% tax rate on your income.
If you earn 1 million NOK (€85k) you will pay €27k in tax.
Are you making a quantile-quantile comparison? It's probably likely that you are making way more than the average romanian dev and the same is likely to apply in norway.
Thanks for the detailed answer and adding information about taxes! I've to adjust to the cost of living but at first glance that seems still quite higher than what are practiced in my country, especially with some experience.
Anywhere from 500-600k NOK with a fresh bachelor's degree to well over a million NOK with experience.
The best paying jobs are usually provision-based consultant/contractor positions. Some companies go hard in that direction, others lean more towards job security and stuff like that. You get paid less, but you get paid the same amount regardless of whether you have work to do. They spend more money on social things like company trips and other events etc. Then there's various benefits like pension, insurance, they might pay for internet and gym memberships, lots of stuff like that.
We can throw this 'logic of political survival' theory straight into the thrash. Because this is strictly the logic of n=1. Humans trying to see patterns where none exist. Norwegians did very well, because they did. Maybe they're special or lucky or blessed by Odin or whatever. Or because of some other more legitimate reason.
But in any case it's not because it's an inevitable result of strong democracy.
Counterexample: us Netherlanders didn't do very well with our once plentiful gas reserves. Which is why the resource curse is called Dutch disease. In spite of having at the time a century of democratic tradition, our prime minister chose to pump the wealth straight into the social system and not build a national wealth fund. Causing a decade of economic decline.
Even better than EU, you're part of the Nordic Passport Union. Which I believe means you can naturalize as Norwegian with just two years residency there.
You don't have to apply for a work or residence permit, which means that you can stay in the country indefinitely. If you're from the EEA you have to exit Norway every 3 months, unless you qualify for a work and residence permit, basically, you have to have a job.
Is the 3-month thing actually enforced in Norway on those who do not cause a nuisance or seek benefits? Not only is it rarely enforced in EU countries, but I vaguely recall hearing that there have been court judgements in some country or another that EU/EEA citizens who overstay there cannot be forced to leave.
When I saw the title, what instantly flashed in my mind was Ibsen and Hamsun. Only then, as I clicked through, did I think about Fosse or Knausgård. Long before Norway became a wealthy oil nation, it had authors known on an international level. Indeed, Ibsen is referenced enough in early and mid 20th-century anglophone culture that you can see that he was a pretty popular figure, not just a concern of a tiny literary elite.
Not OP but the Nordic model is social democratic: inherited from the social democrats that fenced off the communists around the turn of the last century with the promise of delivering socialism through reforms, not through revolution. Early adoption of this model from the capitalists kept class warfare in Scandinavian countries at a minimum, and a prevailing sense of the state as "for the people" has taken root. Which means that the state in Norway was expected to invest the oil revenue to benefit the people, not for the benefit of foreign oil interest in an alliance with a wealthy few as is often the case.
This backdrop explains for example why Musk may find that Tesla needs to withdraw from Sweden unless they sign the deal with the trade unions. Or, as some will have it: Musk and some others will succeed in delivering a coup de grâce to the Nordic model, it has admittedly been withering for some time.
I don't think this analysis is any better and at least the article tries to tell a story.
Sweden, a country next door with not that many people and no oil has someone named Ibrahimovic who is a bit more than a talent. They also produced some of the most hyped novels of the last decade and some of the worst furniture and probably a few other cherry picked examples.
The point is they're just as talented as the Norwegians yet 'no oil'.
My comment points out that Norway has done something amazing that other countries have not come close to doing.
Look at what the US (I am American) has done with our wealth: highest healthcare expenditure per capita (50% more than #2), 47th in life expectancy, fifth-highest incarceration rate.
What is served by reflexively trying to diminish Norway's accomplishments with a "BUT Singapore is more impressive"? Why not instead try to learn from Norway?
Norway is projected to produce $122,421,000,000 worth of oil next year, against a population of only 5 million people.
That's about $24,400 in annual oil revenue per citizen. Their sovereign wealth fund (profits from oil re-invested into the global stock market and real estate) is about $270,000 per citizen. Take the risk-free rate of putting that in US Treasuries and it's an additional $13,500 per citizen per year.
Judged in the context of Petro-states with tiny populations there is still a lot to like about Norway. But it's important to realize that UAE, Qatar and Saudi Arabia are realistically their peers, not countries like the US.
Norway was a lower income country until they discovered an infinite money glitch in the North Sea. When looking at the country, it's critical to realize their oil wealth enables them to have the government programs and society they currently enjoy, rather than mistakenly thinking those programs are the source of their wealth.
And have UAE, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia achieved what Norway has? (Where did anyone say that social programs are the source of Norway's wealth?!)
No one is acknowledging the US data I posted. Even if the US is not as rich per capita as Norway is, can we learn something from Norway (about investment in education and healthcare) with the resources we do have?
BTW, US per-capita healthcare cost is much, much higher than Norway's, and US life expectancy is much lower.
> BTW, US per-capita healthcare cost is much, much higher than Norway's, and US life expectancy is much lower.
But that's the issue -- it's not a matter of allocating the money. The US is already spending it.
The question is, how do you make it more cost efficient? "Just do what Norway does" doesn't solve anything for two reasons.
The first is that it doesn't tell you if that's the right answer, only that what Norway is doing is better than the status quo in the US. But the status quo in the US is uniquely dysfunctional, so that's not a high bar. You still don't know if it's better to do what Norway does or what Singapore does (same life expectancy as Norway, much different system) or some third thing which could hypothetically be better than either of them.
The second is that it doesn't solve the political issue in the US, which is that all of the people making money from the status quo don't want it to change. It doesn't matter if the proposal is a public healthcare system or a market system with actual price transparency or something else entirely, until you can overcome the political inertia of the incumbent system.
And these feed into each other. Because it's obvious that the existing US system is inefficient, but it's not obvious which of the potentially more efficient systems to replace it with, so the people with different ideas fight against each other instead of fighting with each other against the status quo.
I think the rest of the developed world would cheer on if the US just copied any of the dozens of other models for universal healthcare that produce better outcomes cheaper than the current US system.
What we find shocking is that the US appears uniquely unable to fix these things among developed countries despite the vast wealth and resources. There's a level of political dysfunction that is really hard to watch, but also incredibly hard to ignore.
EDIT: To give one example that I personally find shocking: That Medicare has restrictions on the extent of its ability to negotiate drug prices. I get your point that this is in part due to entrenched interests as seen with the attacks on the recent attempt to fix this issue by using powers under the Inflation Reduction Act, but that even chipping away on things like that is proving as hard as it is, is bizarre seen from the outside and the new ability to negotiate prices is still ridiculously limited.
Check out the tsunami of white American kids refusing to get even the most basic vaccines (because Jesus) ... polio and other long-forgotten diseases are about to make a big comeback.
NY Times had a big story about this.
"Insane" doesn't do it justice. We need new words.
> "Insane" doesn't do it justice. We need new words.
Norwegian has another US-inspired term for crazy: "Helt Texas" ("completely Texas") [1]
(Though to be fair, that is mostly used for a hyperbolic allusion to the Hollywood version of the wild west, and translating it as something being "wild west" would perhaps better carry the meaning, but I still find it funny)
> I think the rest of the developed world would cheer on if the US just copied any of the dozens of other models for universal healthcare that produce better outcomes cheaper than the current US system.
"Just pick one" isn't actually a method of choosing when different people disagree on what should be done. People don't even agree that "universal healthcare" is the right target, rather than e.g. a market-based system with actual price transparency that would introduce competition for non-emergency care.
This is also ignoring many of the factors that make the US system so expensive. For example, the AMA has lobbied for regulations that require doctors to do a lot of things that could reasonably be done by nurses. This has been exacerbating an existing doctor shortage, so then doctors get paid more (raising healthcare costs) while impairing outcomes (there aren't enough doctors to provide a high standard of care). This is a regulatory problem created by a powerful lobby.
It's things like that which in the aggregate cause the US system to be what it is, but you can't fix them by copying some different part of the system from another country. You have to fix that problem in particular regardless of what else you do, but fixing it is the thing strongly opposed by the lobbyists.
> To give one example that I personally find shocking: That Medicare has restrictions on the extent of its ability to negotiate drug prices. I get your point that this is in part due to entrenched interests as seen with the attacks on the recent attempt to fix this issue by using powers under the Inflation Reduction Act, but that even chipping away on things like that is proving as hard as it is, is bizarre seen from the outside and the new ability to negotiate prices is still ridiculously limited.
You have to understand the context for things like this. Nobody is talking about negotiating the price of aspirin, which is a cheap commodity regardless of who you get it from.
The issue is drugs under patent.
The way the patent system is supposed to work is that if you invent something you can patent it and then charge the monopoly price for a limited time in order to recover your R&D. The monopoly price is based on the value of the invention. You can patent some dreck and try to charge a million dollars for it and nobody will buy it from you. But if you cure some fatal disease, the value of the cure is very high, which allows you to recover the cost of developing the cure, which could also be very high.
This is obviously not going to be efficient when the drug is being paid for by insurance or Medicare. If the drug company patents something which is only marginally better than the generic, anyone paying out of pocket would just choose the generic and save a lot of money. But if the doctor prescribes the patented one, the insurance is now expected to cover it and by law only the patent holder can make it, so they can charge high prices even though the person choosing which drug to take isn't the person paying the bill anymore.
This is dumb but it's not completely crazy. Sometimes drug companies get away with charging a lot because they patented "existing drug, but with Tylenol" and then convinced doctors to prescribe it. But it also means they can recover their costs for actual life-saving drug research. It's not serving its purpose efficiently but it's still doing something of importance.
So now you want Medicare to "negotiate" these prices. Basically what you're saying is that you want to reduce the intentionally-created subsidy for drug research, or shift more of its cost from Medicare to private insurance and the uninsured. Which is bad policy, but is favored by people who want Medicare's numbers to look better.
What you really want to do here is one of two things. Option one, give up on the model of patenting drugs and then having insurance cover the cost and instead just publicly subsidize drug research and immediately put the drugs into the public domain. Option two, make the patent system work as intended by exposing some of the cost to the patient, e.g. by having a 10% copay for prescription drugs. Patients would then avoid drugs which are extremely overpriced relative to their benefit and you wouldn't have Medicare paying high prices for "existing drug, but with Tylenol" anymore.
> "Just pick one" isn't actually a method of choosing when different people disagree on what should be done. People don't even agree that "universal healthcare" is the right target, rather than e.g. a market-based system with actual price transparency that would introduce competition for non-emergency care.
>
> This is also ignoring many of the factors that make the US system so expensive. For example, the AMA has lobbied for regulations that require doctors to do a lot of things that could reasonably be done by nurses. This has been exacerbating an existing doctor shortage, so then doctors get paid more (raising healthcare costs) while impairing outcomes (there aren't enough doctors to provide a high standard of care). This is a regulatory problem created by a powerful lobby.
>
> It's things like that which in the aggregate cause the US system to be what it is, but you can't fix them by copying some different part of the system from another country. You have to fix that problem in particular regardless of what else you do, but fixing it is the thing strongly opposed by the lobbyists.
The point is that pretty much every other developed country and a lot of developing countries have managed to figure this out, the first over 130 years ago, and they've all had to figure out how to get agreement, overcome the objections to having it at all, overcome lobbyists, overcome medical associations wanting to keep tight control, and so on. Not one thing of this is new.
This US exceptionalism is a bigger part of the problem than each and every one of these objections. You're just not that special other than in believing you're that special and stubbornly refusing to learn from what has worked.
> You have to understand the context for things like this. Nobody is talking about negotiating the price of aspirin, which is a cheap commodity regardless of who you get it from.
>
> The issue is drugs under patent.
This is not news. Every other country also has to deal with it. However, unlike the US, they have chosen to deal with it by negotiating best possible prices, usually by putting together portfolios of different drugs to negotiate over, and then deal with any perceived need to subsidise R&D into drugs that pharma companies aren't doing enough to address. The US is near unique in effectively letting pharma companies write public healthcare policy by making it a game of how to extract the most money from taxpayers.
It is, however, amazing how quickly the American belief in the free market collapses when someone suggests that Medicare should just act as one more actor in a market where the are already hundreds of other buyers negotiating the best possible prices.
> So now you want Medicare to "negotiate" these prices. Basically what you're saying is that you want to reduce the intentionally-created subsidy for drug research, or shift more of its cost from Medicare to private insurance and the uninsured. Which is bad policy, but is favored by people who want Medicare's numbers to look better.
The outcome is that you're misrepresenting the cost of providing care per patient by making the per-patient cost appear ridiculous when a huge bulk of it is an R&D subsidy that the entire world benefits from, that you're choosing to carry even for the half of the top 10 pharma companies that aren't even American, and that does not need to increase if the number of patients increase. If you want to pay that subsidy that's awesome, but when you're lumping it into Medicare it becomes an argument for not extending cover to more people because it artificially inflates the per-patient marginal cost of providing care.
> What you really want to do here is one of two things. Option one, give up on the model of patenting drugs and then having insurance cover the cost and instead just publicly subsidize drug research and immediately put the drugs into the public domain. Option two, make the patent system work as intended by exposing some of the cost to the patient, e.g. by having a 10% copay for prescription drugs. Patients would then avoid drugs which are extremely overpriced relative to their benefit and you wouldn't have Medicare paying high prices for "existing drug, but with Tylenol" anymore.
Or you can do what pretty much the rest of the developed world does: Publicly subsidise R&D (which the US also does - NIH grants for FY2023 are around $50bn) and negotiate best possible prices, so that you avoid creating perverse incentives to chase drugs to optimise the expected ratio of R&D expenses relative to ability to maximise costs to patients.
This willingness to actively defend a system that demonstrably is providing you substandard outcomes at the highest cost in the world is also fairly unique to American conditions.
> The point is that pretty much every other developed country and a lot of developing countries have managed to figure this out, the first over 130 years ago, and they've all had to figure out how to get agreement, overcome the objections to having it at all, overcome lobbyists, overcome medical associations wanting to keep tight control, and so on. Not one thing of this is new.
The difference is the structure of the US government. The original constitutional framework envisioned a weak federal government with limited powers, with this sort of thing instead being handled by the states.
The populist movement in the 20th century didn't like this, so they removed some of the most important safeguards ensuring that that remained the case -- but those safeguards were the only thing preventing the federal government from being captured by industry.
So now that's what's happened. It's a structural problem because we broke the constitutional safeguards originally present to prevent it. The problem is the change is sticky because to undo it you need the votes of the people whose undeserved power you're trying to take away. This has been a problem for much more than just healthcare, but nobody has managed to solve it yet.
> However, unlike the US, they have chosen to deal with it by negotiating best possible prices, usually by putting together portfolios of different drugs to negotiate over, and then deal with any perceived need to subsidise R&D into drugs that pharma companies aren't doing enough to address.
You have a patent monopolist selling to a bureaucracy which is the sole provider of coverage for a large number of patients. That isn't a negotiation. If the buyer isn't allowed to refuse to buy the drug then they have no leverage. If they are then the government is just setting the price and saying take it or leave it.
> It is, however, amazing how quickly the American belief in the free market collapses when someone suggests that Medicare should just act as one more actor in a market where the are already hundreds of other buyers negotiating the best possible prices.
A patented product isn't a free market, it's a government-granted monopoly. The entire point of the patent is to allow the seller to charge a monopoly rent for the duration of the patent term.
If you don't want to pay the monopoly rent then there shouldn't be drug patents to begin with -- but that doesn't get you out of funding the R&D in some other way instead. TANSTAAFL.
> The outcome is that you're misrepresenting the cost of providing care per patient by making the per-patient cost appear ridiculous when a huge bulk of it is an R&D subsidy that the entire world benefits from, that you're choosing to carry even for the half of the top 10 pharma companies that aren't even American
Yes, this is exactly the problem -- other countries "negotiate" (i.e. the government dictates prices) and thereby pay less than their share of the drug development costs. The US could do the same thing but then nobody would be paying for it and the world would have less drug R&D.
It doesn't matter where the drug companies are headquartered. They all use the money to develop drugs that patients everywhere then benefit from.
The ideal solution would be for other countries to pay their fair share of the R&D instead of the US having to pay disproportionately, but in the absence of any way to force them to do that, what should we do? The thing that causes more people to die because there is less funding for drug development?
> and that does not need to increase if the number of patients increase.
The more patients receive the drug the more valuable its development is and the more incentive you want to provide for that.
> If you want to pay that subsidy that's awesome, but when you're lumping it into Medicare it becomes an argument for not extending cover to more people because it artificially inflates the per-patient marginal cost of providing care.
The cost isn't artificial, it's amortizing the cost of the system being used to fund drug development over the patients who use those drugs.
Maybe that system could be more efficient, but just reducing its funding without changing its overall efficiency is only going to result in less drug development.
> Or you can do what pretty much the rest of the developed world does: Publicly subsidise R&D
That would be the first option that I listed?
But there are disadvantages to that. The patent system is imperfect but it has a different set of incentives than a grant system and consequently results in different kinds of research. It's plausible that we're better off with both than one to the exclusion of the other. In which case we shouldn't be so offended at not slashing the funding source for the one of them.
> This willingness to actively defend a system that demonstrably is providing you substandard outcomes at the highest cost in the world is also fairly unique to American conditions.
America subsidizes the rest of the world and then the rest of the world criticizes us for it. Are we really being lectured for not being selfish enough?
> enables them to have the government programs and society they currently enjoy, rather than mistakenly thinking those programs are the source of their wealth.
The person you replied to didn't seem to imply they were, but conversely asked why the US is performing as it is given its wealth compared to Norway.
Average salaries in the US are far higher than in Norway, and GDP per capita, so you would think the US could afford to do better on more metrics
I'll also note that many of the largest welfare reforms in Norway predate the oil wealth, with the largest chunk of the reforms towards the current welfare model being passed in 1966, a year before the first successful oil well in Norwegian sector.
Yet while some things are probably better in the US (average house sizes are larger, I think), as someone who grew up in Norway and has visited the US many times and enjoys being in the US as a visitor, and currently lives in the UK, the UK is as far towards "American conditions" I can stomach. Dysfunctional but at least still has somewhat functioning public services. Why can't the US even match UK public services? The US is certainly significantly richer than the UK.
"Amerikanske tilstander" - "American conditions" - is a term with decades of use in Norwegian politics to scare voters.
Even a lot of conservative voters have historically been worried about "American conditions" because it has a history of being seen as lacking - ironically given far higher levels of faith in the US - in Christian compassion, which has made it unpopular even far into the Norwegian right-wing (e.g. quite a few Norwegian welfare reforms were passed in the 1960s under a center-right government that included the four center-right and right-wing parties of the time)
> "American conditions" - is a term with decades of use in Norwegian politics to scare voters.
Neat, I always enjoy learning about the various bits of propaganda and stereotypes that exist in different cultures and this was a new term for me.
I've many times had fairly entertaining conversations with Scandinavians about what life in the US is actually like compared to their expectations. They always seem a bit in disbelief at how safe, comfortable, easy and secure life is in reality. I've learned to reassure them that things would be different if I were an entry level worker at Walmart or McDonald's, and that that life might look more similar to their expectations.
Having spent enough time in the US that the immigration officials used to flick through my passport in disbelief at the number of US stamps I had in there, I think the disbelief is entirely justified because our concern is not what life is like as someone in a good job, but what society is like somewhere with the huge disparities and huge gaps in social safety nets that are there in the US, and I've seen enough of the outcome of that first hand to know I have no desire to live in American conditions even if my job experience means I'd personally have a safe, comfortable, easy and secure life.
Work does not guarantee a decent living. There are many who work full-time low paying jobs. Many even need a second job to just to "earn a living"
As a European, it is really strange to see this attitude of "survival of the fittest" here on HN
The average HN reader probably works in an office with a decent salary. Why should we deserve better health care than people doing hard physical labor and have to retire early because their bodies are broken. The society is depending on them to function, so we could at least offer them adequate health care. Someone working in a factory or delivering your Amazon packages also work hard. Much harder than what I do.
The lack of humanity in one of the most religious countries in the western world surprises me.
The same can be said about humane treatment of prisoners. Abuse and rape in prisons have become standard jokes in American comedy. I guess they deserve it when they dare to steal your car...
You don't deserve goods or services. You pay for them, or others pay for them if you live in a welfare state and you don't work. Either way, the doctor needs the money to buy food.
> They always seem a bit in disbelief at how safe, comfortable, easy and secure life is in reality
The US is by no means unique in this regard. Outside of active conflict zones and failed/failing states, most countries in the world can provide comfort and at least the illusion of safety to those with resources and means.
It's certainly remarkable that countries exist with cheap affordable health care for all, unemployment safety nets, disability support, and no fear of school shootings at all.
To late to edit, so let me add to this here: Out of curiosity, I decided to do a search in the Norwegian National Library (nb.no, a lot of material requires VPN if you're from a non-Norwegian IP, and of course most material is in Norwegian) for "Amerikanske tilstander" to see if I remember it correctly and if I could find where it started, and of 8640 hits in Norwegian newspapers, some observations and examples:
* The very first one coming up in a simple search was a letter in Dagbladet, then as now a major daily newspaper, August 27 1927, and funnily enough given the subject of this article, the first use of "amerikanske tilstander" there was in a letter to the editor where a Norwegian author warned that as "the power of capital was evolving" we were on our way to get American conditions. He goes on to complain about the spread of "inferior" lowbrow magazines and rant about popular literature.
* In the 1930's there were just a few dozen uses of the term - one paper has the headline "One Murder Per Day" with the subtitle "American conditions in Finland", in 1932 another writes about American conditions in Paris where apparently masked bandits were roaming the streets.
* An interesting one given the US mythology around Ford's impact on the 8 hour working day is an article in "Smaalenens Social Democrat", a left-leaning paper with "American Conditions." in big letters with the subtitle "The 'Fordian system' is hell for the workers" that goes on to describe conditions in Ford factories in excruciating detail, and what was "hell" to a left-leaning 1930's Nordic paper would not seem that out of place if you claimed it was Amazon or Tesla today... Workers rights and welfare became an increasing reason for invoking American conditions in later decades.
* Only one 1930's mention that I could find described an American condition that would be seen positively by many today (thought the writer meant it negatively): Better economic outcomes for women in divorce cases.
The big increase came in subsequent decades:
From 8 in the 1940s, to 60 in the '50s, 378 in the '60s, 766 in the 70's, 1722 in the '80s, 1923 in the '90s, 2038 in the '00s, before a drop to 1230 in the 10's.
It can't seriously be argued that the US are not a rich country? In GDP, the US are in fact in the same class as Norway. And for Norway part of that goes to the fund, while the US government runs a deficit.
As for Norway specifically, their sovereign wealth fund is there specifically so that the country does NOT use this wealth quickly (or much at all for now).
At any rate, no, the US could absolutely do much better.
> Norway was a lower income country until they discovered an infinite money glitch
What metric are you using to arrive at this conclusion? Norway had roughly the same PPP GDP per capita as its neighbors (Sweden, Denmark) for 150 years prior to the discovery of oil.
You really should look into Singapore freedoms before making statements like that. There are several political philosophies in the world that are more restrictive than the social-democracies of the liberal democracies in the Nordic countries.
Singapore is effectively a one-party state. It is very orderly, tidy and disciplined. https://www.state.gov/reports/2022-country-reports-on-human-... In section 1.F) you'll see that citizens have weak/no privacy protections from the government. 2.A) Free speech is not really a big thing there. 2.B) Weak rights to peaceful assembly.
This is obviously a delusional take that requires ignoring reality. They quite literally don't have freedom of speech or freedom of assembly at the constitutional level, are run by what is effectively a dictatorship of varying degrees of benevolence and consistently rank in the lower end of indices of political freedom and human rights.
The Norway model is not very replicable - we all can’t pump a huge amount of future CO2 out of the ground for almost nothing and sell it for a lot while destroying the climate such that we can invest in our tiny population
It may not be very replicable on a global basis, but given the person you replied to mentioned the US: The US has significantly higher average salaries than Norway, and so it is very much valid to raise the issue of what the US is doing with the wealth it creates.
The 10x there compares local currency to USD. Given the NOK to USD exchange rate, a 10x PPP difference between NOK and USD means Norway and the US are near parity in terms of purchasing power in USD.
Actually, the salaries are now much closer than I thought, so depending on exactly which measures you use I might well have been wrong that US salaries are (still) much higher than Norwegian ones. The gap used to be fairly huge.
This feels like after the fact reasoning. In an alternate timeline where Norway has no oil and is poor, I can imagine someone saying, "How could you expect them to succeed? Poor farming conditions, terrible winters, hardly any natural resources beyond fish."
After all, Russia also has some awful climates, and it doesn't seem to have resulted in strong social cooperation.
It resulted in such strong social cooperation that the majority of the population (the workers) succeeded in a revolution in 1917 and then for decades drastically improved their material conditions.
The October Revolution didn’t involve the majority of the population (workers). The Bolsheviks had strong support from railroad workers and the army specifically, and with key infrastructure captured they were able to eventually win the day, albeit after a famous civil war with working-class people fighting on both sides. Many successful revolutions throughout history were won by minority groups.
The October Revolution also wasn’t Russia’s first revolution that year. The tsar had already been ousted in the February Revolution, and considering that Russia had already begun to industrialize significantly in the final years of tsarist rule, it is certainly likely that Russia would have enjoyed rising prosperity even if Lenin had not returned from exile and made his coup.
You do realize that "the people " marching towards Moscow demanding change never happen? Instead it was apathy from the people that caused the revolution to be a success.
Where you literally had guards not caring if the revolutionaries took over the position or building?
And the material conditions did not drastically improve, the USSR struggled with living conditions until it's demise.
If anything the blatant corruption made social cooperation impossible.
Debatable whether that was the workers and the extent to which material conditions improved. Certainly, the political conditions were atrocious, and there was the whole Holodomor thing that pro-Soviet narratives like to leave out. Was killing millions an improvement?
And then Russia today has very low social trust, which is less surprising when you look at them being a totalitarian dictatorship for so long.
If we compare with the northern latitudes, which my comment was a response to: For Norway / Sweden / Finland, no not really. Serfdom did not exist in a similar form after medieval times, and neither did autocracy from late 18th / early 19th century onwards. Finland, even though part of Russia for much of this time, did not have serfdom.
Because in russia one bad word in good environment with some kgb buddy might get you a trip to gulag. So everybody was very careful choosing conversation partners and topics. That’s not the way to build strong social cooperation.
It sounds like a form of strong social cooperation to me, just one that no one likes. And since strong social cooperation sounds so good to some people, they start to look to separate it from the strong social cooperation they like, either knowingly or unknowingly, and we end up with a similar situation to the stereotypical "ah, but that wasn't real socialism" socialist, where it just can't be admitted to be anything similar.
I'm a libertarian so I'm already suspicious of such things, makes it easy to spot.
If that was the case you'd see the same outcomes from Sweden, but you don't. The obvious differentiating factor seem to be oil, Norway was a poor-isj country until a few decades ago.
I'd argue that you see the same thing in Sweden as in Norway, but without the oil in Sweden's case.
The music industry in Sweden is huge. Check out who wrote and produced many of the US top hits over the last 30 years. Not to speak of the local Swedish bands who make it big internationally.
The software industry is also huge in Sweden (Spotify, Skype, Minecraft, Battlefield, Klarna, Candy Crush, etc). The explanation for this is largely that the kids who grew up in the late 70s and in the 80s got very good support from their parents in getting their own home computer where they could learn to program. This is very similar to young chess players in Norway.
Sweden also punches well above its weight in some sports. Winter sports are kinda a given for a Nordic country, but tennis doesn't fit into that mold. Yet Sweden dominated tennis for a while. This was due to parents and society supporting young kids learning to play tennis in the 60s and 70s.
> Norway was a poor-isj country until a few decades ago.
Norway was already the richest country in Europe back in 1938.
After WW2 Switzerland recovered it’s number 1 spot but in the 60s Norway still had a considerably higher GDP per capita than the Netherlands, and slightly higher than the UK and France.
Sweden is far more similar to Norway than it is to the rest of the world and they don't have much oil. Oil turbocharged Norway maybe 25%. Sweden still ranks top of most metrics people prefer.
> If that was the case you'd see the same outcomes from Sweden, but you don't.
Care to expand on that? I quite literally have no idea what you're talking about. From my POV both Sweden and Denmark provide broadly similar quality of life and wealth of opportunities to their citizens.
Nordic countries provide opportunities only if you dislike work. The more you work, the more money you earn, the more of it the state takes from you to give to those who don't care to work.
This in no way addresses the GP's point regarding differences between the Nordics. Seems like you're just desperately looking for any possible excuse to interject your political views no matter how left field the context.
What does it even mean to be a literary powerhouse in 2023? Of the Norwegian authors they listed, the only name I recognized was Knausgård. His most famous books came out like 10 years ago, and while they were a sensation for a while, I believe they still sold best in Norway. And I think that even the most successful literary novelists of today are selling fewer copies than the moderately successful literary novelists of 30 years ago. Their novels are surely enjoyed by far fewer people than an only-relatively successful niche Youtube or TikTok content creator. Literary novels don't make money, and don't shape the culture, so what does it even mean to be a 'powerhouse'?
I do think this is a crudely banausic perspective.
> Their novels are surely enjoyed by far fewer people than an only-relatively successful niche Youtube or TikTok content creator. Literary novels don't make money, and don't shape the culture, so what does it even mean to be a 'powerhouse'?
Mere numerical impressions is a poor standard of influence or staying power. Very many great works of culture, philosophy and history are little read by the standards of social media. I have no idea why you think that means they 'don't shape the culture'. I doubt that, each year, Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations is read even one hundredth the number of times that Mr Beast's videos are watched. I very much doubt that the future historian will take the Philosophical Investigations - by consensus the most influential work of philosophy in the twentieth century, whose effects on our intellectual culture are deep and pervasive - to be an incidental footnote when compared to Mr Beast.
But cultural value isn't just a function of influence, clearly. Knausgaard's books are to many people, myself included, simply great works of art, and should be celebrated for that fact. They show a level of cultural excellence, ingenuity and craft that the average trending YouTube video doesn't, whatever merit it might have besides.
Definitely not nothing, but do you read authors because they win the Nobel prize? Probably some people do, but how many? A million people in the world would be my (extremely) generous estimate. And that's literally the highest lifetime honor a literary novelist can receive. Not to disparage these authors, but to put the state of the literary novel in context: that's not a hell of a lot of cultural cache. Again, the question is: what does it mean to be a literary powerhouse in 2023? The stakes seem rather small.
I never paid attention to the degree translation can shape our literary landscapes... Fascinating!
> At the conference, NORLA also underlined that translators are its most important talent scouts, not agents, making passion rather than profit the driving force of the literary export machinery. A month after the conference, NORLA gathered 150 translators from across the world at a retreat in the countryside. The application process for participating in the gathering had been open to anyone with a love for translation, and I assume NORLA encouraged all the attendees to like what they liked in the pool of Norwegian books and then to take it from there.
> Norwegian novels are toned down, rarely noticeably conceptual, rarely in direct conversation with theory or tradition. Here, you find page after page of plot driven middle-class angst, minimalism and melancholy, closeness to nature, mellowness, humility, and what presents itself as stripped-down honesty. Here and there a funny novel does appear, but when it does, it’s usually funny in a purely observational and demonstratively folksy way.
A Man Called Ove was excellent while the American remake A Man Called Otto with Tom Hanks was garbage.
Which is why they invented skiing! Norwegians do quite a lot of physical exercise but it has to vary over the year. Cross country skiing is a good way to get into nature and is great full body workout. But yes, the bikini beach party season seems to be so short that I've missed it every year, unless you're talking about the quick run from the sauna to the icy sea.
Indeed, from a couple of friends who moved to Finnish Lapland, I know the frozen north is a great place for exercise in the winter because of all the skiing and fatbike opportunities, with a network of free shelters stocked with firewood so that one can do overnight trips. But now that I recall that most of Norway’s population is on the coast where temperatures stay more moderate, I wonder how many of them have access to good skiing conditions right outside their door.
This problem has been solved by everyone being rich enough to have a cabin in the mountains! Joking aside, whilst many people have access to a cabin through friends or family, most people don't have to travel far to go skiing as the temperature drops quickly as you go inland and uphill. There's also a lot of artificial snow production when it is cold enough for both downhill and cross country skiing.
I've lived in four countries in all and am currently in Sweden. It's cold here too, but so many people exercise regularly in all seasons both inside and out. I believe this is also helped by the fact that it's very common for companies to provide a (tax-advantaged) health allowance that subsidizes things like gym memberships, fitness classes, race or other event entries, etc.
Maybe Singapore? There are lots of English-speaking employers, the weather is great, and the better apartments come with rooftop tennis, gym, and pool. MRT is amazing and allows you to quickly go to free parks like the botanical garden if you feel like walking around outside. That will surely help with the winter blues. Lots of university students, too. But alcohol and/or parties are extremely expensive and dorms are typically gender-separated with security guards.
Norway, with 0.07% of the world's population, has the world's best chess player ever. Two of the top ten bridge players. One of the very best soccer players under 25. And so on.
Basically, it's a very oil-rich country that uses its wealth to invest in its people. And we see the results in every field of endeavor.
Many other "rich" countries, whatever the source of their wealth, do not have the same people-investment attitude.
Funny: I learned recently that Norway's Ekofisk oil field almost ended up with Denmark. It came down to a negotiation that went Norway's way - against a drunk Danish minister.