> But recently, cracks have been starting to show. Norwegians are taking much more sick leave than a decade ago, driving up costs for health services. Student test scores have worsened more than in other Scandinavian countries, and critics of the government say there are too many boondoggle tunnels and bridges to nowhere.
These are the issues they're worried about? None of the numbers I saw while scanning look particularly worrying, and I doubt there's ever been a country on the face of this planet for which you wouldn't have been able to produce a similar list of issues of this magnitude - including past Norway.
They're worth paying attention to, but not sounding the alarm bells over.
> They're worth paying attention to, but not sounding the alarm bells over.
That's because there is a default bad assumption that because they are so wealthy that no problems should exist, similar to how very rich people are seen. Looking at other wealthy petro-states (and people) around the world, that's clearly not true.
But relatively speaking I don't think there's a country that wouldn't trade most of their problems for Norway's, with the possible exception of their aging population.
What's the problem? Only poor people care about test scores as they imagine high test scores is how one can pull themselves out of being poor. When you are rich you can also do pointless things just for the fun of it like build bridges to nowhere. None of these are problems unless you try and look at it through a poor man's lens.
Poorer health might be concerning, but is likely the result of the population growing older. More children would help make the numbers look better, I suppose, but, statistically, only poor people like having children.
> What's the problem? Only poor people care about test scores as they imagine high test scores is how one can pull themselves out of being poor. When you are rich you can also do pointless things just for the fun of it like build bridges to nowhere. None of these are problems unless you try and look at it through a poor man's lens.
That may be a reasonable take at the level of an individual. But it's nonsense at the level of a country.
Wealth is the ability to get other people to do things. But if everyone is becoming less capable, then that's not a problem that wealth can fix.
Outsourcing may be a temporary solution to his problem, but I don't see it working well long term.
> But if everyone is becoming less capable, then that's not a problem that wealth can fix.
What suggests that people are becoming less capable? More importantly, what suggests that people are becoming less capable in an irreversible way? If people are less capable, but it is reversible, then wealth can fix it. As you said, you can use wealth to get other people to become more capable.
> What suggests that people are becoming less capable?
From the root level comment in this thread:
> Student test scores have worsened more than in other Scandinavian countries, and critics of the government say there are too many boondoggle tunnels and bridges to nowhere.
-
> More importantly, what suggests that people are becoming less capable in an irreversible way? If people are less capable, but it is reversible, then wealth can fix it.
I don't think anyone is suggesting that this trend is irreversible.
But big trends like this can be difficult to turn around - if it were easy, the trend wouldn't have happened in the first place (or, at least, it wouldn't have been detectable).
> If people are less capable, but it is reversible, then wealth can fix it. As you said, you can use wealth to get other people to become more capable.
You can't just say "wealth will do x". That's really a semantic shortcut for saying "people will do x". But presumably people are already trying to improve the countries test scores. And people are already trying (at least to a certain extent) to spend government funds wisely. I'm not really sure how wealth will change what's currently occurring.
Oh, so you mean not that they are becoming less capable in general, but that they are becoming less capable at testing? I suppose that is a reasonable take in light of earlier comments – but, again, wealthy people don't see value in test results, so what difference does it make?
This is like noticing that people have become less likely to share "hand-me-downs". You'd no doubt see that as a travesty if you are struggling to buy clothes, but if you look at it from a place of wealth where you are buying clothes as if they are nothing, what does that mean to you? Not much.
> if it were easy, the trend wouldn't have happened in the first place
There is a logical leap in there that you haven't explained. In the same vein, it is easy to grow food in your garden, but it is abundantly clear that people no longer see the need, even where they once did. Just because something is easy does not mean that there is reason to do it. You are going to have to elaborate.
Only to the extent of the environmental impact being greater than the alternative activity. Like another commenter said, wealth is the ability to get people to do things. You're not wealthy if you crawl into a cave and just sit there doing nothing (ignoring that even then you are impacting the environment with your methane emissions).
> Only poor people care about test scores as they imagine high test scores is how one can pull themselves out of being poor.
Bashing 'poor people' aside, it's safe to say that on a national level, declining test scores are a warning sign that merits investigation.
> When you are rich you can also do pointless things just for the fun of it like build bridges to nowhere
You can, but there's no small amount of broken window fallacy there.
> None of these are problems unless you try and look at it through a poor man's lens.
I might be too poor to see the joy of building of bridges to nowhere, but there are still 'problems' with declining test scores, government misuse of funds, and pointless infrastructure projects.
> statistically, only poor people like having children
Yeesh. There are at least three reasons why this is completely wrong, but what's more important is that you seem to have a weird bone to pick with "poor people". You really might want to sort that out for yourself.
You've continued to make a habit of attacking other users in comments here, as well as posting an enormous quantity of flamewar comments. Since we've asked you many times not to do this and even unbanned you on condition that you'd stop do, I think enough is enough and have re-banned your account. This is not what HN is for, and badly destroys what it is for.
'Bashing' is a human trait. Software on the internet carries no such emotion.
> declining test scores are a warning sign that merits investigation.
Just as increasing test scores is a warning sign that merits investigation. But that doesn't suggest a problem, only change. What good is wealth if it is not used to user in change?
> there's no small amount of broken window fallacy there.
Not really. The broken window fallacy is based on the idea of breaking windows for the good of the economy. There is nothing to suggest that bridges are being built to nowhere for the good of the economy. Maybe when you are poor the economy is front and centre in your thoughts, but not everything has to be about the economy.
> government misuse of funds, and pointless infrastructure projects.
This can be a problem if you aren't wealthy enough to support it, but, again, this cannot be observed through a poor lens. If the people of Norway (which is a democracy — the people direct the government) want to spend their extensive wealth in a way a poor person would consider foolish, they can. That is benefit of being wealthy.
> There are at least three reasons why this is completely wrong
Looks more like zero reasons. Assuming three wasn't a number randomly pulled out of hat, perhaps something got truncated during preparation of this message?
> but what's more important is that you seem to have a weird bone to pick with "poor people".
Again, software doesn't have this emotion you are trying to personify.
> Your best defense against accusations of classism is that you're software??
"Defending accusations" is a human trait. You again have mistaken the context in which you write.
> Also, I'm fairly sure bots are banned here.
Hacker News is not what is normally considered a bot, but it is decidedly software. What feature of text on orange and beige left you to recognize it as humanity instead of the software that it is?
The USA surpassed Norway's median income some time in the 2020's. And it's VASTLY cheaper to live in the United States.
The Nordic petro states were never really that impressive to me personally. I'm sure someone will come out of the woodwork to talk up their healthcare and social services, but again, if you were being fair we would compare them to a State like Massachusetts instead of Mississippi or Alabama and you would find our healthcare systems here are equally if not more accessible.
Speaking for myself, I also really enjoy the diversity we have in the US, and our ability to absorb immigration and integrate into a whole. Meanwhile the Scandi/Nordic states seem to struggle like the rest of Western Europe when it comes to accepting new people without ghettoizing them for an indefinite number of generations.
Wow indeed. Der Spiegel reported on the decapitation of Lady Liberty back in April of 2017. While you could have pretended she still lived during the Biden administration, it is clear that she is quite dead in 2025.
The US has more history to it than just the last 6 months, and some of us recall that while Trump puts on a big show with lots of heat and noise, there's rarely much light. If you look at actual deportations, he lags behind previous administrations.
So no, putting the frenzy over this administration aside, and recognizing that the US has more history and more of a future than the rule of one man, what I said holds.
having lived in the US and in europe i can confirm that. the issues with integration in the US are very different from those in europe.
the US suffers from systemic historic racism that they are struggling to get rid of, but they have always been a mix of cultures where some aspects of foreign cultures are assimilated and accepted and other aspects disappear as the immigrants adapt.
europe suffers from xenophobia and general difficulty to integrate foreign cultures. being traditionally a single culture there is very little assimilation of foreign cultures (mostly some food items) and immigrants are expected to adapt fully to the local culture, without any allowance to keep aspects of their own culture with few exceptions.
in my opinion this leads to immigrants in europe holding on to their own culture more than they would in the US making integration even more difficult.
> in my opinion this leads to immigrants in europe holding on to their own culture more
Wait, what specifically does? Why do you think gypsies have not integrated yet in any countries they are in? Be it Canada, Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary, Germany, etc.
the expectation to assimilate our culture and fully give up theirs.
Why do you think gypsies have not integrated
i'd believe this is mainly because they are nomadic, which is something that we seem to have a hard time accepting, or even tolerating. for me this is one aspect of their culture that we should celebrate and support. but we don't.
Gypsies WERE nomadic, today they are not really nomadic though, so I do not think that is one of the reasons. I am asking about gypsies who have been in the country for generations yet still have not integrated. I have my theories, as I have had a lot of gypsy friends and I was part of many gypsy communities for a while across the country, and many of them have relatives who went to Canada and Germany. In fact, there are gypsies who only do prostitution in Germany, but that is besides the point I think.
> If you look at actual deportations, he lags behind previous administrations.
Isn't that what is expected? I'm not there, but the way the story is making it to us outside of the US is that Trump has directed immigration authorities to turn their attention away from real problem cases to go on a witch hunt instead. If true, of course deportations are going to go down. But right now nobody wants to expose themselves to getting wrapped up in the hunt.
There's plenty of least-developed countries where most of the population isn't formally employed, doesn't engage with standardized tests, and has never built necessary bridges/tunnels.
If every person in Norway is worth $100M - who's going to wait the tables and bring them coffee and service their boats and clean their houses while they sail around and be leisurely all day?
Who's going to tend to the ski lifts and the golf courses? Who's going to take care of their polo horses? Who's going to clean the streets and work at the police stations? Who's going to keep the grid running? Who's going to work the ports to import everything? Who's going to drive the delivery trucks and put everything in it's place upon arrival?
It's blatantly obvious that you can't have a society where everyone is "rich", unless you have a second class of citizens to wait on them.
Robots aren't advanced enough yet.
While in some ways Norway is laughably far from this scenario, in other ways, their sovereign wealth fund is less about a decade away from everyone being a millionaire - which, theoretically, should allow everyone to not work and have a decent life - but obviously will not (unless they import second class citizens, that aren't ever allowed access to the wealth fund, and have to do all the work).
You have a very American idea of “rich”. For you, it’s being worth 100M. But for me it’s being able to lead a life without financial worries doing a job relatively few hours a week, regardless of whether I code or wait tables.
By this second definition, a country can definitely be rich across the board without having a “poor” second class. Just make sure people earn a decent living wage, and then some. There will be low crime (no need for gated communities!), high trust (no need for a lawyer on retainer!), and good education and health care (no need for private schools or hospitals!)
You have a very zero-sum view of wealth, the idea that to be wealthy means it’s gotta be to the detriment of others. I’m not saying Norway’s got it all figured out, but they’re definitely gunning for something closer to what I describe than what you do.
It's seems totally reasonable to expect that Norwegians, who are still dumb apes like the rest of us, would be at high risk of suffering from "trust fund syndrome". Just like the countless families (and handful of countries) that totally burned through every dollar they didn't earn.
The author is basically pointing out that the country is now pretty much a country of trust fundies, and that usually that leads to higher levels of directionless meandering and lack of ambition. Scale it to country size and you would expect to see stuff like insane spending without much discretion, and a general careless approach to life.
Other countries have that. Other countries have lots of waste. But it's totally logical to assign Norway as high risk for "affluenza" and therefore monitor it's vitals with that idea in mind. It's not particularly hard for ~5 million people to blow $2 trillion in a few decades.
They need laws saying that they (the country) can only spend the income (at most). Pass it now while a different generation is in power. Require a massive majority to amend it.
For individuals, there should be a universal basic income but it should only put you at lower middle class.
Education is free in Norway, including university education. There's already fairly strong structural and cultural protections against just spending the fund. What might become more critical is when the oil revenue really does decline over the next 50-100 years.
Education is free. Whether one considers the social support to be UBI is a matter of debate, I guess, but right now it would leave you decidedly poor/low-class.
lol thats not the reason. you're basically correct that passive income doesnt exist at scale, but it isnt because of active management. it's because passive income is very literally getting money from other people's work. you need to have a lot of people still working to support passive income
The State Pension fund Outland (Direct translation) is managed by the Norwegian Bank, and has grown a lot over the years. The staten has a policy og never spending above a certain percent of the fund, witch has shown to be below the growt rate. On a nation level it is basically passive income. However with the increase, the influx from the fund to the state budget some says leads to increased Inflation in later years.
On a side note, just because the state has money, dosent mean every person is personally rich. Just that being poor dosent have to suck as hard or permanent with social policies like free healthcare and education.
> The author is basically pointing out that the country is now pretty much a country of trust fundies, and that usually that leads to higher levels of directionless meandering and lack of ambition.
Which is a concern that those who back indiscriminate social programs and ideas like UBI need to take seriously.
Now, of course, a trust fund kid needn't be an aimless and vacuous hedonist, but that requires a disciplined upbringing many such kids seem to lack. Furthermore, even discipline requires a more expansive and higher sense of the human person and the purpose of life. Discipline for the sake of what?
In our culture, we absolutely lack a sense of higher ends. Our picture of life is summed up by the term "making it", which consists of becoming rich, or at least materially comfortable. In a liberal society, highest aims are necessarily privatized, so the common culture that forms among people living in such a society, that makes them a society, will necessarily degenerate to the lowest common denominator and some metastasized compounding of it. The culture pulls people back into the muck of mediocrity and contains a hostility to higher purpose. Higher purpose is divisive, even offensive! So, when you are poor, your concerns revolve around survival and securing the basic needs of food and shelter and so on. Once satisfied, because no higher aims of life seem to exist, certainly none that the culture can point us at, we fall into some cancerous and deranged worship of feeding our base appetites. This we may call consumerism. So, life becomes hedonistic, and nihilistic. There is nothing for the us to do, certainly not for the rank and file of society, beyond buying shit, stuffing our faces, stimulating our genitals, and pissing away our lives on entertainment and distraction until we finally die.
So, in a sense, wealth can become a temptation to fritter away one's life, but it is not the wealth per se that's responsible. You can, as a materially well off person, still have a life full of meaning and purpose. But for that, you must discover what human nature is oriented toward and how you should engage it. It isn't arbitrary.
Norway seems to be doing fantastically well..if anything the reviewed book is guilty of a kind of rich-person luxurious complaining (over minor difficulties).
"Oystein Olsen, a former head of Norway’s central bank, said Bech Holte’s work is riddled with inaccuracies, including overstating the extent of the slowdown in productivity. Researchers at Norway’s Statistics Office said the book presents a deeply flawed version of economic history and pointed out that Norway is a small country, greatly influenced by external factors."
This paragraph probably also summarises why this article was written:
> “I tried to write in a way that would make people angry, for better or worse,” he said at a conference in April. The solutions his book advocates include sharply reducing both taxation and government spending, and implementing stricter rules around how much the government can withdraw from the sovereign wealth fund.
it's absolutely ridiculous! they're angry that people enjoy their life too much. wow...
and btw, i get the impression norway is spending their money pretty wisely, thinking long-term. and thinking with their own brain. not like the UAE, where they started thinking about the future too late, and mostly with brains hired from the west like McKinsey (who are just siphoning the wealth away into their pocket: see neom, etc).
The US is another good example of being “too rich.” For example, consider American infrastructure costs. The US spends >5x on infrastructure versus other developed countries [0]. NYC spent $2.6 billion dollars per mile to build the 1.2 mile Second Avenue Subway extension. Meanwhile, Paris spent $450M/mile [1]. A 500 mile high speed rail line connected LA and San Francisco is conservatively projected to cost $89-128 billion [2]; meanwhile, in Spain, it cost $60 billion to build 2500 miles of high speed rail [3]. It’s not just public spending that’s extreme relative to other industrialized countries; private construction is much more expensive in the US [4].
Wasteful spending on infrastructure is but one concrete example; we also see gross inefficiencies manifest in costs of American healthcare, education, defense, etc. While there are many complex factors contributing to such waste, a major underlying reason is that there’s simply so much money to go around that nobody bothered to optimize for costs, to the point that they’ve ballooned so unsustainably that the US is increasingly incapable of building anything at all.
This is just poor governance, which is a symptom of the over-centralization of political power, not of being "too rich". The people of San Francisco and LA would never shell out that kind of money (>100K for every man, woman and child in LA and San Francisco combined) to build 500 miles of rail. Only in Sacramento and D.C. can leaders become so detached from reality that they'll mindlessly drop two Apollo Programs' worth of funding on a regional rail project.
If your mayor proposed to spending $100K per citizen on a rail project, they'd be thrown out on their ear. There would likely be no more important issue on the ballot, so you could make them pay for their awful decisions. But if your US House Rep voted for such a thing, what could you do? Become a single-issue voter on a rail project in California? You have no recourse whatsoever, because the democratic feedback mechanism simply does not work effectively on a continental scale. The people cannot guide our government's policy when the entire universe of policy decisions are boiled down to an absurdly simplistic "choice" of "red or blue?". So of course we get garbage outcomes.
There are solutions to this problem (Federalism, disunion, etc), but it'll take a lot more pain before people are willing to make the necessary changes. In the sense that people are too comfortable to contemplate systemic change, perhaps we are in fact "too rich".
> Henriksen wrote in an op-ed earlier this year, might have been: The Country That Should Have Been Even Richer
What's wrong with not rabidly chasing bigger wealth? Why has this become totally unacceptable in this world?
This reeks of late stage capitalist views.
> We are choosing a model that is uninspiring for capital investment
Sounds fantastic in my book.
I also like that sort of example:
> His examples include $2.6 billion to develop a carbon-capture project whose commercial viability remains unclear
What if the goal was carbon capture and not commercial viability? What worth will be your commerce if we choke ourselves out on carbon dioxyde? That's also the concept of subsidiary and state funded stuff, it's not because it's not commercially viable that it's not useful.
I'm also unconvinced by quotes like "the country is suffering from the dutch disease" while Norway seems to have done what's indicated in such a case, through its sovereign fund. Another mitigation for that is to avoid letting in too many foreign investments in, to combat the currency appreciation that comes as a symptom of dutch disease... which this article presents as a bad situation.
Sure, the country might face a challenge as the oil wells dry up, and I'm not saying everything is fine (although I think a lot of countries would prefer to have that sort of issue).
I also think cost-efficiency should be a goal, and a responsibility of the state for state-funded projects and endeavours. I'm absolutely not absolving things like overblown costs and delays in big government led projects, this shouldn't be an excuse either (although the definition of "overblown" for delays may vary from person to person).
But his article looks more like people upset that Norway's money isn't going to them, rather than worrying about the fate of Norway itself.
These don't seem like very big problems, but it will be interesting to see how Norway deals with an aging population while maintaining its very generous social programs. They are probrably the best suited country in the world to handle this, so what they do may provide a blueprint or a cautionary tale to other countries. Will they raise taxes, increase immigration, lower services or raid the wealth fund?
Steering an economy (or any organization) is a constant alertness to things that can snowball and undermine good outcomes. So, in a real sense, there’s always something (and more accurately, many things) to fix with complex and dynamic interrelationships that present different gradients of risk at different altitudes and size of economy.
It's just that economies are systems with feedback loops that exist on islands of stability. Like a ball on top of a hill.
Its the same thing for your car; any news is bad news, because your car operating as normal is not news, and anything that happens will move your car away from that optimal spot - it's bad news.
> First presented in their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, the propaganda model views corporate media as businesses interested in the sale of a product—readers and audiences—to other businesses (advertisers) rather than the pursuit of quality journalism in service of the public. Describing the media's "societal purpose", Chomsky writes, "... the study of institutions and how they function must be scrupulously ignored, apart from fringe elements or a relatively obscure scholarly literature". The theory postulates five general classes of "filters" that determine the type of news that is presented in news media. These five classes are: ownership of the medium, the medium's funding sources, sourcing, flak, and anti-communism or "fear ideology".
As a Norwegian, I can say that living here is awesome. Unless, you're a business owner, a founder, or have no work experience. The effects of the wealth tax has been insane. Businesses no longer have money to invest and every business that is not state-owned, is in survival mode.
The majority of the "rich" have already moved to another country.
Business owners have to sell their business to a foreigner to be able to pay the wealth tax. These business owners use this money to move to another country and retire.
Businesses has stopped hiring people without work experience. Even if you have a computer science / engineering degree. The brain drain has already started.
The rich no longer invest in local initiatives like local sports, local businesses or volunteering as they are "disconnected".
A lot less tax is being paid and to cover for this we need to withdraw more from the oil fund. It may take a few decades to empty the fund. But I think that money will be wasted within a decade if "hate" against rich continues. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1857694219244048691
I am seriously worried about the future, and I am considering moving to Sweden. I love building businesses, but I feel that the state is stealing resources I need to build a business that can pay tax for the next generations.
The high sick leave thing is another serious matter. But when politicians deflect responsibility when they've made a mistake, especially when public scrutiny or pressure increases, they send a message to the rest of the Norwegian population that it is fine to take a few months off if work is too hard. This has not happened once, this has happened a few dozen times just the last few years. And founders, they do not have the right for a single day of paid sick leave unless they employ themself and pay extra tax.
The wealth tax in itself probably does not explain the issues you see. They are more likely related to the global increases in interests.
Now the recently introduced exit tax has some serious problems, in that is has triggered and exodus both of genuinely rich people, and of prospective founders who can easily get rich on paper and have massively disproportionate tax effects. That law is very stupid - especially that unrealized gains are taxable 100% at shares market rate.
I think it's sovereign wealth fund is about 2T in assets, and Norway's population is about 5M so that's about 400k per person.
That hardly seems like a "trust fund kid" that seems a very good head start for the people, assuming it is well distributed (and mostly evenly).
I do agree with this sentence: "implementing stricter rules around how much the government can withdraw from the sovereign wealth fund." Politicians being what they are the incentives are poor here. The rules must be strong for it to have survived for so long, but making them stronger seems prudent.
Exactly! The article says $340,000 per person which could generate something around $10-$13,000 per year at a safe withdrawal rate, which is a nice extra money to have but not exactly "My life is yachting around the Mediterranean now".
Life without work is meaningless. Over the millennia we have done nothing but work. We were made to work.
I don't know if you've experienced not working without having to worry about money, but I have and it has a unique feeling of emptiness to it.
This is not me praising 9-5 office jobs, or work from home jobs, or any other specific job. They can all be hell in and of themselves, but the idea of abolishing work is just so laughable to me.
The moment that happens, a collective neurosis will overtake humanity the likes of which has never been seen before. We can only hope work will continue to be around as long as we are around, for our own sake.
I don't buy it. The cats and dogs seems to be pretty happy and they rarely work apart from the biological stuff that we do like growing body and repair cells and eating and all.
Yes, this is why people dread retirement. Society should implement some sort of Logan's Run style carrousel for the sad, miserable people that have retired and no longer get to have the pleasure of working.
It is sad that Norway is not taking advantage of their unique situation. They could start making steps on redesigning capitalism and democracy. It is a combination of two flawed and never reviewed systems that together amplify their faults.
Capitalism has been tried in 100 countries over the past 100 years. Not a single country has reported a harmonious society without suffering and inequality. Failure over and over.
Countries are running this program that is unfit for human society. Capitalism wasn’t scientifically researched nor updated according to the modern scientific knowledge in sociology, anthropology, economics, and human biology. In humans, it amplifies greed and materialism. It forces all humans into labour with less than 50% of jobs and occupations being useful, and another half is there just to employ people. Capitalism does not accept you for who you are, it will only accept you into system if you provide economic value, regardless if there’s already enough goods and food for everyone.
And neither alternative to capitalism has ever been seriously researched. Not socialism/communism, but actually a professionally, scientifically researched and designed system? There were no serious attempts. We have institutions for physics, biology, construction, logistics, and every other science. And all of them make discoveries and move science forward. Except for this one.
Why there’s no effort to research and design the social economic system to replace capitalism? Why is only this specific science in a standstill?
And democracy is similarly assumed by everyone as some perfect system. Yet we use electoral democracy designed literally for 100 persons per representative. In Ancient Greece elected person knew every one of people they represented personally. And it grew now to 50,000 and more people per representative and nobody ever asked if that should be allowed. It wasn’t designed for this many, and it shows. Electoral democracy was the transitional system until we have computers capable of dealing with this amount of data. Elected officials were, and still are flawed human computers representing groups of people.
> Not a single country has reported a harmonious society without suffering and inequality.
What's wrong with inequality? Inequality is not the problem. If someone has a net worth of $500k and another person has a net worth of $10mil, is that bad? Of course not. That's inequality, but so what? Why this obsession with money? And a nation of poor people has high equality. Is that desirable? Equality is a red herring, and possibly an expression of envy.
Poverty is the problem. Oligarchic abuse of wealth for tyrannical purposes is. A society obsessed with money is. We should absolutely not be aiming for equality, as there is no reason for it or value in it.
But you are absolutely correct when you hint at the need to consider human nature. A sound philosophical anthropology is the basis for a sound society and a sound culture. The concepts of human nature our society and culture are built on are defective and emaciated, even deranged.
The economy exists for the benefit of society and its members. It is only a part of human life, but within that sphere, it should serve its participants. It absolutely should not be a means of exploiting others and extracting and concentrating wealth at the expense of others. This is what rapacious capitalism celebrates. Usury and financial speculation are perhaps the distillation of such state-sanctioned exploitation.
Inequality is based on random luck of birth. Why defend inequality if you don’t know how much better system we can design? It seems that you’re defending capitalism.
And having an economy does not require capitalism or communism specifically.
And it did severely reduce Netherlands' competitiveness back when the Groningen gas field was operational.
Norway is a well off country, but compared to their Scandi peers Denmark and Sweden, they don't have as diversified an economy - especially innovation industries like Pharma in DK or DefenseTech in Sweden - due to their heavy ONG dependency [0].
Denmark is equally blessed with NatGas fields like Netherlands was (look at a map) and similar to Norway, yet they still incubated a domestic innovation industry and additionally retained a diversified manufacturing and agricultural economy.
Furthermore, large soverign wealth funds in democracies can become especially enticing to raid during protracted downturns or the rise of populism - look at Alaska's PIF as an example.
Additionally, plenty of black swans exist in the world now. The US-EU FTA makes US ONG exports signficantly more cost competitive than Norwegian offerings, and potential FTAs with MERCOSUR (Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay) and Canada can further reduce Norway's staying power in European energy markets. As Norway is not an EU member state, it's in a worse position to defend it's interests in it's largest market.
And that's the crux of the argument - Norway is unable to incubate alternative industries that can help diversify away from their ONG dependency, which increases the long term risks for Norway, and has risks that could lead to opportunistic raiding of their SWF.
> Norwegians are taking much more sick leave than a decade ago, driving up costs for health services. Student test scores have worsened more than in other Scandinavian countries
...COVID?
Norwegians are taking more sick leave after the largest mass-disabling event in generations?
And test scores are worse compared to other Scandinavian countries, like Sweden, which famously had very few COVID restrictions?
A growing segment of aging people will bring more medical/care expenses, covered by relatively fewer working people. The fairer a social security system is, the more the expenses will change once the population pyramid shifts.
Norway has a name for living off the welfare state as a grown up man: Nave, deriving from the social security service Nav and it has been like that for a decade at least.
Building a full social class of dependents of the government takes many years of demoralization and subversion of values.
I'm not an expert, but isn't that exactly what rich people who live off interest rates do? Why is bad when a country does the same? I understand the risks mentioned, but why are they acceptable when people with capital does that?
Lets take the extreme, lets assume that Norway is an island and has a $50t wealth for 5m people. $10m each. Assume 2% return on that wealth, $200k a year income. Great, everyone is happy.
Who empties the bins? Or repairs the road?
You end up importing those people from elsewhere, just like the wealthy parasites do. Oil countries like Qatar are like this. It's not a good thing.
A centi-millionaire, in Qatar, Norway or New York, can live for free without doing any work, and will see their wealth grow about $10m a year off the backs of other people, people who won't earn anywhere near $10m in a lifetime.
Other people who aren't as wealthy do the work.
Imagine you are on an island with 10 billionaire CEOs and 10 people who have no net worth but know how to fish, cook, build etc.
It doesn't matter how rich the billionaires are, their wealth is worthless, the person with the skills is whats valuable.
The real numbers are $340,000 per person in the fund, which at a safe withdrawal rate would be $10-13,000 per year if turned into an income stream. So not exactly fuck you money, and there's a very long way to go before they have problems with bin collection.
It's questionable the amount of fun. Norway has fairly high depression rates and doing almost anything is very expensive. Even fully employed Norwegians on average go out to eat only a couple of times a year. They also travel less and have comparatively fewer recreational activities. I'm pretty sure that anyone living almost entirely on government assistance isn't doing much else but existing.
Welfare states work best when the majority of the population has that attitude. It keeps the most people in the “producer” column and fewer people in the “being supported” column.
It could be much worse. Usually resources subsidise billionaire lifestyles where one person consumes massive resources to support their lifestyle. At least Norway spread that around a bit even if limited to their own country.
Ideally the world would be one with equity and all but short of a benevolent alien invasion or AI takeover we’re not getting that. At least Norway’s doing well at wealth distribution at a local level.
Statistics are one thing.... individual realities are another. Taking different generations into same statistics makes it even worse.
Can an average young couple earning average pay in norway afford to buy a house/apartment there? Preferably large enough to have space for let's say 2-3 kids and young enough to actually have 2-3 kids (for demographic reasons)?
I live in a small country that used to be a part of a larger communist one, and our homeownership situation seems great, very high percentage of people own their homes, but the reality for young people is, that unless we do some drastic changes soon, buying a home will be impossible for a majority of them, and waiting to inherit their parents' apartment will take too long (demographic-wise... you can't really have kids in a 2 bedroom apartment with 3 roommates).
> But recently, cracks have been starting to show. Norwegians are taking much more sick leave than a decade ago, driving up costs for health services. Student test scores have worsened more than in other Scandinavian countries, and critics of the government say there are too many boondoggle tunnels and bridges to nowhere.
These are the issues they're worried about? None of the numbers I saw while scanning look particularly worrying, and I doubt there's ever been a country on the face of this planet for which you wouldn't have been able to produce a similar list of issues of this magnitude - including past Norway.
They're worth paying attention to, but not sounding the alarm bells over.
> They're worth paying attention to, but not sounding the alarm bells over.
That's because there is a default bad assumption that because they are so wealthy that no problems should exist, similar to how very rich people are seen. Looking at other wealthy petro-states (and people) around the world, that's clearly not true.
But relatively speaking I don't think there's a country that wouldn't trade most of their problems for Norway's, with the possible exception of their aging population.
>there is a default bad assumption that because they are so wealthy that no problems should exist
I live in a wealthier US state and the folks in my city's subreddit whine - and they whine a lot.
What's the problem? Only poor people care about test scores as they imagine high test scores is how one can pull themselves out of being poor. When you are rich you can also do pointless things just for the fun of it like build bridges to nowhere. None of these are problems unless you try and look at it through a poor man's lens.
Poorer health might be concerning, but is likely the result of the population growing older. More children would help make the numbers look better, I suppose, but, statistically, only poor people like having children.
> What's the problem? Only poor people care about test scores as they imagine high test scores is how one can pull themselves out of being poor. When you are rich you can also do pointless things just for the fun of it like build bridges to nowhere. None of these are problems unless you try and look at it through a poor man's lens.
That may be a reasonable take at the level of an individual. But it's nonsense at the level of a country.
Wealth is the ability to get other people to do things. But if everyone is becoming less capable, then that's not a problem that wealth can fix.
Outsourcing may be a temporary solution to his problem, but I don't see it working well long term.
> But if everyone is becoming less capable, then that's not a problem that wealth can fix.
What suggests that people are becoming less capable? More importantly, what suggests that people are becoming less capable in an irreversible way? If people are less capable, but it is reversible, then wealth can fix it. As you said, you can use wealth to get other people to become more capable.
> What suggests that people are becoming less capable?
From the root level comment in this thread:
> Student test scores have worsened more than in other Scandinavian countries, and critics of the government say there are too many boondoggle tunnels and bridges to nowhere.
-
> More importantly, what suggests that people are becoming less capable in an irreversible way? If people are less capable, but it is reversible, then wealth can fix it.
I don't think anyone is suggesting that this trend is irreversible.
But big trends like this can be difficult to turn around - if it were easy, the trend wouldn't have happened in the first place (or, at least, it wouldn't have been detectable).
> If people are less capable, but it is reversible, then wealth can fix it. As you said, you can use wealth to get other people to become more capable.
You can't just say "wealth will do x". That's really a semantic shortcut for saying "people will do x". But presumably people are already trying to improve the countries test scores. And people are already trying (at least to a certain extent) to spend government funds wisely. I'm not really sure how wealth will change what's currently occurring.
> From the root level comment in this thread
Oh, so you mean not that they are becoming less capable in general, but that they are becoming less capable at testing? I suppose that is a reasonable take in light of earlier comments – but, again, wealthy people don't see value in test results, so what difference does it make?
This is like noticing that people have become less likely to share "hand-me-downs". You'd no doubt see that as a travesty if you are struggling to buy clothes, but if you look at it from a place of wealth where you are buying clothes as if they are nothing, what does that mean to you? Not much.
> if it were easy, the trend wouldn't have happened in the first place
There is a logical leap in there that you haven't explained. In the same vein, it is easy to grow food in your garden, but it is abundantly clear that people no longer see the need, even where they once did. Just because something is easy does not mean that there is reason to do it. You are going to have to elaborate.
> When you are rich you can also do pointless things just for the fun of it like build bridges to nowhere. None of these are problems
For one thing it's clearly a problem if you include the environmental impact of constructing those bridges to nowhere.
Only to the extent of the environmental impact being greater than the alternative activity. Like another commenter said, wealth is the ability to get people to do things. You're not wealthy if you crawl into a cave and just sit there doing nothing (ignoring that even then you are impacting the environment with your methane emissions).
> Only poor people care about test scores as they imagine high test scores is how one can pull themselves out of being poor.
Bashing 'poor people' aside, it's safe to say that on a national level, declining test scores are a warning sign that merits investigation.
> When you are rich you can also do pointless things just for the fun of it like build bridges to nowhere
You can, but there's no small amount of broken window fallacy there.
> None of these are problems unless you try and look at it through a poor man's lens.
I might be too poor to see the joy of building of bridges to nowhere, but there are still 'problems' with declining test scores, government misuse of funds, and pointless infrastructure projects.
> statistically, only poor people like having children
Yeesh. There are at least three reasons why this is completely wrong, but what's more important is that you seem to have a weird bone to pick with "poor people". You really might want to sort that out for yourself.
You've continued to make a habit of attacking other users in comments here, as well as posting an enormous quantity of flamewar comments. Since we've asked you many times not to do this and even unbanned you on condition that you'd stop do, I think enough is enough and have re-banned your account. This is not what HN is for, and badly destroys what it is for.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42419831 (Dec 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40868959 (July 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35407476 (April 2023)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34854957 (Feb 2023)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30293928 (Feb 2022)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28699914 (Sept 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28654320 (Sept 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28650525 (Sept 2021)
> Bashing 'poor people' aside
'Bashing' is a human trait. Software on the internet carries no such emotion.
> declining test scores are a warning sign that merits investigation.
Just as increasing test scores is a warning sign that merits investigation. But that doesn't suggest a problem, only change. What good is wealth if it is not used to user in change?
> there's no small amount of broken window fallacy there.
Not really. The broken window fallacy is based on the idea of breaking windows for the good of the economy. There is nothing to suggest that bridges are being built to nowhere for the good of the economy. Maybe when you are poor the economy is front and centre in your thoughts, but not everything has to be about the economy.
> government misuse of funds, and pointless infrastructure projects.
This can be a problem if you aren't wealthy enough to support it, but, again, this cannot be observed through a poor lens. If the people of Norway (which is a democracy — the people direct the government) want to spend their extensive wealth in a way a poor person would consider foolish, they can. That is benefit of being wealthy.
> There are at least three reasons why this is completely wrong
Looks more like zero reasons. Assuming three wasn't a number randomly pulled out of hat, perhaps something got truncated during preparation of this message?
> but what's more important is that you seem to have a weird bone to pick with "poor people".
Again, software doesn't have this emotion you are trying to personify.
> 'Bashing' is a human trait. Software on the internet carries no such emotion.
> software doesn't have this emotion you are trying to personify.
Your best defense against accusations of classism is that you're software??
... Hate to break it to you bud, but bots can have classism built in too. Also, I'm fairly sure bots are banned here. Feel free to see yourself out.
> Your best defense against accusations of classism is that you're software??
"Defending accusations" is a human trait. You again have mistaken the context in which you write.
> Also, I'm fairly sure bots are banned here.
Hacker News is not what is normally considered a bot, but it is decidedly software. What feature of text on orange and beige left you to recognize it as humanity instead of the software that it is?
Voight-Kampff time
The USA surpassed Norway's median income some time in the 2020's. And it's VASTLY cheaper to live in the United States.
The Nordic petro states were never really that impressive to me personally. I'm sure someone will come out of the woodwork to talk up their healthcare and social services, but again, if you were being fair we would compare them to a State like Massachusetts instead of Mississippi or Alabama and you would find our healthcare systems here are equally if not more accessible.
Speaking for myself, I also really enjoy the diversity we have in the US, and our ability to absorb immigration and integrate into a whole. Meanwhile the Scandi/Nordic states seem to struggle like the rest of Western Europe when it comes to accepting new people without ghettoizing them for an indefinite number of generations.
> in the US, and our ability to absorb immigration and integrate into a whole.
Wow.
Wow indeed. Der Spiegel reported on the decapitation of Lady Liberty back in April of 2017. While you could have pretended she still lived during the Biden administration, it is clear that she is quite dead in 2025.
[flagged]
The US has more history to it than just the last 6 months, and some of us recall that while Trump puts on a big show with lots of heat and noise, there's rarely much light. If you look at actual deportations, he lags behind previous administrations.
So no, putting the frenzy over this administration aside, and recognizing that the US has more history and more of a future than the rule of one man, what I said holds.
having lived in the US and in europe i can confirm that. the issues with integration in the US are very different from those in europe.
the US suffers from systemic historic racism that they are struggling to get rid of, but they have always been a mix of cultures where some aspects of foreign cultures are assimilated and accepted and other aspects disappear as the immigrants adapt.
europe suffers from xenophobia and general difficulty to integrate foreign cultures. being traditionally a single culture there is very little assimilation of foreign cultures (mostly some food items) and immigrants are expected to adapt fully to the local culture, without any allowance to keep aspects of their own culture with few exceptions.
in my opinion this leads to immigrants in europe holding on to their own culture more than they would in the US making integration even more difficult.
> in my opinion this leads to immigrants in europe holding on to their own culture more
Wait, what specifically does? Why do you think gypsies have not integrated yet in any countries they are in? Be it Canada, Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary, Germany, etc.
what specifically does?
the expectation to assimilate our culture and fully give up theirs.
Why do you think gypsies have not integrated
i'd believe this is mainly because they are nomadic, which is something that we seem to have a hard time accepting, or even tolerating. for me this is one aspect of their culture that we should celebrate and support. but we don't.
Gypsies WERE nomadic, today they are not really nomadic though, so I do not think that is one of the reasons. I am asking about gypsies who have been in the country for generations yet still have not integrated. I have my theories, as I have had a lot of gypsy friends and I was part of many gypsy communities for a while across the country, and many of them have relatives who went to Canada and Germany. In fact, there are gypsies who only do prostitution in Germany, but that is besides the point I think.
> If you look at actual deportations, he lags behind previous administrations.
Isn't that what is expected? I'm not there, but the way the story is making it to us outside of the US is that Trump has directed immigration authorities to turn their attention away from real problem cases to go on a witch hunt instead. If true, of course deportations are going to go down. But right now nobody wants to expose themselves to getting wrapped up in the hunt.
There's plenty of least-developed countries where most of the population isn't formally employed, doesn't engage with standardized tests, and has never built necessary bridges/tunnels.
Seats in medical schools go empty in Oslo because the course are difficult. I have lived in Oslo. Problem is real
Not worrying about cracks early is a sure way to end up bankrupt.
If every person in Norway is worth $100M - who's going to wait the tables and bring them coffee and service their boats and clean their houses while they sail around and be leisurely all day?
Who's going to tend to the ski lifts and the golf courses? Who's going to take care of their polo horses? Who's going to clean the streets and work at the police stations? Who's going to keep the grid running? Who's going to work the ports to import everything? Who's going to drive the delivery trucks and put everything in it's place upon arrival?
It's blatantly obvious that you can't have a society where everyone is "rich", unless you have a second class of citizens to wait on them.
Robots aren't advanced enough yet.
While in some ways Norway is laughably far from this scenario, in other ways, their sovereign wealth fund is less about a decade away from everyone being a millionaire - which, theoretically, should allow everyone to not work and have a decent life - but obviously will not (unless they import second class citizens, that aren't ever allowed access to the wealth fund, and have to do all the work).
You have a very American idea of “rich”. For you, it’s being worth 100M. But for me it’s being able to lead a life without financial worries doing a job relatively few hours a week, regardless of whether I code or wait tables.
By this second definition, a country can definitely be rich across the board without having a “poor” second class. Just make sure people earn a decent living wage, and then some. There will be low crime (no need for gated communities!), high trust (no need for a lawyer on retainer!), and good education and health care (no need for private schools or hospitals!)
You have a very zero-sum view of wealth, the idea that to be wealthy means it’s gotta be to the detriment of others. I’m not saying Norway’s got it all figured out, but they’re definitely gunning for something closer to what I describe than what you do.
I think what GP is saying is less like “most people will be comfortable” and more like “most people won’t need to work”, and that that can’t work.
The real numbers are $340,000 per person, not $100M. It's an income stream of about $10-$13,000 per person at a reasonable SWR.
Yeah, if everyone has a 100 million dollars, no one has a 100 million.
It's seems totally reasonable to expect that Norwegians, who are still dumb apes like the rest of us, would be at high risk of suffering from "trust fund syndrome". Just like the countless families (and handful of countries) that totally burned through every dollar they didn't earn.
The author is basically pointing out that the country is now pretty much a country of trust fundies, and that usually that leads to higher levels of directionless meandering and lack of ambition. Scale it to country size and you would expect to see stuff like insane spending without much discretion, and a general careless approach to life.
Other countries have that. Other countries have lots of waste. But it's totally logical to assign Norway as high risk for "affluenza" and therefore monitor it's vitals with that idea in mind. It's not particularly hard for ~5 million people to blow $2 trillion in a few decades.
They need laws saying that they (the country) can only spend the income (at most). Pass it now while a different generation is in power. Require a massive majority to amend it.
For individuals, there should be a universal basic income but it should only put you at lower middle class.
Education should be free.
Education is free in Norway, including university education. There's already fairly strong structural and cultural protections against just spending the fund. What might become more critical is when the oil revenue really does decline over the next 50-100 years.
The government may only use 3% of the income from the oil fund. This law is in place since 2001. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_budgetary_rule
Education is free. Whether one considers the social support to be UBI is a matter of debate, I guess, but right now it would leave you decidedly poor/low-class.
> It's not particularly hard for ~5 million people to blow $2 trillion in a few decades.
That wealth will continue to grow (assuming wise investment), so the population can live on passive income, without touching the capital.
Just ask Alberta how easy it is to blow a resource trust fund under voters who start to believe they're rich because they're better people.
"How dare the people have access to the elite's comforts!!!"
If you have a point you should make it directly. What point is there in fabricating a quote like this?
Passive income is a myth. To a first approximation, at that scale it doesn't really exist. Someone has to actively manage the investments.
And even with good management, the investment income is nowhere near enough to live on. Especially not in an expensive country like Norway.
lol thats not the reason. you're basically correct that passive income doesnt exist at scale, but it isnt because of active management. it's because passive income is very literally getting money from other people's work. you need to have a lot of people still working to support passive income
The State Pension fund Outland (Direct translation) is managed by the Norwegian Bank, and has grown a lot over the years. The staten has a policy og never spending above a certain percent of the fund, witch has shown to be below the growt rate. On a nation level it is basically passive income. However with the increase, the influx from the fund to the state budget some says leads to increased Inflation in later years.
On a side note, just because the state has money, dosent mean every person is personally rich. Just that being poor dosent have to suck as hard or permanent with social policies like free healthcare and education.
> The author is basically pointing out that the country is now pretty much a country of trust fundies, and that usually that leads to higher levels of directionless meandering and lack of ambition.
Which is a concern that those who back indiscriminate social programs and ideas like UBI need to take seriously.
Now, of course, a trust fund kid needn't be an aimless and vacuous hedonist, but that requires a disciplined upbringing many such kids seem to lack. Furthermore, even discipline requires a more expansive and higher sense of the human person and the purpose of life. Discipline for the sake of what?
In our culture, we absolutely lack a sense of higher ends. Our picture of life is summed up by the term "making it", which consists of becoming rich, or at least materially comfortable. In a liberal society, highest aims are necessarily privatized, so the common culture that forms among people living in such a society, that makes them a society, will necessarily degenerate to the lowest common denominator and some metastasized compounding of it. The culture pulls people back into the muck of mediocrity and contains a hostility to higher purpose. Higher purpose is divisive, even offensive! So, when you are poor, your concerns revolve around survival and securing the basic needs of food and shelter and so on. Once satisfied, because no higher aims of life seem to exist, certainly none that the culture can point us at, we fall into some cancerous and deranged worship of feeding our base appetites. This we may call consumerism. So, life becomes hedonistic, and nihilistic. There is nothing for the us to do, certainly not for the rank and file of society, beyond buying shit, stuffing our faces, stimulating our genitals, and pissing away our lives on entertainment and distraction until we finally die.
So, in a sense, wealth can become a temptation to fritter away one's life, but it is not the wealth per se that's responsible. You can, as a materially well off person, still have a life full of meaning and purpose. But for that, you must discover what human nature is oriented toward and how you should engage it. It isn't arbitrary.
Norway seems to be doing fantastically well..if anything the reviewed book is guilty of a kind of rich-person luxurious complaining (over minor difficulties).
"Oystein Olsen, a former head of Norway’s central bank, said Bech Holte’s work is riddled with inaccuracies, including overstating the extent of the slowdown in productivity. Researchers at Norway’s Statistics Office said the book presents a deeply flawed version of economic history and pointed out that Norway is a small country, greatly influenced by external factors."
so lobbyists are trying for privatization in Norway huh. It's a bold strategy, Cotton. Let's see if it pays off for em.
This paragraph probably also summarises why this article was written:
> “I tried to write in a way that would make people angry, for better or worse,” he said at a conference in April. The solutions his book advocates include sharply reducing both taxation and government spending, and implementing stricter rules around how much the government can withdraw from the sovereign wealth fund.
It sounds like trickle-down economics, but it's bad when the trickle-down happens, so let's get back to the hoarding step.
The fact that Holte is a former investment director for a major Norway oil group has to be a mere coincidence.
McKinsey, no surprises.
It really sounds like that, doesn't it. Better funnel those sweet Oil dollars to some elite, so the plebs work more.
...but this time it _might just work_!
it's absolutely ridiculous! they're angry that people enjoy their life too much. wow...
and btw, i get the impression norway is spending their money pretty wisely, thinking long-term. and thinking with their own brain. not like the UAE, where they started thinking about the future too late, and mostly with brains hired from the west like McKinsey (who are just siphoning the wealth away into their pocket: see neom, etc).
These plebs have it too good, lets screw them.
The US is another good example of being “too rich.” For example, consider American infrastructure costs. The US spends >5x on infrastructure versus other developed countries [0]. NYC spent $2.6 billion dollars per mile to build the 1.2 mile Second Avenue Subway extension. Meanwhile, Paris spent $450M/mile [1]. A 500 mile high speed rail line connected LA and San Francisco is conservatively projected to cost $89-128 billion [2]; meanwhile, in Spain, it cost $60 billion to build 2500 miles of high speed rail [3]. It’s not just public spending that’s extreme relative to other industrialized countries; private construction is much more expensive in the US [4].
Wasteful spending on infrastructure is but one concrete example; we also see gross inefficiencies manifest in costs of American healthcare, education, defense, etc. While there are many complex factors contributing to such waste, a major underlying reason is that there’s simply so much money to go around that nobody bothered to optimize for costs, to the point that they’ve ballooned so unsustainably that the US is increasingly incapable of building anything at all.
[0] https://bettercities.substack.com/p/americas-infrastructure-...
[1] https://betweenhellandhighwater.com/2023/06/22/the-paris-met...
[2] https://hsr.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/2024-Draft-Bus...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/11/spains...
[4] https://archive.is/pEDpn
This is just poor governance, which is a symptom of the over-centralization of political power, not of being "too rich". The people of San Francisco and LA would never shell out that kind of money (>100K for every man, woman and child in LA and San Francisco combined) to build 500 miles of rail. Only in Sacramento and D.C. can leaders become so detached from reality that they'll mindlessly drop two Apollo Programs' worth of funding on a regional rail project.
If your mayor proposed to spending $100K per citizen on a rail project, they'd be thrown out on their ear. There would likely be no more important issue on the ballot, so you could make them pay for their awful decisions. But if your US House Rep voted for such a thing, what could you do? Become a single-issue voter on a rail project in California? You have no recourse whatsoever, because the democratic feedback mechanism simply does not work effectively on a continental scale. The people cannot guide our government's policy when the entire universe of policy decisions are boiled down to an absurdly simplistic "choice" of "red or blue?". So of course we get garbage outcomes.
There are solutions to this problem (Federalism, disunion, etc), but it'll take a lot more pain before people are willing to make the necessary changes. In the sense that people are too comfortable to contemplate systemic change, perhaps we are in fact "too rich".
https://archive.ph/q7hRC
> Henriksen wrote in an op-ed earlier this year, might have been: The Country That Should Have Been Even Richer
What's wrong with not rabidly chasing bigger wealth? Why has this become totally unacceptable in this world?
This reeks of late stage capitalist views.
> We are choosing a model that is uninspiring for capital investment
Sounds fantastic in my book.
I also like that sort of example:
> His examples include $2.6 billion to develop a carbon-capture project whose commercial viability remains unclear
What if the goal was carbon capture and not commercial viability? What worth will be your commerce if we choke ourselves out on carbon dioxyde? That's also the concept of subsidiary and state funded stuff, it's not because it's not commercially viable that it's not useful.
I'm also unconvinced by quotes like "the country is suffering from the dutch disease" while Norway seems to have done what's indicated in such a case, through its sovereign fund. Another mitigation for that is to avoid letting in too many foreign investments in, to combat the currency appreciation that comes as a symptom of dutch disease... which this article presents as a bad situation.
Sure, the country might face a challenge as the oil wells dry up, and I'm not saying everything is fine (although I think a lot of countries would prefer to have that sort of issue).
I also think cost-efficiency should be a goal, and a responsibility of the state for state-funded projects and endeavours. I'm absolutely not absolving things like overblown costs and delays in big government led projects, this shouldn't be an excuse either (although the definition of "overblown" for delays may vary from person to person).
But his article looks more like people upset that Norway's money isn't going to them, rather than worrying about the fate of Norway itself.
These don't seem like very big problems, but it will be interesting to see how Norway deals with an aging population while maintaining its very generous social programs. They are probrably the best suited country in the world to handle this, so what they do may provide a blueprint or a cautionary tale to other countries. Will they raise taxes, increase immigration, lower services or raid the wealth fund?
Great example of a golden rule of media commentary; all economic news is bad news.
Low unemployment? That's a labour shortage.
High GDP growth? The economy is overheating.
High rates of foreign investment? We are losing control of our economy.
Country experiencing historic levels of prosperity? Wealth is making everyone lazy, fat and unproductive.
Steering an economy (or any organization) is a constant alertness to things that can snowball and undermine good outcomes. So, in a real sense, there’s always something (and more accurately, many things) to fix with complex and dynamic interrelationships that present different gradients of risk at different altitudes and size of economy.
I had never realised that. Is there an eponymous law about this? (Or some other kind of reference?)
Should I call it Parson's law?
It's just that economies are systems with feedback loops that exist on islands of stability. Like a ball on top of a hill.
Its the same thing for your car; any news is bad news, because your car operating as normal is not news, and anything that happens will move your car away from that optimal spot - it's bad news.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
Specifically, the propaganda model:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model
> First presented in their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, the propaganda model views corporate media as businesses interested in the sale of a product—readers and audiences—to other businesses (advertisers) rather than the pursuit of quality journalism in service of the public. Describing the media's "societal purpose", Chomsky writes, "... the study of institutions and how they function must be scrupulously ignored, apart from fringe elements or a relatively obscure scholarly literature". The theory postulates five general classes of "filters" that determine the type of news that is presented in news media. These five classes are: ownership of the medium, the medium's funding sources, sourcing, flak, and anti-communism or "fear ideology".
Can we just call it "news orgs are in bed with elites and want the common folk to be slaves"?
As a Norwegian, I can say that living here is awesome. Unless, you're a business owner, a founder, or have no work experience. The effects of the wealth tax has been insane. Businesses no longer have money to invest and every business that is not state-owned, is in survival mode.
The majority of the "rich" have already moved to another country. Business owners have to sell their business to a foreigner to be able to pay the wealth tax. These business owners use this money to move to another country and retire. Businesses has stopped hiring people without work experience. Even if you have a computer science / engineering degree. The brain drain has already started. The rich no longer invest in local initiatives like local sports, local businesses or volunteering as they are "disconnected". A lot less tax is being paid and to cover for this we need to withdraw more from the oil fund. It may take a few decades to empty the fund. But I think that money will be wasted within a decade if "hate" against rich continues. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1857694219244048691
I am seriously worried about the future, and I am considering moving to Sweden. I love building businesses, but I feel that the state is stealing resources I need to build a business that can pay tax for the next generations.
The high sick leave thing is another serious matter. But when politicians deflect responsibility when they've made a mistake, especially when public scrutiny or pressure increases, they send a message to the rest of the Norwegian population that it is fine to take a few months off if work is too hard. This has not happened once, this has happened a few dozen times just the last few years. And founders, they do not have the right for a single day of paid sick leave unless they employ themself and pay extra tax.
The wealth tax in itself probably does not explain the issues you see. They are more likely related to the global increases in interests.
Now the recently introduced exit tax has some serious problems, in that is has triggered and exodus both of genuinely rich people, and of prospective founders who can easily get rich on paper and have massively disproportionate tax effects. That law is very stupid - especially that unrealized gains are taxable 100% at shares market rate.
Aren't there better examples of filthy rich oil states than Norway?
I think it's sovereign wealth fund is about 2T in assets, and Norway's population is about 5M so that's about 400k per person.
That hardly seems like a "trust fund kid" that seems a very good head start for the people, assuming it is well distributed (and mostly evenly).
I do agree with this sentence: "implementing stricter rules around how much the government can withdraw from the sovereign wealth fund." Politicians being what they are the incentives are poor here. The rules must be strong for it to have survived for so long, but making them stronger seems prudent.
Exactly! The article says $340,000 per person which could generate something around $10-$13,000 per year at a safe withdrawal rate, which is a nice extra money to have but not exactly "My life is yachting around the Mediterranean now".
The goal of every civilization is to abolish work. I don't see the problem.
> The goal of every civilization is to abolish work.
I don’t know that that’s the core goal of civilization. Instead I think it is more about:
- survival and stability
- human flourishing
- progress and innovation
- continuity (of culture, values, etc.)
I like the idea that the goal of civilization is the pursuit of happiness. I don't want to live in a walle type world
Literally everything in society is making you suffer to make money. And you think societies goal is to abolish work.
Life without work is meaningless. Over the millennia we have done nothing but work. We were made to work.
I don't know if you've experienced not working without having to worry about money, but I have and it has a unique feeling of emptiness to it.
This is not me praising 9-5 office jobs, or work from home jobs, or any other specific job. They can all be hell in and of themselves, but the idea of abolishing work is just so laughable to me.
The moment that happens, a collective neurosis will overtake humanity the likes of which has never been seen before. We can only hope work will continue to be around as long as we are around, for our own sake.
I don't buy it. The cats and dogs seems to be pretty happy and they rarely work apart from the biological stuff that we do like growing body and repair cells and eating and all.
I agree. Let's have some kind of distinction between work and labor
Yes, this is why people dread retirement. Society should implement some sort of Logan's Run style carrousel for the sad, miserable people that have retired and no longer get to have the pleasure of working.
> The goal of every civilization is to abolish work.
Where did you get that from lol ? We're doing everything we can to have people work for less, longer and in more precarious conditions.
People are still fighting for a "living" wage, we're far from a "thriving" wage and even further from the abolition of work.
The answer is a no until you interfere with international oil consumption.
It is sad that Norway is not taking advantage of their unique situation. They could start making steps on redesigning capitalism and democracy. It is a combination of two flawed and never reviewed systems that together amplify their faults.
Capitalism has been tried in 100 countries over the past 100 years. Not a single country has reported a harmonious society without suffering and inequality. Failure over and over. Countries are running this program that is unfit for human society. Capitalism wasn’t scientifically researched nor updated according to the modern scientific knowledge in sociology, anthropology, economics, and human biology. In humans, it amplifies greed and materialism. It forces all humans into labour with less than 50% of jobs and occupations being useful, and another half is there just to employ people. Capitalism does not accept you for who you are, it will only accept you into system if you provide economic value, regardless if there’s already enough goods and food for everyone. And neither alternative to capitalism has ever been seriously researched. Not socialism/communism, but actually a professionally, scientifically researched and designed system? There were no serious attempts. We have institutions for physics, biology, construction, logistics, and every other science. And all of them make discoveries and move science forward. Except for this one. Why there’s no effort to research and design the social economic system to replace capitalism? Why is only this specific science in a standstill? And democracy is similarly assumed by everyone as some perfect system. Yet we use electoral democracy designed literally for 100 persons per representative. In Ancient Greece elected person knew every one of people they represented personally. And it grew now to 50,000 and more people per representative and nobody ever asked if that should be allowed. It wasn’t designed for this many, and it shows. Electoral democracy was the transitional system until we have computers capable of dealing with this amount of data. Elected officials were, and still are flawed human computers representing groups of people.
> Not a single country has reported a harmonious society without suffering and inequality.
What's wrong with inequality? Inequality is not the problem. If someone has a net worth of $500k and another person has a net worth of $10mil, is that bad? Of course not. That's inequality, but so what? Why this obsession with money? And a nation of poor people has high equality. Is that desirable? Equality is a red herring, and possibly an expression of envy.
Poverty is the problem. Oligarchic abuse of wealth for tyrannical purposes is. A society obsessed with money is. We should absolutely not be aiming for equality, as there is no reason for it or value in it.
But you are absolutely correct when you hint at the need to consider human nature. A sound philosophical anthropology is the basis for a sound society and a sound culture. The concepts of human nature our society and culture are built on are defective and emaciated, even deranged.
The economy exists for the benefit of society and its members. It is only a part of human life, but within that sphere, it should serve its participants. It absolutely should not be a means of exploiting others and extracting and concentrating wealth at the expense of others. This is what rapacious capitalism celebrates. Usury and financial speculation are perhaps the distillation of such state-sanctioned exploitation.
> If someone has a net worth of $500k and another person has a net worth of $10mil, is that bad? Of course not.
If both have the same level of political and social influence: not bad at all.
> Oligarchic abuse of wealth for tyrannical purposes is
Bang on.
> We should absolutely not be aiming for equality
It's a rough barometer to tell us how close we are to an abusive oligarchy.
Inequality is based on random luck of birth. Why defend inequality if you don’t know how much better system we can design? It seems that you’re defending capitalism. And having an economy does not require capitalism or communism specifically.
It's called Dutch Disease.
And it did severely reduce Netherlands' competitiveness back when the Groningen gas field was operational.
Norway is a well off country, but compared to their Scandi peers Denmark and Sweden, they don't have as diversified an economy - especially innovation industries like Pharma in DK or DefenseTech in Sweden - due to their heavy ONG dependency [0].
Denmark is equally blessed with NatGas fields like Netherlands was (look at a map) and similar to Norway, yet they still incubated a domestic innovation industry and additionally retained a diversified manufacturing and agricultural economy.
Furthermore, large soverign wealth funds in democracies can become especially enticing to raid during protracted downturns or the rise of populism - look at Alaska's PIF as an example.
Additionally, plenty of black swans exist in the world now. The US-EU FTA makes US ONG exports signficantly more cost competitive than Norwegian offerings, and potential FTAs with MERCOSUR (Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay) and Canada can further reduce Norway's staying power in European energy markets. As Norway is not an EU member state, it's in a worse position to defend it's interests in it's largest market.
And that's the crux of the argument - Norway is unable to incubate alternative industries that can help diversify away from their ONG dependency, which increases the long term risks for Norway, and has risks that could lead to opportunistic raiding of their SWF.
[0] - https://oec.world/en/profile/country/nor#yearly-trade
> Norwegians are taking much more sick leave than a decade ago, driving up costs for health services. Student test scores have worsened more than in other Scandinavian countries
...COVID?
Norwegians are taking more sick leave after the largest mass-disabling event in generations?
And test scores are worse compared to other Scandinavian countries, like Sweden, which famously had very few COVID restrictions?
Must be the oil money
It doesn't even need to be COVID. I think this graph alone explains most of the changes: https://www.populationpyramid.net/norway/2024/
A growing segment of aging people will bring more medical/care expenses, covered by relatively fewer working people. The fairer a social security system is, the more the expenses will change once the population pyramid shifts.
Norway has a name for living off the welfare state as a grown up man: Nave, deriving from the social security service Nav and it has been like that for a decade at least.
Building a full social class of dependents of the government takes many years of demoralization and subversion of values.
Of whose values? Demoralization of whom?
Puritans can't stand the idea that someone else might be working less and/or having more fun.
I'm not an expert, but isn't that exactly what rich people who live off interest rates do? Why is bad when a country does the same? I understand the risks mentioned, but why are they acceptable when people with capital does that?
Its bad in both cases.
Lets take the extreme, lets assume that Norway is an island and has a $50t wealth for 5m people. $10m each. Assume 2% return on that wealth, $200k a year income. Great, everyone is happy.
Who empties the bins? Or repairs the road?
You end up importing those people from elsewhere, just like the wealthy parasites do. Oil countries like Qatar are like this. It's not a good thing.
A centi-millionaire, in Qatar, Norway or New York, can live for free without doing any work, and will see their wealth grow about $10m a year off the backs of other people, people who won't earn anywhere near $10m in a lifetime.
Other people who aren't as wealthy do the work.
Imagine you are on an island with 10 billionaire CEOs and 10 people who have no net worth but know how to fish, cook, build etc.
It doesn't matter how rich the billionaires are, their wealth is worthless, the person with the skills is whats valuable.
The real numbers are $340,000 per person in the fund, which at a safe withdrawal rate would be $10-13,000 per year if turned into an income stream. So not exactly fuck you money, and there's a very long way to go before they have problems with bin collection.
It's questionable the amount of fun. Norway has fairly high depression rates and doing almost anything is very expensive. Even fully employed Norwegians on average go out to eat only a couple of times a year. They also travel less and have comparatively fewer recreational activities. I'm pretty sure that anyone living almost entirely on government assistance isn't doing much else but existing.
Norway is middle of the list of countries by rate of depression: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/depressio...
It's not that surprising people spend less time eating out and travelling since it's a very cold country.
>isn't doing much else but existing
The nerve of some people.
Seriously though, why isn't existing enough?
Welfare states work best when the majority of the population has that attitude. It keeps the most people in the “producer” column and fewer people in the “being supported” column.
When you have a sovereign wealth fund that invests abroad, the "producer" column can be the rest of the world.
It'll work as long as those other countries respect property rights of foreign investors.
I am not a puritan at all
If anyone doesn't want to work it's their choice, as long as they don't expect money from anyone else
Demoralization when it comes to work, study and educational and professional ambition
why study if everyone else doesn't. why bother...
an attitude that ends catastrophically at the individual and social level
Non-paywall archive link: https://archive.ph/q7hRC
Getting the Nginx default installation message. Not sure why (?).
Anyway, not sure why paywalled articles are shared in HN if that means people won't be able to read them and engage in further discussions...
Wait, does this kind of mean , the work I do support random Norwegian who is Slacking off all day even though I don't even live in same country?
Someone has to still make the food they eat and clothes they wear.
I assume the poor people in Asian countries do it for them and still remain poor their entire lives even though they work probably 100x more.
What a shit show economic system we have made.
Norway is a net exporter of food. A lot of Norwegians are working hard to make or catch it.
My bad. I overreacted.
It could be much worse. Usually resources subsidise billionaire lifestyles where one person consumes massive resources to support their lifestyle. At least Norway spread that around a bit even if limited to their own country.
Ideally the world would be one with equity and all but short of a benevolent alien invasion or AI takeover we’re not getting that. At least Norway’s doing well at wealth distribution at a local level.
Statistics are one thing.... individual realities are another. Taking different generations into same statistics makes it even worse.
Can an average young couple earning average pay in norway afford to buy a house/apartment there? Preferably large enough to have space for let's say 2-3 kids and young enough to actually have 2-3 kids (for demographic reasons)?
I live in a small country that used to be a part of a larger communist one, and our homeownership situation seems great, very high percentage of people own their homes, but the reality for young people is, that unless we do some drastic changes soon, buying a home will be impossible for a majority of them, and waiting to inherit their parents' apartment will take too long (demographic-wise... you can't really have kids in a 2 bedroom apartment with 3 roommates).
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