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The scourge of generational wealth. They really, genuinely don't know how the real world works. twitter.com/jzellis/status

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My man, we have people almost as bad as these posh coneheads in Norway, and it's only been stinking rich for a generation or two!

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Ah, maybe it doesn't take so long. As long as there's no living memory in the family of money really mattering that much, I guess that's all it takes.

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I think it's more about the exceptionalism, tbh. Even (especially?) poor white Americans can be completely insufferable in similar ways. It's the belief that you're a special people (or class) that arises with special treatment.

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But yeah, in Norway you often marry that exceptionalism to the belief that no money problems will ever blight your life, and you're already pretty far along the path to full upper class English.

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Oh god, could this be a bad UBI thing?

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Only if it's unevenly distributed.

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Mmm... is that the key? So if *everyone* can survive without working as long as they're incredibly frugal / survive binge-spends by basically doing nothing for the remainder of the month, it doesn't turn people into clueless arseholes?

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I think the key thing here is inequality. Norway has relatively low (but rising) domestic inequality, but is basically a trust fund baby at an international level. Norwegians have lots of holiday time and disposable income, and Norway has high immigration.

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Everywhere you go, you are flooded with cheap consumer goods, whilst most countries you could visit, even in richer parts of Europe, exist on a sliding scale of poverty mismanagement compared w/home. It's pretty, chill and well-kept here, messy and stressful and ugly "there".

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So it's easy for Norwegians to fall into the mistaken belief that this isn't a confluence of extreme luck in terms of petrodollars and (mostly) competent political leadership, and rather it's because Norway is, and Norwegians are, very special. See where this is going?

2:41 PM · Jun 13, 2019Twitter Web App

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And immigrants and migrants and tourists will all tend to agree. Norway is very pretty, very rich, very peaceful. So many foreigners share this special mythology of Norwegian exceptionalism, kinda like most of the world once did with the US and UK.

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Of course there are already cracks in this facade. Income growth has stopped rising against cost of living, and we have a private debt bubble of ridiculous proportions growing every year. But many Norwegians still believe this is a very special place and people.