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?
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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.
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Damn. That's a real shame. Doesn't bode well for even relatively positive visions of the future.
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Well, there is that. You say the place is peaceful, though - if (for want of a crass summary) people can be smug about their relatively nice country, but it doesn't actually make them do bad things, is it OK? Or could that debt bubble bursting turn people against each other?
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Oh, no. We are v. compromised. I've heard exceptionalist arguments for why selling the US hellfire missiles is OK!
I don't know. Depends how hard the economy would be hit. Norway does have a trillion dollar sovereign wealth fund for a population smaller than that of London...
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I guess we can't make direct UK/Norway comparisons when the latter has a 12th of the population, but it's interesting to compare the approach to local oil wealth. We somehow seemed to manage to spend ours making the country worse for most people. That seems like a mistake.
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Maybe it'll take another generation or two to see if the approach generally works in Norway, though. Will the population ultimately become kind and peaceful - or smug and/or complacent?
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