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?
Conversation
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.
1
1
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.
This Tweet was deleted by the Tweet author. Learn more
Replying to
Damn. That's a real shame. Doesn't bode well for even relatively positive visions of the future.
1
Replying to
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?
1
Replying to
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...
1
Replying to
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.
1
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?
1