Let's also not forget the fact that Norway is a very oil-rich country which brings a huge degree of wealth into the economy, and this skews the image considerab

Let's also not forget the fact that Norway is a very oil-rich country which brings a huge degree of wealth into the economy, and this skews the image considerably. You might have noticed that the guy the article talks about got rich selling stuff to -- guess who? -- the Norwegian oil industry. The number of startups in a given community doesn't causate a great entrepreneurship scene. By that metric Norway could just give every team that's interested 50k dollars from their oil, call them a startup and automatically have a more vibrant startup scene than Silicon Valley. Troll economics, anyone? People also overestimate the degree to which the US is capitalistic. Government spending in the US is now around 40%, with the free-market days of the pre-WWII era long replaced by a heavy-handed state that has never shrunk meaningfully. Maybe we Scandinavians run our bloated government bureaucracies more efficiently in our comparatively small, historically homogenous societies, but they're certainly not the reason we're rich. We're rich because we've been relatively free and capitalistic for a long time, also historically enjoying relatively low political corruption and a strong rule of law. At least that's the picture as I see it, being an Icelander that has lived and worked in Denmark I feel I grok the way these relatively small communities of my kinsmen work on a gut level. One more thing: New Hampshire is one of the richest states in the USA, has about the same population as Norway and has a higher GDP per capita. If we're going to compare the US to Norway (one of the richest European countries) while excluding other much poorer countries from the equation, we should also compare New Hampshire to Europe to put things in proper perspective.