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Can a Country Be Too Rich? Norway Is Finding Out

74 points by obscurette 1y ago

StevenWaterman 1y ago
> 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
- ilivedinnoreg 1y ago
  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.
  - freeone3000 1y ago
    Of whose values? Demoralization of whom?
    - rwmj 1y ago
      Puritans can't stand the idea that someone else might be working less and/or having more fun.
      - rayiner 1y ago
        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.
        triceratops 1y ago
        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.
      - tuesdaynight 1y ago
        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?
        ta1243 1y ago
        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.
        rwmj 1y ago
        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.
      - hattmall 1y ago
        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.
        djeastm 1y ago
        >isn't doing much else but existing The nerve of some people. Seriously though, why isn't existing enough?
        rwmj 1y ago
        Norway is middle of the list of countries by rate of depression: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/depression-rates-by-country 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.
      - ilivedinnoreg 1y ago
        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
    - ilivedinnoreg 1y ago
      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
- jeroenhd 1y ago
  It doesn't even need to be COVID. I think this graph alone explains most of the changes: https://www.populationpyramid.net/norway/2024/ 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.
nicman23 1y ago
so lobbyists are trying for privatization in Norway huh. It's a bold strategy, Cotton. Let's see if it pays off for em.
- throwawayoldie 1y ago
  ...but this time it _might just work_!
- grumbelbart2 1y ago
  It really sounds like that, doesn't it. Better funnel those sweet Oil dollars to some elite, so the plebs work more.
- kome 1y ago
  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).
- mlinhares 1y ago
  These plebs have it too good, lets screw them.
- rwmj 1y ago
  McKinsey, no surprises.
- Vinnl 1y ago
  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.
  - 1y ago
rwmj 1y ago
https://archive.ph/q7hRC https://archive.ph/q7hRC
Vinnl 1y ago
> 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.
- jjmarr 1y ago
  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.
- danans 1y ago
  > 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.
  - 9rx 1y ago
    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.
kamikazeturtles 1y ago
Non-paywall archive link: https://archive.ph/q7hRC https://archive.ph/q7hRC
- krowek 1y ago
  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...
physarum_salad 1y ago
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."
nielsbot 1y ago
[flagged]
bparsons 1y ago
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.
- 317070 1y ago
  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?
  - danlugo92 1y ago
    Can we just call it "news orgs are in bed with elites and want the common folk to be slaves"?
  - Workaccount2 1y ago
    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.
    - 317070 1y ago
      > It's just that economies are systems with feedback loops that exist on islands of stability. Like a ball on top of a hill. OK, I get that that is indeed what makes these headlines tick, but if we take a step back. That is a ridiculous way of looking at the economy. * historically speaking, there is no stability to be found * I don't see how the poor in the world would support this view that "stability is good" * in fact, I'm sure economists would raise alarms if we would have zero growth for a long time.
  - aspenmayer 1y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent Specifically, the propaganda model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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".
Workaccount2 1y ago
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.
- andsoitis 1y ago
  > 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.
  - danlugo92 1y ago
    "How dare the people have access to the elite's comforts!!!"
    - Permit 1y ago
      If you have a point you should make it directly. What point is there in fabricating a quote like this?
  - nradov 1y ago
    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.
Ragnarork 1y ago
> 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.
personalityson 1y ago
The goal of every civilization is to abolish work. I don't see the problem.
- andsoitis 1y ago
  > 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.)
  - tonyedgecombe 1y ago
    If you agree with Stafford Beer[1] then the purpose of civilisation is what it does. At the moment that doesn't look much like your list. Rather it seems to be about oppressing those at the bottom and enriching those at the top. The only thing that seems to reverse this trend is war. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stafford_Beer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stafford_Beer
- hshshshshsh 1y ago
  Literally everything in society is making you suffer to make money. And you think societies goal is to abolish work.
- lm28469 1y ago
  > 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.
- vik0 1y ago
  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.
karenbass 1y ago
[dead]
hshshshshsh 1y ago
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.
- nradov 1y ago
  Norway is a net exporter of food. A lot of Norwegians are working hard to make or catch it.
  - hshshshshsh 1y ago
    My bad. I overreacted.
- AnotherGoodName 1y ago
  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.
HardCodedBias 1y ago
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.
- rwmj 1y ago
  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".
dostick 1y ago
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.
- lo_zamoyski 1y ago
  > 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.
amelius 1y ago
Aren't there better examples of filthy rich oil states than Norway?
1970-01-01 1y ago
The answer is a no until you interfere with international oil consumption.
megaman821 1y ago
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?
ajsnigrutin 1y ago
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).
MontyCarloHall 1y ago
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-costs-are https://bettercities.substack.com/p/americas-infrastructure-... [1] https://betweenhellandhighwater.com/2023/06/22/the-paris-metro-as-a-window-on-america/ https://betweenhellandhighwater.com/2023/06/22/the-paris-met... [2] https://hsr.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/2024-Draft-Business-Plan-020724-A11Y.pdf https://hsr.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/2024-Draft-Bus... [3] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/11/spains-high-speed-trains-arent-just-efficient-they-have-transformed-peoples-lives https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/11/spains... [4] https://archive.is/pEDpn https://archive.is/pEDpn
- marcusverus 1y ago
  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".
alephnerd 1y ago
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 https://oec.world/en/profile/country/nor#yearly-trade
olavgg 1y ago
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 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.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- jononor 1y ago
  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.
hnburnsy 1y ago
Asylum: Norway accepts asylum seekers under international obligations, but applications are rigorously vetted, and approval rates vary. In 2023, about 11,000 asylum applications were processed, with a significant portion rejected, per UDI statistics. The CIA World Factbook (2010 estimates, updated for 2025) lists Norway’s ethnic composition as 83.2% Norwegian (including Sámi), 8.3% other European, and 8.5% other (non-European).
bookofjoe 1y ago
https://archive.ph/SEZfW https://archive.ph/SEZfW

74 points by obscurette 1y ago

> 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

ilivedinnoreg 1y ago
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.
- freeone3000 1y ago
  Of whose values? Demoralization of whom?
  - rwmj 1y ago
    Puritans can't stand the idea that someone else might be working less and/or having more fun.
    - rayiner 1y ago
      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.
      - triceratops 1y ago
        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.
    - tuesdaynight 1y ago
      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?
      - ta1243 1y ago
        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.
        rwmj 1y ago
        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.
    - hattmall 1y ago
      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.
      - djeastm 1y ago
        >isn't doing much else but existing The nerve of some people. Seriously though, why isn't existing enough?
      - rwmj 1y ago
        Norway is middle of the list of countries by rate of depression: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/depression-rates-by-country 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.
    - ilivedinnoreg 1y ago
      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
  - ilivedinnoreg 1y ago
    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
jeroenhd 1y ago
It doesn't even need to be COVID. I think this graph alone explains most of the changes: https://www.populationpyramid.net/norway/2024/ 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.

nicman23 1y ago

so lobbyists are trying for privatization in Norway huh. It's a bold strategy, Cotton. Let's see if it pays off for em.

throwawayoldie 1y ago
...but this time it _might just work_!
grumbelbart2 1y ago
It really sounds like that, doesn't it. Better funnel those sweet Oil dollars to some elite, so the plebs work more.
kome 1y ago
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).
mlinhares 1y ago
These plebs have it too good, lets screw them.
rwmj 1y ago
McKinsey, no surprises.
Vinnl 1y ago
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.
- 1y ago

rwmj 1y ago

https://archive.ph/q7hRC https://archive.ph/q7hRC

Vinnl 1y ago

> 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.

jjmarr 1y ago
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.
danans 1y ago
> 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.
- 9rx 1y ago
  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.

kamikazeturtles 1y ago

Non-paywall archive link: https://archive.ph/q7hRC https://archive.ph/q7hRC

krowek 1y ago
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...

physarum_salad 1y ago

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."

nielsbot 1y ago

[flagged]

bparsons 1y ago

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.

317070 1y ago
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?
- danlugo92 1y ago
  Can we just call it "news orgs are in bed with elites and want the common folk to be slaves"?
- Workaccount2 1y ago
  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.
  - 317070 1y ago
    > It's just that economies are systems with feedback loops that exist on islands of stability. Like a ball on top of a hill. OK, I get that that is indeed what makes these headlines tick, but if we take a step back. That is a ridiculous way of looking at the economy. * historically speaking, there is no stability to be found * I don't see how the poor in the world would support this view that "stability is good" * in fact, I'm sure economists would raise alarms if we would have zero growth for a long time.
- aspenmayer 1y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent Specifically, the propaganda model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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".

Workaccount2 1y ago

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.

andsoitis 1y ago
> 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.
- danlugo92 1y ago
  "How dare the people have access to the elite's comforts!!!"
  - Permit 1y ago
    If you have a point you should make it directly. What point is there in fabricating a quote like this?
- nradov 1y ago
  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.

Ragnarork 1y ago

> 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.

personalityson 1y ago

The goal of every civilization is to abolish work. I don't see the problem.

andsoitis 1y ago
> 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.)
- tonyedgecombe 1y ago
  If you agree with Stafford Beer[1] then the purpose of civilisation is what it does. At the moment that doesn't look much like your list. Rather it seems to be about oppressing those at the bottom and enriching those at the top. The only thing that seems to reverse this trend is war. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stafford_Beer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stafford_Beer
hshshshshsh 1y ago
Literally everything in society is making you suffer to make money. And you think societies goal is to abolish work.
lm28469 1y ago
> 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.
vik0 1y ago
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.

karenbass 1y ago

[dead]

hshshshshsh 1y ago

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.

nradov 1y ago
Norway is a net exporter of food. A lot of Norwegians are working hard to make or catch it.
- hshshshshsh 1y ago
  My bad. I overreacted.
AnotherGoodName 1y ago
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.

HardCodedBias 1y ago

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.

rwmj 1y ago
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".

dostick 1y ago

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.

lo_zamoyski 1y ago
> 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.

amelius 1y ago

Aren't there better examples of filthy rich oil states than Norway?

1970-01-01 1y ago

The answer is a no until you interfere with international oil consumption.

megaman821 1y ago

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?

ajsnigrutin 1y ago

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).

MontyCarloHall 1y ago

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-costs-are https://bettercities.substack.com/p/americas-infrastructure-... [1] https://betweenhellandhighwater.com/2023/06/22/the-paris-metro-as-a-window-on-america/ https://betweenhellandhighwater.com/2023/06/22/the-paris-met... [2] https://hsr.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/2024-Draft-Business-Plan-020724-A11Y.pdf https://hsr.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/2024-Draft-Bus... [3] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/11/spains-high-speed-trains-arent-just-efficient-they-have-transformed-peoples-lives https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/11/spains... [4] https://archive.is/pEDpn https://archive.is/pEDpn

marcusverus 1y ago
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".

alephnerd 1y ago

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 https://oec.world/en/profile/country/nor#yearly-trade

olavgg 1y ago

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 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.

deleted 1y ago
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jononor 1y ago
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.

hnburnsy 1y ago

Asylum: Norway accepts asylum seekers under international obligations, but applications are rigorously vetted, and approval rates vary. In 2023, about 11,000 asylum applications were processed, with a significant portion rejected, per UDI statistics. The CIA World Factbook (2010 estimates, updated for 2025) lists Norway’s ethnic composition as 83.2% Norwegian (including Sámi), 8.3% other European, and 8.5% other (non-European).

bookofjoe 1y ago

https://archive.ph/SEZfW https://archive.ph/SEZfW