111–120 of 146 posts
Norway could have let its own citizens decide how to spend their share of the money. That would probably result in some spending more than others, resulting in inequality and an overall worse quality of life, even for the wealthier. Instead they decided on a mandatory saving of the money. This might have been good for them, but it creates a giant State which wouldn't fly in other cultures.
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Well, make it happen. University is one option: http://www.studyinnorway.no/Tuition-Scholarships I say this not to be glib, but as someone who yearned to move abroad and found out that it wasn't as hard as I thought.
"However, you should take into consideration that living expenses in Norway are higher than in many other countries." I don't have a job right now, no savings, 29 years old, and paperwork bore me. There are dozens of those "programs", and I don't want to spend one entire week sorting it out to discover I can't afford to just live over there. I want to go there no question asked, to work, not to study.
Sometimes life involves tasks that are very slightly unpleasant, like paperwork. You might find that learning a tolerance for this minimal degree of inconvenience will yield benefits down the road.
The oil curse is a silly notion. The US and Canada have both avoided any 'curse.' China is the world's 5th largest oil producer, it too is certainly not cursed by oil. Norway however has a huge problem coming, soon. Their oil production is running out rapidly: http://i.imgur.com/UlR1B0a.jpg It has fallen about 40% in a decade +/-. Even with their large sovereign fund, they will exhaust that quickly if the oil product…
I've often said the Nordic countries in general are as close to a Star Trek style civilisation as we've ever gotten. As someone who lives in America Lite (the UK) your policies on just about everything strike me as insanely reasonable. I pretty much feel shame whenever I think about our last two governments.
Is there freedom of movement for UK citizens into Nordic countries? If not, is the migration process hard or easy? If it's simple, why not move there yourself?
There is also the related concept of "Dutch Disease" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease ) which is what I expected this would be about. The idea is that once a country discovers it has reserves of a valuable natural resource, it tends to exploit and build its economy around that resource, at the expense of its more complex sectors like manufacturing. Norway seems to have handled that decently well so far, a…
I know a lot of people talk up Norway, but I'm not aware of anything that Norway does economically that matters outside of energy production. What great technology, companies, etc. have they produced in the last 40 years? What big innovations come out of Norway? Do they have the top universities in the world? They've only won two nobel prizes since oil became the center of their economy, and they became rich. They wo…
On a more serious note, we're only like 5 mill people, and while we don't rock the nobel prices I think the oil has pushed us more towards engineering than theoretical research (for better or worse..). Agree our Universities should be better than they are - it's apparently hard to get funding for something that isn't directly applicable to oil, subsea or salmon.
But you probably use lots of stuff designed/invented in Norway without knowing. Example: Do you use a GSM phone? GSM was invented at a Norwegian University.
Lots of research for subsea-technology, oh, and we're pretty good at ship design stuff - dating back from the viking age until now (x-bow). Techy stuff: Energy Micro, Nordic Semiconductors, some parts of Atmel, Opera, FAST, etc.
Most of the oil welfare fund is invested abroad - all over the world (reduces risk and avoids inflation), these days heavily geared towards green technologies / energy.
Land value taxation and severance taxes can help recapture the value of our Commons, and allow us to reduce taxes on labor or investment.
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Whaling is a tradition in Norway and has been going on since medieval times. More information: http://www.fisheries.no/ecosystems-and-stocks/marine_stocks/... In my view, whalers are decent people - they generally aren't "jerks". You probably have never even talked to nor met any one of them. I understand your point that hunting and farming of animals in general is not good, but it's a pretty hard habit to break. Thi…
Eh, but back in medieval times it was a fair fight--no sonar, no diesel engines, no grenade-tipped harpoons, and as a bonus, there was actually a legitimate need to do this.
The whaling now is done by people with money, in order to earn more money. Nothing more.
I'm from Latin America and many countries here have more-than-decent resources to make things happen, but the difference between us and Norwegians is trust, and that changes it all. Take a look at Brazil, for example. There were over 20 megaconstructions planned for the World Cup and one one of them was completed, the Maracana stadium. That's just an insane amount of corruption. So, what happens? Well, since everyone…
They're, in theory, sitting on the world's largest oil reserves. Meanwhile their production has been falling for 15 years because the government, under Chavez and now, has squandered the opportunity.
They have somewhere between $10 trillion and $30 trillion in proven oil reserves, depending on who you believe (either way it's immense). They should be one of the wealthiest countries in history, right now. That's despite the challenges around extraction and the quality of their heavy oil.
The oil curse is a silly notion. The US and Canada have both avoided any 'curse.' China is the world's 5th largest oil producer, it too is certainly not cursed by oil. Norway however has a huge problem coming, soon. Their oil production is running out rapidly: http://i.imgur.com/UlR1B0a.jpg It has fallen about 40% in a decade +/-. Even with their large sovereign fund, they will exhaust that quickly if the oil product…
The US and Canada have both avoided any 'curse'. Erm, consider the massive amount of environmental and policy issues that we've had due specifically to oil. Had we not had so much of it in the early 20th century, we probably wouldn't have had the automobile boom of today and the long-term sabotage of public transportation. There's a curse, all right.
It's likely America would have not have been able to afford a vast, high quality public transportation system had the economic foundations not been built up in the first place. Especially considering the spread out population base, and geographic size of the country.