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Unlike Most Millennials, Norway's Are Rich (bbc.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Best known for its Viking history, snow sports and jaw-dropping fjords, Norway is making a new name for itself as the only major economy in Europe where young people are getting markedly richer. People in their early thirties in Norway have an average annual disposable household income of around 460,000 kroner (around $56,200). Young Norwegians have enjoyed a 13% rise in disposable household income in real terms compared to Generation X (those born between 1966 and 1980) when they were the same age. These startling figures come from the largest comparative wealth data set in the world, the Luxembourg Income Database, and were analyzed in a recent report on generational incomes for the UK Think Tank The Resolution Foundation.
Compare this with young people in other strong economies: U.S. millennials have experienced a 5% dip, in Germany it's a 9% drop. For those living in southern Europe (the southern Eurozone suffered the brunt of the global economic crisis in 2008), disposable incomes have plunged by as much as 30%. Norway's youth unemployment rate (among 15- to 29-year-olds) is also relatively low at 9.4% compared to an OECD average of 13.9%. According to the BBC, this can be attributed to the country's rapid economic growth, thanks largely to their huge oil and gas sectors. "After seeing the biggest increase in average earnings of any large high-income economy between 1980 and 2013, it now leads multiple global rankings for wealth and wellbeing."
Compare this with young people in other strong economies: U.S. millennials have experienced a 5% dip, in Germany it's a 9% drop. For those living in southern Europe (the southern Eurozone suffered the brunt of the global economic crisis in 2008), disposable incomes have plunged by as much as 30%. Norway's youth unemployment rate (among 15- to 29-year-olds) is also relatively low at 9.4% compared to an OECD average of 13.9%. According to the BBC, this can be attributed to the country's rapid economic growth, thanks largely to their huge oil and gas sectors. "After seeing the biggest increase in average earnings of any large high-income economy between 1980 and 2013, it now leads multiple global rankings for wealth and wellbeing."
Turns out it's easy to run a "social democracy" when you're floating on a sea of oil you can sell to the rest of the world. Guess Marx forgot to put that part in.
As I've watched how Norway has been doing over the past 15+ years with their wise use and planning of oil revenues it has been clear that the Norwegian government has been planning for the future to ensure the prosperity of their citizens.
Now that technology is unlocking massive amounts of fossil fuels, it's unfortunate that other countries (I'm thinking of my country Canada) aren't following the example and planning for the future in the same way. I know that in Canada, there would be a major fight with Alberta to share tar sands revenue, but it would be nice if the Albertan government at least would follow Norway's approach and provide for their citizen's future.
Good on Norway, hopefully other countries will follow their lead.
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What are you supposed to learn?
Have large oil and gas reserves and keep your population low?
The first is not something you can control without conquering other countries, and the second will get you called racist or nazi.
What are you supposed to learn?
Invest fossil fuel revenue in free education, generous unumployment insurance, generous parental leave, domestic companies outside of the fossil fuel sector? Also: high minimum wages.
And therein lies the problem.
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
If you read that wiki entry, you will learn that there's nothing in there that is incompatible with a market economy.
In fact, to quote the Prime Minister of Denmark himself (from the same article): "The Nordic model is an expanded welfare state which provides a high level of security to its citizens, but it is also a successful market economy with much freedom to pursue your dreams and live your life as you wish."
Market economies and socialism are a perfectly compatible. In fact, you could say that one does not work without the other.
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Yeah, this, rather than the socialist and welfare approach which kinda all of Europe share but it's clearly not making people richer in the rest of Europe.
The only "great" insight story here is that if you invest the profits from your very rich natural resources into stocks and redistribute a small enough part of it to your people (in this case by being able to keep your generous welfare while still having lower taxes than others which offer the same) they get richer!!
If you spend it straight away you get less from it than if you invest it and don't use up too much of it.
And if you let private global companies take the gains from it and only charge a small tax on them they the people get less of the benefits and just a few people get huge benefits from it.
Yay. Surprising!
Mean-while here in Sweden the taxes for ore or minerals or whatever for a mining company is 0.1%.
Norway carefully used their assets whilst the UK pissed their oil wealth away. Africa is currently flogging all their mineral assets to China on the cheap to benefit a few bent politicians and supercar salesmen. Like the modern day Ant and Grasshopper!
I'd really need to hear what your definition of socialism actually is to square it with the notion being compatible with (or as you later suggest required for) a market (I'm assuming you mean a free one, or one that is reasonably so) economy. Otherwise I suspect you're guilty of choosing your definition of socialism post priori so that you can find one that doesn't look like a miserable failure.
Private exchange doesn't make sense if you have communal ownership. Maybe you're envisioning something like all private companies being employee owned (i.e., you can't hold stock if you don't work there and if you work there you must hold stock) but I don't think that's ever been tried. It's almost like a guild system, only with multiple competing guilds. This system also says nothing about personal income tax or social safety nets either as you could just as easily use this system regardless of how that's handled.
The only other thing you could possibly mean is that everyone acts as a capitalist agent, but the government takes most or all of their earnings. Essentially you seem to have private exchange in name only up since as soon as you make an exchange whatever benefit you gained from it becomes communally controlled. I suppose that works if you have a group of people that like playing free market just for the sake of playing free market. It would be a bit like playing Monopoly endlessly, only with real money that you never get to keep since just goes back in the tray. I don't know if there's a group of people on the planet weird enough to play by those rules. Maybe if the group were entirely self-selecting, but to suspect it on a population level for any ethnic group is suspect at best.
Socialism is by definition incompatible with Nordic Social Democracy model. We categorically reject all main cornerstones of socialism, and instead go for market economy with high taxation that funds the baseline income level and services.
We do have socialist in every Nordic state by the way. They're the marginal far left parties, rejected by overwhelming majority of the populace. Here in Finland for example, far left openly socialist Vasemmistoliitto holds between 5 and 8% of the vote, and is a minor party. They also have some communists in their party, but their leadership generally denounces communism and sticks to socialism. I can provide citations for that as well.
It would be very helpful if wannabe far leftists from across the pond would stop insulting our countries, our politicians and our ways of life by maliciously branding them as "socialist" for their own political purposes. Have your class war if you want, but leave us well out of it.
United States: 14.3 suicides per 100,000 pop
Norway: 10.9 suicides per 100,000 pop
http://worldpopulationreview.c...
I may post more in-depth later. For now I can't stop giggling at all the right wingers here who after years of screeching "that's socialism' every time anyone breathed a hint of a word in favor of a social safety net who ar now trying to walk that back and claim "That's not socialism at all!"
*GIGGLE*
We're talking about the American definition of socialism though which boils down to "not shitting on the poor". As the poor are only there because they didn't work hard enough, any state support is equivalent to the actions of murderous dictatorships past and present and carrying military grade weaponry about day to day is the only way to prevent those slackers from trying to take that well earned money away from you by force.
That ignoring the AGW alarmists is a good thing for our kids? But, no, that's pretty much impossible, right?
So, why is it okay when Norway does it, but the height of evil when we do it?
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
The Gen Xers did alright and the boomers made out like bandits, but the Millennials are screwed. They're not getting pensions, their 401ks get eaten up by fees and the periodic stock market crashes brought on by weak regulation and risk free bail outs and their student loan debt means they can't start life until their 30s. Meanwhile outsourcing + H1-Bs means they're in intense competition for decent jobs so they worked much, much harder than their parents and grandparents for much, much less.
.com and house bubbles masked the ill effects of supply side economics until 2008 when it all came crashing down). With control of the government came control of media (Sinclair media's been allowed to buy up all local stations).
The right wing in America (who's defining feature is a pro-corporate bent that wants low wages, lax environmental regulations and lax worker protections) knows this. They're currently in control of all branches of Government (the Democratic party moved the Overton window to the left so Clinton could sail into the Whitehouse and got away with it when the
The question is, Americans may be ready for Democratic Socialism but will they get it? The ruling class has so much wealth and power now they can bury the will of the people. It's been shown a 2-3 week ad blitz is enough to change the public's opinion on anything. Hell, we can't get more than 60% of the population to agree that healthcare is a right and thanks to our political system that gives extra voting power to rural states (a Montana voter has something like 42 times more voting power than a California thanks to our Senate) and the effect of "swing states" I'm not sure any of this matters.
It literally doesn't matter how much evidence you have that Democratic Socialism works. The people opposed to it have unlimited money (we gave it to them) and the last two generations are very much in the "I got mine, fuck you" school of thought. Maybe when those people start dying. Hell, we (mostly) got gay rights. Then again the new SCOTUS might shoot all that down...
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alvinrod challenged:
I'd really need to hear what your definition of socialism actually is to square it with the notion being compatible with (or as you later suggest required for) a market (I'm assuming you mean a free one, or one that is reasonably so) economy. Otherwise I suspect you're guilty of choosing your definition of socialism post priori so that you can find one that doesn't look like a miserable failure.
Private exchange doesn't make sense if you have communal ownership.
Social democracy isn't socialism. Hell, even socialism isn't socialism.
Theory be damned, socialism in practice is a philosophy that holds societies ought to provide the essentials for life (food, clean water, shelter, education, health care) for all their members, regardless of their income level, as fundamental rights. The definition of "pure" socialism-as-economics isn't really even worth discussing, because there is no such functioning economic system in existence. And there won't be, ever, as long as human beings are fallible creatures.
Communal ownership of some basic resources (infrastructure, for instance) is baked into western democratic practice. That's the case because it makes sense that those resources be held in common. Worker-owned companies can and do thrive in hyper-capitalist America, as long as their underlying business models are realistic and responsive to their markets.
Yes, you can build a wall of rhetorical purity around the term - or you can simply acknowledge that social democracy is the modern face of socialism, and it is not failing (at least, in the Scandanavian and Benelux countries) by any objective measure.
Life is complicated. Much too complicated, in fact, to be adequately modeled by rigid, ideological absolutes ...
Check out my novel.
I use the dictionary definition:
Well, the income tax rate in Denmark is just over 60%, so it fits that definition, too.
Denmark. Denmark plays by those rules. More than 60% of income in Denmark goes to taxes. Last time I checked the definition of "most", 60 percent meets the definition.
Face it: The happiest countries in the world are the countries that have struck a balance between socialism and market economies.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Norway is probably the only oil-producing country on earth that managed to share oil revenues among citizen. Most of the time oil is a curse for the people, resulting in corruption, kleptocracy and dictatorship.
What? Why didn't the oil/gas CEOs get all of it?
It is socialism, and many Americans would love to see it happen here. And it will.
You are welcome on my lawn.
It's not that hard, the explanation was already given: a country with relatively high taxes that are used to provide (for free or a small fee) services that benefit the population at large. Mainly safety, education and healthcare. You get to keep the money you make in transactions, just not all of it. Everyone is OK with this because they value an equal society where no one is "left behind" more than a society where its acceptable if some people don't make it and others make it many lifetimes over
You are, and have been for a long time. Which makes it very strange that you fight so hard against more universal socialization (45% -> ~100%) in areas like health care that have proven so successful in other places.
In the US social democracy seems to have been successfully conflated with Soviet-style totalitarian communism.