> But Norway uses the oil revenue to build a better future. Which everyone will benefit from.

How do you get to that? Norway has extremely tight immigration policies. They hardly let anybody in. Their multi trillion dollar bounty will primarily benefit a few million people, while they export extreme per capita pollution; their per capita oil production is consistently among the top five or six globally.

What spectacular technological breakthroughs and exports has Norway produced from their oil riches (in clean energy or otherwise)? I'm not aware of any. Contrast them with neighboring Sweden for example when it comes to technological innovation. Norway isn't that type of culture, they're much more akin to the insular, small kingdom petro states of the Middle East. You don't have to take my word for it, you can look at their primary industries, their nobel production, their scientific output and their technology invention.

> Contrast them with neighboring Sweden for example when it comes to technological innovation.

Well, all the scandinavian countries are very innovative compared to their population, so that's not a very fair comparison.

Anyway, Norway is still extremely innovative. Maybe not in consumer facing and software related industries, which is what gets visibility in Hacker News. Norway doesn't have Spotify or IKEA.

But Norway has the worlds cleanest production of aluminum. It has been innovative in fertilizer production. It has a very strong microelectronics design industry. ARM's GPUs are designed here, most of the worlds Bluetooth Low Energy microcontrollers and other RF microcontrollers. It has the worlds leading automotive CMOS imaging sensor design center. Etc. Tomra is a world leader in recycling technology. And lets not forget all the non-petroleum marine innovation.

Yes, the oil industry is dominating. It's very difficult to get investments outside of petroleum (although that is improving as the desire to diversify is growing).

But seriously, Norway is doing about as well as can be expected of an oil producing nation. And if you think it's realistic to expect oil production to be cut on the supply side, you're hopelessly naive.

> They hardly let anybody in.

Norway is in the top ten in terms of the migration rate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_net_migra...

> their nobel production

In terms of Scientific Nobel prizes, Norway is in the 7th position, with a rate of 15 per 10 million compared to Sweden(rank 5) with 17 per 10 million. Not a big difference.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_laureates_per_capita#Sci...

"How do you get to that? Norway has extremely tight immigration policies. They hardly let anybody in."

I'm an immigrant here in Norway. The immigration process has been pretty straightforward. Much better than the crap I read about the US system. I'll add that I'm american, and have had to go through the entire process.

Folks from the EU have it fairly easy - basically, so long as you have a job, you can stay. Simply tell the government you are here (there might be another step or two, but it is simple). Like a lot of places, you just have to go through the right channels and have a reason to be here.

A lot of the folks I know are immigrants as well, from different places in the world.

You're not entirely wrong, but it's important to be careful as well because the immigration authorities in the nordics are bureaucratic monsters. There are many examples of people being deported because of a mistake entirely out of their hands, such as an employer getting the wrong date on a form, or not paying salaries on time (which can easily happen if people don't have a bank account set up yet.) These things sound like they could just be corrected by sending the forms again or whatever, yet people are deported for the dumbest reasons.

These institutions need fixing, but it never seems to be a priority and most definitely not in the current political climate. :o(

I don't know if it is "luckily" or not, but my stay here isn't actually conditional on work, since I wound up here through marriage. It is very conditional on being married, but that hasn't been an issue either. I have a in-house Norwegian to help through most of the bureaucracy.

And you are correct, it isn't perfect, but I think those stories happen everywhere. I'm still happy to be dealing with these bureaucratic monsters as opposed to the american immigration monsters.

You are most definitely correct on the current political climate. If anything, they have made things more difficult for folks. Initial immigration hasn't been so bad, but they did increase the requirements for permanent residency so that I have to prove I'm self-supporting, work for 12 months, be in school for a year, (even though my spouse has to prove he makes enough to support me each year) or be here a long time - I think they said 8-10 years. Again, though, not impossible by any means. It just made me wait longer for citizenship.

Can you share a rough estimate housing & living expenses ?

My understanding that Scandinavian countries are very expensive for every day living expenses.

(As a single healthy educated adult male, its too late to enjoy the free child care, education, health care, etc)

It is honestly harder for me to do so. I'm a cheap person by nature - I have the stuff that I want, my spouse (who has had to support me for much of the time) simply takes care of most of without my input. Also, I live in a cheap, small attic apartment that isn't much more than student housing :) We are slowly saving for a house, so it works out.

But they are expensive. A single bus ride (paid in cash) is as much or more as a latte. Norway is a bit more expensive - to the point there is a (free!) bus that goes between here (Trondheim) and just over the border in Sweden so people can shop cheaply. The amount I spend on groceries and a bit of spending money would more than pay rent and my food (but not all of utilities) in Indiana. I also eat well (mostly vegetarian save for some fish at least once a week). If you go far enough north, you get taxed less, though, to encourage people to live up north. I'm not sure living expenses are cheaper, though.

On the other hand, wages are different. You might make less as a programmer but more when working in retail. And I can definitely plan my expenses better.

Depends on what city and country you're comparing with, and how you like to live. Scandinavia isn't cheap, but it's generally also value for money.

I've used this tool in the past, and found it good to get a rough, general estimate: https://www.expatistan.com/cost-of-living/comparison/stockho...?

>Norway has extremely tight immigration policies.

Norway is in the EEA. If you're an EU/EEA/CH citizen, you're in. May be difficult for people not from Europe, but it's not closed off.

>How do you get to that? Norway has extremely tight immigration policies. They hardly let anybody in.

That is a myth (or propaganda). Norway immigration population stands at 16.8%. For example the US immigration population is under 15%.

This. Feel free to check: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d...

It's not propaganda or a myth. Norway mostly only allows in skilled labor immigration, thus they have tight immigration policies. I didn't say they allow zero immigration.

Norway also went out of its way to avoid the very large immigration influx that eg Sweden allowed. They have a careful, rigid immigration approach (for obvious reasons, they'd be flooded instantly by immigration if they allowed it). Their immigration for 2017 was the lowest number for the last decade and it has been declining persistently since 2011. They're locking things down.

The US doesn't use a merit or equivalent based immigration system, as most developed countries do, including Norway and other nations such as Canada or Australia. That means if you are a low skill or low wage worker, you can actually get into the US. It's one of the few developed nations that allows such a thing.

Edit for trhway's comment below (I'm throttled on my replies):

I said nothing about absolute figures, I'm aware of the population difference between the two. One would naturally adjust what a 'large influx' means based on the population figures per country.

Show me the vast count of refugees that Norway took in versus Sweden. In just 4-5 years, Sweden took in 600,000 people, many of them from countries like Syria. While Sweden was doing that, Norway remained locked down by comparison (as did Finland).

Norway's very tight immigration policies would never allow that mass influx of refugees to happen. I don't necessarily blame them, they have an extraordinary situation for themselves. They're not interested in flooding their country with low wage / low skill persons that would dilute their very wealthy welfare state heavily through cost addition (without the off-setting tax base gain you get from skilled immigration). It's a cultural choice. Sweden is now seeing blow-back from the choices they made, in the rise of anti-immigration far right political parties there and a rejection of their former immigration policies.

Norway is one of the most desirable countries on earth to live. It has one of the highest standards of living. Its people are among the richest that have ever existed in history. You know why they aren't drowning in immigration? That's their tight immigration policies in action. Otherwise, it'd be a million people a year pouring in.

>Norway also went out of its way to avoid the very large immigration influx that eg Sweden allowed.

what are you talking about?! Have you tried to Google? Sweden has 2x population of Norway and 1.4M immigration population which makes it under 15%.

>Show me the vast count of refugees that Norway took in versus Sweden.

With regard to specifically refugees - both countries mostly have refugees from Middle East and Africa - Norway has 160K total refugee population, Sweden - 230K. Thus one can say that Sweden even less refugee friendly than Norway.

>In just 4-5 years, Sweden took in 600,000 people, many of them from countries like Syria. While Sweden was doing that, Norway remained locked down by comparison (as did Finland).

sorry, man, you just have to at least to google before posting.

"Norway mostly only allows in skilled labor immigration, thus they have tight immigration policies."

That's just not true. I'm not skilled. I don't have a degree. I did happen to meet a Norwegian some years back and marry him. In addition, folks from the EU can come over and work. There is a strong immigrant workforce doing non-skilled work. Bartenders, janitors, factory work, and so on.

The US system has its downsides. The Norwegian system is pretty straighforward with what is expected of folks - or at least that has been my experience. The US has a lottery for some things, and the wait time for green cards is ridiculous. While some of the politicians in power aren't so immigrant happy (They recently increased the qualifacations for permanent residency and a bit on citizensip), at least the king promotes messages of inclusiveness. Trump, on the other hand, doesn't.

They build the better future by just investing into clean technologies. In Norway, over 40% of all new cars are electric. They are switching to electric ferries. Now, as the article reports, they start investing in electric airplanes. They might not build these things, but by spending their money on electric mobility, they create a market. As I wrote before, what enabled us to have cheap solar now, was all the subsidized buying of solar cells, when they were expensive, creating the engineering and production capacity required to have cheap solar cells.

Progress doesn't come from innovation alone, but also from finance and adoption. Norway are doing a good job at raising demand for electric transportration and acting as a testing ground and leader for the future. This is something all rich countries should do. / Fellow Swede

> What spectacular technological breakthroughs and exports has Norway produced from their oil riches (in clean energy or otherwise)? I'm not aware of any.

A lot of Norwegian innovation is in areas you don't hear about, often marine, sub sea or aquaculture. You won't hear about a revolutionary new ship bow (for example X-Bow) on your regular news sites, or some niche underwater technology.

Other than that, there's tons of stuff happening with green tech. Wind.. Electrification of shipping and ferries, etc.

I'm betting you're exposed to Norwegian technology on a daily basis without realising. AVR (Atmel) came out of Norway. Nordic Semiconductor, Energy Micro, etc, etc. Your gadgets are full of tech originally designed in Norway.

Most progress on clean energy doesn't come from the breakthroughs alone - you also need large deployment to bring costs down.

That's certainly what they appear to be doing with electric planes. This will spur innovation and lower prices.