Norway is sitting on a gigantic pile of offshore gas that it uses to generate massive profits that go into a huge fund they don't know what to do with, all of that for a 5M population that drowns into social programs.
There is literally no country in the world that has this ratio of natural resources $ / capita.
Yet, when you look at what Norway has actually produced over the past few decades in terms of innovation, companies, etc. the picture is very, very empty.
While we would generate less tax revenue per capita than Norway would, that's not the point. The point is the state should take a much larger share of the profits of extracting natural resources that state owns.
[1]: https://www.americanprogress.org/article/federal-oil-and-gas...
[2]: https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/global/Docume...
This is horrific. Also the best argument I’ve seen.
Norway may be at the far end of the spectrum, but it's not black and white. Most countries have resources and very few share them with their citizens. It's not just to be born into a system where an incumbent oligarchy has control of resources. That kind of modern realpolitik doesn't develop any kind of civic duty or pride.
Norway is white.
Source: https://www.norskpetroleum.no/en/production-and-exports/expo...
Norway EXPORTS about $80Bn worth of oil & gas per year. Which is about $14,800 per capita.
I don't agree with this being used as a primary metric for determining the worth of a nation or the value of its policies.
The #1 priority of a country should be the well-being of its people. Not "of its wealthiest"; not "of its economy". The well-being of all its people.
Norway is, last I knew, consistently among the happiest countries on Earth. I think that's a far, far more meaningful metric than "how many new ways to part people from their money have they come up with?"
(Now, I think there's a reasonable argument to be made with respect to things like basic scientific research, improved green technologies and other advances toward ending climate change, etc—particularly since that's vitally important for every nation's long-term well-being. But that's not at all the same thing as "innovation, companies, etc".)
It is also extremely disingenuous to call innovation and companies "new ways to part people from their money." People are often parting with their money because that new thing meaningfully improves their lives. Also, the basic scientific research argument is extremely overplayed. Breakthroughs in basic scientific research amount to nothing if they don't make it into the supply chain for goods and services eventually and that happens through company formation.
Then you're rich and I'm not.
This is how almost every single human being alive right now or alive in the past thinks. I have a lifelong friend who through a combination of luck, hard work, and being a legitimate genius is now wealthy ($10,000,000+ net worth and climbing).
However, he and his wife insist they are not 'rich'.
If you own a penthouse in a 30 story condominium and a lake house on the Great Lakes and haven't flown less than first / business class in the past 10 years, you're rich by any nation's standard.
Yes I know Venezuela is not Norway.
>"you just want free stuff"
Ah the old patronizing "I invent a quote the person didn't say, and then I straw man against it like they did."
Oh, wait. He was born rich, continues to suckle the teat of the US government, and will generally make money if all he does is sit there and do nothing, because money is power, and power has a gravitational pull of its own.
Also, the reason that wealthy people with families who have hundreds of years of wealth are so stingy is because they don't want to work for it.
Not foisting Uber on the world is a strength, not a weakness...
Being stable, taking care of your own stuff, that's strength.
Your idea of a strong economy has its foundations in a growth-only myth that has caused all of the issues we see before us.
Do you have anything to back this claim up? Most of what I've searched about the Nordic countries in terms of innovation seems to disagree with this assertion.
https://voxeu.org/article/nordic-innovation-cuddly-capitalis... https://www.ft.com/content/e3c15066-cd77-11e4-9144-00144feab... https://www.globalinnovationindex.org/analysis-indicator
If you look at your first link Norway is explicitly excluded. In the third link Norway is 20th while Sweden and Denmark are 2nd and 9th.
a huge chunk of oil has been taken off the global market and refining capacity can't be increased instantly
>After going into massive debt for college
college used to possible to be paid for with a part time job before the government started handing out loans which jacked up prices
Easy to get loans certainly have an impact on prices, but non tuition spending has declined on a per student basis.
There are plenty of affordable places to live. People just don't want to move there. Buying a house in a hip U.S. city/suburb isn't a human right.
There’s a growing attitude that if they’re already paying exorbitant amounts for housing and have a large amount of student debt, why not go all-in and buy a house that’s an extra $100-500K more than what they could find in a cheaper location?
There’s also a lot of FOMO from people who watched their friends over-extend themselves on expensive home purchases and then be rewarded heavily for it by rising home values. I’ve talked to a lot of younger people who have feel a severe sense of urgency to buy the most expensive house they can afford before they miss out on future gains or get priced out of the market entirely.
If you think house prices only go up rapidly and your entire adult life has confirmed that idea, you also wouldn’t be interested in moving to a boring location and buying a cheap house. You’d want to move somewhere exciting and get the most expensive house the bank will let you buy.
Getting a mortgage in the country, for a tech worker, is basically a bet that either home values will stay high enough you can back out or that you'll be able to stay remote for the length of the mortgage.
Meanwhile even shithole houses go for $250k+ in part because affordable housing is simply irreplaceable due to that housing being built before such onerous regulations being implemented.
A combination of loosening up zoning laws around residential buildings and a land value tax would do lots to facilitate affordable housing, but nobody wants to disrupt current homeowners on behalf of renters and future buyers
I see you interchanged the words I actually used "onerous regulations" and instead addressed "onerous safety regulations." Nowhere in the comment you replied to is the word "safety" found.
But it is true a lot of regulations are made in the name of "safety." What these fail to account for, is that many of these regulations increase expense, so there are tradeoffs such as those who lose healthcare or education opportunities by instead spending it making housing more safe (thus, they may actually become less safe by having a safer house). Or even worse, people who end up homeless because although they could have built an "unsafe" shack, the regulations in all their wisdom deem it's better to be dead of the elements on the street than to live in a sub-par structure.
> Its a well documented phenomenon that housing policy is driven to protect past buyers over future ones (NIMBY, using zoning laws to limit density of housing, minimal acreage in cities etc).
>A combination of loosening up zoning laws around residential buildings and a land value tax would do lots to facilitate affordable housing, but nobody wants to disrupt current homeowners on behalf of renters and future buyers
Agree on all accounts here, the stars really align against new entrants.
I know it's allowed, but is this what we want for society? I hope not.
In Japan, houses generally depreciate over time, yet the home ownership rate is still 60% because the other benefits of home ownership are so attractive.
If you know you want to live in a particular area for a long time, and you can afford it, home ownership is usually an attractive move.
But watch the rent to home price ratio. There is definitely a point where renting just makes more sense, like when I was paying $1000/month on something that the landlord was trying to sell for a $1 million. Ya, buying in that case would be purely for speculation.
Buying a house just so that at the end you own it is not an investment, that's just a purchase with a loan.
Meanwhile the rest of the economy de-industrialized, manufacturing jobs became more scarce because technology increased productivity, whatever was too labor cost intensive went overseas, and whatever jobs couldn't be offshored, retail and service jobs, aren't capable of having the same productivity gains as what was happening in tech. There are pretty hard limits to what restaurant staff, or retail employees, or other regular jobs can do to become more productive. That is why their wages are stagnant, the only reason those jobs exist is because they can't be exported, in some places they even import foreign workers to do those jobs to keep wages low. This is why unions fell out of favor, labor has no leverage anymore since their jobs can just be exported, or they cant but they are low skill jobs so employers can just churn people or grab import immigrants to do it because employees are nothing more than cogs in a machine that Amazon hasn't figured out how to automate yet.
Keep in mind that this is all by design, capital was liberalized, economies globalized, college loans guaranteed, nimbys limiting development in real estate and energy, these were all policies that people wanted and politicians enacted, whether or not they were fully aware of the second order consequences which are why things feel so messed up now.
What people wanted to send almost all labor intensive jobs like manufacturing overseas? Or sending almost all the production of semiconductors which are the primary building blocks of technology overseas? The corporate ownership? Yes. The vast population of citizens? No.
Do you realize that the United States mainly exports cardboard and oil plus a few car parts for BMW? While we import almost everything else.
Finance and tech remained because they are top-heavy industries that require only a few high paid people to execute the majority of those businesses. Bottom line is that this is not sustainable over the long haul. People will revolt as they fully realize that a basic task like buying their own property for their family is unachievable and other basic expenses like healthcare, rent, transportation, and food take up all or more of their income.
Finance was not a glamorous, high paid profession like Wall Street depicted before liberalization, it has only become what it is now after that, that is the change I am talking about. Most of the things that blew up either massively increased productivity or was adjacent to the financialization of the economy and benefited from the uneven expansion of the money supply via the Cantillion effect.
You may think that it doesn’t matter what the vast population wanted, but the slack in the system has been narrowed so far now that even the last bastion of the Fed cannot bail out the top-heavy institutions much longer.
That's the start of the top comment, really? We're emerging from the era of unprecedentedly low returns on capital. There are trillions in bonds with negative nominal yield ffs.
Just getting corporations and billionaire individuals to pay some taxes would be a nice start.
Could you elaborate on this reference? I am not familiar with this.
That's the point. For most there is absolutely no escaping that debt so they can't possibly get out of this situation (hence "neoslavery").
This form of coercion is violence and that's the point of having a budget shortfall in your existence: to make you a compliant worker whether you want to be or not.
Another term for this (and what people think we're heading to) is neo-feudalism because we're getting closer and closer to being serfs effectively.
[1]: https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2019/10/21/the-spiralling...
You load 16 tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
St. Peter, don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company storeThere's four boxes.
There are a handful of regional books detailing the mine wars (Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields, The WV Coal Wars/more elementary and Robert Shogan's The Battle of Blair Mountain) that are worth checking out. PBS (American Experience?) also had a 2 hour special a few years back that focused on WV and Mother Jones that was worth watching.
https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/what-kafala-system
and
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2019/02/reality-...
and
If you have to have ever-increasing profits, you have to ALSO have purchasers with ever-increasing purchasing power.
You can slide by for a while by wedging yourself into a currently existing system and tapping some of its resources, but eventually if that drain isn't backfilled with more then it will run dry.
Which consumer products do you own come from Norway?
The only consumer product that is produced in volume, is fish.
Keep in mind that Norway only has a population similar to South Carolina. There is a limit to how diverse the tech sector can be.
Sweden, the closest neighbour, is governed in very similar ways, and has plenty of familiar consumer oriented products.
Are you wearing Norwegian made clothes ? Is your house filled Norwegian made appliances ?
You do have a point, though think a comparison to Sweden (only double Norway’s population, but with many worldwide household name businesses) is more fair.
There is also some really interesting scientific research.
If you're telling me that the AVERAGE person in the West is worse off now than in 1925 or even 1965, you're delusional.
MAYBE the average white male. But even that I am highly skeptical...
Was life better in 1995 or 2005 or 2012? I dunno. There's ups and downs. The trend line has been obvious.
This time around interest is lagging inflation by atleast 1 year.
In the 70s the rate and salaries increased BEFORE the inflation occured = inflation was rate/salary driven and because debt level was lower.
Today salaries are not increasing 10% per year for most people.
So I actually think the interest rate hike increases the scarcity inflation eventually since energy production need low interest loans to build new sources.
The only sure thing about the hike is that ZERO new companies will be created, for good and for bad.
How many businesses are equity funded in the first place?
We did not have capital to start our business.
Most small businesses starting from zero can't get capital in the first place (excluding personal funds, family funds which aren't usually charging interest tied to the Fed benchmark)
Those tech companies that do get tons of capital despite negative value are somewhat unique and for sure interest rates will eventually affect that. Valuations are already starting to come back to at least the Stratosphere ;)
Just like you would not buy a house now, you wouldn't start a business.
I'm talking statistically, not like a rule. ZERO relative to lower rates.
You mean wind, solar and nuclear power? I mean they are capital intensive because the operational costs are dwarfed by the initial investment. With coal and gas, the fuel is an ongoing and high expense compared to the power plant itself.
Wind and solar are only interesting in very small solutions (think small sailing boats), nuclear is super energy intense to build! Hydro is the ONLY balanced investment but all good locations are already in use.
Rising wages? There has been no meaningful real increase in wages in 40 years despite a massive increase in productivity. Profits keep going up and up. The expectations for profits keep going up. The problem here is that the people who make companies possible don't get to share in the proceeds of what they contribute to.
Rising wages and lower profits would actually represent in workers actually getting an actual real increase in wages and getting a greater share in the fruits of their labor. But no, that's unacceptable. We have to raise prices to maintain the profits and effectively erode those wage increases.
The real failure here is the government.
Take rising energy prices. The government could take action to hasten development of existing leases and/or restrict the export of refined petroleum products. Oil hasn't gotten more expensive to produce. Oil and gas companies are simply raking in massive profits.
What we actually need is a system like Norway where we don't simply give away natural resources like this for private investors to profit off. At least in Norway, the government is making a ton of revenue from the increased prices, which it can direct back to people who need it.
Housing? Shelter is or should be a human right. What we're allowing to happen here through investors buying up housing stock (and jacking up the prices), second homes, AirBnB and so on has reached the point of being a human rights violation IMHO. Also those skyrocketing rents do even more to erode the income of particularly lower income people to keep them living paycheck to paycheck.
This is modern serfdom in action. The government acts at the behest of the capital-owning class regardless of party and part of that is having a compliant labor pool. This is turning into the West's version of Pakistan's brick kilns.
After going into massive debt for college, having to pay a huge amount for your car, gas and rent and so on, you're absolutely showing up to work. That's the point.
A budget shortfall is built into your existence.