Subsitute Norway for non-oil Sweden, a country with huge immigration. Sure it's a small and "rich" country, but the cultural things like good work/life balance applies anyway.
Edit: as was pointed out to me in another comment: this is using a loose definition of "life" which includes 23 hour nights at freezing temperatures. Not for everyone.
It absolutely does make a difference to have the world's largest sovereign wealth fund[0], as well as the economic status that allows you to leave it untouched. Simply having guaranteed future access to that kind of wealth changes your political and economic options today.
> Subsitute Norway for non-oil Sweden, a country with huge immigration
Sweden is also comparably small (same size as NYC proper), and much of the "huge immigration" comes from other Scandinavian countries or EU member states. Sweden refuses to publish data on ethnic backgrounds[0], but by all accounts it is overwhelmingly white[1]. Of the top ten countries of origin for Swedish immigrants, 6 are predominantly-white European countries, and the rest are countries with majority Muslim population[2]. Muslim immigrants in Sweden have on average a dramatically lower quality-of-life than the general Swedish population and compared to what is being discussed here. On top of that, they face incredible racism and xenophobia.
So if anything, this supports the point that allowing free migration (as all US cities do) brings average quality-of-life down, not up. (Or to put it another way, it's very easy to maintain a high quality-of-life when you have the freedom to exercise strict control over your borders).
[0] http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-24049876
[1] Manhattan, by contrast, was majority non-white for most of the 20th century, and only just surpassed 50% white in ~2011.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Sweden#Populat...
It probably makes a political difference yes, but I mean that if you woke a swede in norway, they wouldn't really notice apart from that everyone sounded funny.
> much of the "huge immigration" comes from other Scandinavian countries or EU member states.
The biggest recently is Syria, followed by Eritrea (2014).
I'm not saying that immigration is a net positive economically in Sweden (this is a hot topic, which isn't PC to talk about btw), short term at least that is very hard to believe, especially for refugees. Long term you get a different set of factors though when you weigh in demographics etc, the opinion on immigration is somewhat positive here though.
Going slightly OT here but I'm pretty sure that racism/xenophobia against muslims in Sweden is no worse than elsewhere. I'm not saying things are peachy, but incredible seems like an overstatement in this case.
If anything, I'm surprised how tolerant this society is.
You must be confusing it with something else. Sweden is slightly bigger than California (450295 vs 423970 km2).
That is when we exert our five+ weeks of vacation and travel to a warmer place...
Track the price of oil against Norway's extreme GDP per capita growth from 2000 to 2008 ($37k per capita to $95k per capita), a time in which the price of oil went up ~10 fold. It's plainly obvious that Norway's economy is highly dependent on the performance of oil. Their wealth boom the prior 15 years came almost exclusively from the big oil run. Until the year 2000, they did not stand out as especially wealthy compared to other top tier nations. Their GDP per capita was almost identical to the US throughout the 1990s.
Each norwegian citizen is like Warren Buffett, they sit on a shitload of money but you can't tell.
> But I do think the article is right in pointing out a lack of options in the U.S. if you want to live a lifestyle that doesn't center around work.
This is the "option" of being both a very small and very rich state, which is simply not feasible.
To put this into perspective, Norway is just over half the population of New York City. If New York City had half a million dollars of oil reserves per citizen (as you point out) and started to mint its own currency, and established immigration and trade barriers[0], yes, we would see a massive quality-of-life improvement compared to the status quo.
But that's simply not an option, because (a) we can't produce massive oil riches out of thin air, and (b) NYC is not a sovereign state.
[0] Norway is not part of the EU, but even if it were, EU member states are able to restrict trade and immigration within themselves to a far greater degree than a city or even state in the US can.