>the US experiences significantly higher GDP per capita
This is to be expected, if Americans are working longer hours than their European counterparts.
If you do a little back-of-the-envelope normalization (GDP/capita/average hours worked), the results are much closer. Norway, of course, absolutely dominates by this metric.
>This is North Sea oil, right? Hard to generalize from.
Wasn't really generalizing, just stating fact.
Norway has far fewer proven oil reserves than Iran, Iraq, Venezuela, Algeria, Ecuador, Nigeria and on and on...
Oil is not a panacea. The combination of a progressive culture and resource endowment tends to win. But don't assume that the latter is most important.
> The combination of a progressive culture and resource endowment
Don't forget having a relatively culturally and ethnically homogenous population (when compared to countries like the US), something that is often forgotten when holding up Scandinavian countries (esp. Norway) as a model.
USA is the country with a domestic market of 300+ million people, largely English-speaking, and has not seen a war on its soil in modern times, right? Hard to compare to anything else, then.
It's funny how people immediately just say because oil whenever it is brought up, and think that it magically explains everything. Yes, a ridiculous proportion of export is from that industry. But it's not like finding oil immediately makes people prosperous - you have to manage it. Do you want long-term prosperity? Or do you want boom towns with high local inflation, high crime etc.?
Going into how the Norwegian petroleum industry works would reveal a strategy that is very different from how countries like the US (or Canada in the prairie provinces) would have handled the same discovery. And it works.
Yes, it did. And how it is and has been managed is a large part of well it has worked for the country, which is a lot more involved and interesting than "Oil was found in the North Sea in the late 60's and everyone lived happily ever after, the end".
But since you seem to be an expert, how about you enlighten me on this subject.
I am in fact an expert. I have a background in finance and economics and could speak for hours on this subject.
You seem to want to pick a fight, based on something I didn't even actually say or imply (which you carried over from another comment). That doesn't seem like very friendly behavior for HN. I never said a single thing implying Norway's financial well being was guaranteed or automatic or required no effort.
I said Norway is prosperous due to oil. That is true, and their prosperity began with the oil boom, and that is not a coincidence.
A five second comparison between how Venezuela has managed their resources and how Norway has, would tell you everything you need to know about the care Norway has taken to manage their good fortune, but that doesn't change in any way the fact that their good fortune is derived from the oil boom that saw their output peak at a massive 3.4 million bpd (particularly massive compared to their tiny population).
> You seem to want to pick a fight, based on something I didn't even actually say or imply (which you carried over from another comment).
Pick a fight? You're refering to that whole 'care to enlighten me'? Would you have preferred a bit less sarcasm to go with that question? It seems to me that the aggression started with you, implying that I didn't understand the importance of the petroleum industry. Even though it was the only thing I was discussing in that post that you replied to.
All I said was that the combination of petroleum and the management of it has been important. Clearly, if you take petroleum out of the equation, management doesn't really help much, now does it? So I took it for granted that readers could see that petroleum was a crucial part of the equation.
You might appreciate that, after explaining how management of natural resources like this plays a significant part in how well it works to a nation's advantage, someone comes in and reduces it back to "oil, that's it", I might get a bit irritated? And if the point was not to reduce it to that, why would one even reply with a one-liner like that, as it doesn't really say anything novel on the topic?
This is to be expected, if Americans are working longer hours than their European counterparts.
If you do a little back-of-the-envelope normalization (GDP/capita/average hours worked), the results are much closer. Norway, of course, absolutely dominates by this metric.
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