Fun fact, but there's essentially zero correlation between income inequality & wealth inequality- and the Nordics have some of the highest wealth inequality in the world. For example in 2019 by Gini coefficient, the most unequal countries in the world were #1 the Netherlands, #2 Russia, #3 Sweden, and #4 the United States (with Denmark coming in at #8). The data is clearly pretty noisy, but as far as I can see Sweden was again more unequal than the US in 2021:
Meanwhile Southern Europe has reasonably high income inequality, but not much wealth inequality. Just kind of an underdiscussed piece, especially as many people like to issue catastrophic warnings about how wealth inequality destroys a society- then quickly change the subject when you note that the Nordics are more unequal than America
Doesn't mean it isn't done. The Lego family was caught flying their private jet all over the world so they sold it and now have exclusive renting rights to a plane in a hangar operated by another company.
I live in Denmark. I am Danish. Too many people nurse fantasies of the Nordics as some kind of socialist utopia.
The fact is Denmark grows more corrupt by the day. They keep pushing the retirement age so I will be working until I'm 72. Healthcare quality has been dropping for more than 40 years now. The wealthy own the majority of land. We are currently home to a government that is leading the EU in its push for a surveillance mandate that is frankly terrifying in its scope. That same government pushed through the most garbage mega-project I have personally ever witnessed—that we the taxpayers are supposed to fund—despite voter outcry. Digital tenders get sold in backroom deals to a single company that is so ethically bankrupt they've been called out numerous times for workplace violations by our unions.
We're all fucked in the global slide toward authoritarianism and the wealthy's capture of the world economy. And while they get fat supping on our labor we're at each other's throats for who can be crowned the greatest victim.
It's unlikely you will have any retirement except your own savings, as the unfunded pension funds start to collapse globally. Maybe Danish is different but you can check from local sources.
> Just kind of an underdiscussed piece, especially as many people like to issue catastrophic warnings about how wealth inequality destroys a society- then quickly change the subject when you note that the Nordics are more unequal than America
Ask someone from the Nordics about housing prices. Do you think they’ll change the subject?
> many people like to issue catastrophic warnings about how wealth inequality destroys a society- then quickly change the subject when you note that the Nordics are more unequal than America
A missing piece of the puzzle may be regulatory capture and a strong political/legal structure that resists the worst ambitions of cruel people whether they be wealthy or poor.
You can think of wealth like the potential energy of a spring under tension. If used properly it is capable of powering the most amazing and intricate social mechanisms but if poorly regulated it destroys social fabric and the well being of every day people.
Things like Citizens United and lobbyists representing cruel wealthy interests running unchecked over American democracy are examples of the socially destructive potential energy of wealth.
I'm also curious if there's a selection pressure in play where the more cruel wealthy people in the Nordic countries move to the US because they see more opportunity to make money and be cruel in that environment while wealthy people who have some affinity with their nation and the people of it choose to remain and don't or can't lobby for terribly antisocial policies.
> I'm also curious if there's a selection pressure in play where the more cruel wealthy people in the Nordic countries move to the US
That's an interesting thought! It would make sense that the people who care less about others and more about themselves would find it easier and more beneficial to leave. I wonder if anyone has ever done a study on the wealth, personality traits and political views of the people who leave.
People need to start getting specific about their grievances. It’s not inequality per se. People don’t care if some people have more than them. There are specific concrete things.
For Americans the big ones are: a health problem can destroy your life and your life’s savings, housing costs are too high, and college is too expensive and leaves people in debt.
Housing, health care, and tuition.
Two out of three of those are better in Europe, mostly: health care and college costs. They are better even if things are on paper more unequal.
High housing costs are a disease across the entire developed world.
I will generalize but by my experience most Americans I have met just can't fathom to pay (= taxed) for some common good. Why should I pay for someone's healthcare when I live healthy and all I see that others are smoking? Why should I pay for someone's free train ticket when I only travel by car? This I saw across all genders, age groups, and political affiliation. Americans have this hyper individualist mindset that no other country does in the planet. It's good for some things like innovation (see the HN crowd) but not necessarily a benefit for the society.
Americans are literally socially selected for that mindset. Around the world, the vast majority of people don’t want to leave their home countries: https://news.gallup.com/poll/652748/desire-migrate-remains-r.... Even in sub-saharan africa, only 37% would emigrate if they had the choice. In asia it’s single digits. So a large share of America’s population is literally made up of the most antisocial 10-20% of the population that would leave, along with their descendants.
I want to question the assumption here that "pioneer mindset" is an inherited trait, and generally whether we can say anything useful about people living today based on the choices of their ancestors several generations back.
People emigrated from Europe to America because they were out of options. It was not a case of throwing away all of your possessions to go on an adventure. Rather, the vast majority emigrated because it was literally the only way to move up in a world where land ownership was the key to wealth, and your older brother already inherited the farm, or your family did not own any land in the first place. Or perhaps you couldn't even find an apprenticeship.
Keep in mind that all of Europe existed in an extremely rigid social hierarchy with practically zero mobility. Most people in Europe lived in abject poverty. America offered some social mobility, at least to those who came there by choice.
Yes, thank you. A huge percentage of historical European immigration to the US was by groups that functionally had zero wealth or social mobility in their home countries. Working in a steel mill in the new world was hell, but it beat generational rural poverty back home.
The hyper-individualism of modern America is something that has developed fairly recently, even if it had earlier roots.
Taxes as various European states and US states are sometimes on par. Everyone pays for somebody’s health problems, Americans as well, through insurance, it is just health insurance is mandatory in Europe. The other stuff boils down to effective use of tax money, it is easier to do it in a smaller state compared to US or Canada or similar. Individualism has an effect but at this day and age it is about lobby groups politicising any topic they do not like. FYI nobody likes to pay taxes.
Also tobacco users cost less in healthcare because they far more often die right around retirement age, never incurring the far more expensive age related healthcare. Being a smoker also disqualifies them from many common procedures, and also the sin taxes smokers pay on tobacco often exceeds their entire lifetime medical costs.
People who blame smokers for healthcare costs are just looking for someone to blame because they either don't want to admit, or don't realize, that their 90 year old granny taking 30 medications a day, having hip replacements, and 3rd round of cancer costs as much in healthcare per year as most people do over 2 or 3 decades.
There are tobacco taxes in the US but it varies by state. Also it seems US is in the lower range on smoking rate compared to many other OECD countries.
>Why should I pay for someone's healthcare when I live healthy and all I see that others are smoking?
This is a common bad, not a common good. Fundamentally people follow incentives, and when you financially punish good behaviour and reward bad behaviour (make someone with healthy habits pay for someone else's unhealthy habits), you disincentivise the good behaviour and incentivise the bad behaviour. At a society-wide scale, that leads to more of the bad behaviour.
I think the incentive of not getting a life altering or threatening disease is much stronger than having to pay for the treatment yourself. If the cost has any effect on choices, it must be very small because it does not show in statistics.
Sure, but making people pay for those treatments themselves does not change anything. For many the quick satisfaction of good food is simply a stronger incentive than a healthy body or a fatter wallet 10 years later.
1) Excess calorie consumption has only been true since about 1990. Up until that point, average heights were still increasing, so that meant that a significant chunk of the population were still undernourished. We are only about one generation from that mark, so people's social habits still haven't moved on from scarcity.
2) Nicotine, in particular, is quite good for appetite suppression. Unfortunately, the delivery system most people choose (smoking) causes more problems that the obesity it suppresses.
3) How easily people lose weight on GLP-1 agonists shows that obesity isn't just lack of willpower. The human body has a lot of systems encouraging you to hoard calories metabolically and very few systems telling you to stop. It is quite impressive that a single drug can somehow flip those metabolic systems completely in the other direction.
> 3) How easily people lose weight on GLP-1 agonists shows that obesity isn't just lack of willpower
What? I’m about as pro-GLP1 as it gets - see past comments on the subject.
But if anything it absolutely slams the door shut on obesity about being anything but overeating when the environment made it so damn easy to do so. The method of action is you are less hungry and eat less. Full stop. Secondary effects are a rounding error.
Sure, there are societal reasons people are fat now. I don’t actually believe willpower is a real thing when surrounded by unhealthy addictive choices. But being able to turn off the hunger switch and turn to easy mode is absolutely the reason these drugs work and are life changing.
I’m not ashamed to admit my being fat was due to lack of willpower to not eat excessively. Having a way to make it so I didn’t need to engage said willpower even half as much was the reason I’m now down to 12% body fat and am in shape from working out heavily. It’s not like you take the drug and you magically get thin - you still need to work at it and make healthy choices. They simply become easier to do.
Pretending it’s otherwise for the vast majority of people is a disservice.
The best most honest way I’ve come up with to describe these drugs is a performance enhancing drug for your diet.
Changing society at a root cause level would of course be far better, but that’s not realistic on any human lifetime sort of scale. This is the best we have for people alive today.
I agree with your comment, except that framing it as "lack of willpower" is unfortunate, because it implies that you should somehow be able to ignore these signals - if only you had enough "willpower". It seems to require an untenable amount of willpower to sustain a resistance to these signals, so perhaps it isn't realistic.
One of the things that blew my mind when I moved to the US from Europe were the enormous portions and the amount of grease in every single dish when eating out. Even simple salads were shiny and drenched in oil. It only takes a small percentage of excessive calories over long periods to explain the obesity epidemic.
Trust me, we live this. And it's always someone else's unhealthy habits; I remember a chainsmoking manager expounding at lunch about the awful burden drug users put on the economy.
Norway is sitting on a gold mine, I mean, an oil field. It can afford many things other countries can't, while also prudently saving much of its oil income.
It looks like Norway's oil revenue per capita is somewhere between $20,000 and $90,000, while the USA's is between $200 and $800, depending on how you calculate it.
If you don’t mind me asking, how were you able to immigrate there? I have family that lives in Norway on my father’s side and I’ve sometimes fantasized about packing up my life and moving there after I visited them and saw what an amazing place it is. The few times I’ve been manic enough to actually consider its realistic plausibility I’ve always been stopped at the dead end of their immigration policy. Maybe things have changed but when I looked into it, it seemed like a very difficult bar to meet (I would’ve either tried to find a skilled trade immigration policy, or perhaps used my extended family as a reason, but neither of those routes seemed particularly possible).
That is a great question and I would be happy to share.
Varnish Software had a job posting in Norway and I asked them if they would consider a US candidate. At that time I was living in the US and was looking for opportunities to immigrate to Norway (or Finland).
After I accepted the position they helped with the “skilled workers visa” process.
Moving abroad has a lot of logistics. Depending on your situation in the US, I suggest to sell, rent, or store your belongings in the US and only bring what you can as luggage on the Airplane. In my case, we had an estate sale, asked family to hang on to sentimental items, and gave away everything else. When we left the US to fly to Norway, we had 5 suitcases of what we needed/wanted.
My partner (at that time) and I had a 6mo old child.
We started with an Airbnb in the Sagene area of Oslo. After landing we rented a car and drove to the Airbnb.
That turned into a 6mo rental (outside of Airbnb) as we explored the area for either an apartment to rent or buy. Again, it helped to have minimal possessions as we moved around to find the area that suited us and our family.
Eventually we settled in an area called Torshov.
June or July is a great time move, the city is calm and almost everyone is on summer holiday.
It can take several months before you are in the banking system to receive your salary, so in advance you will need to have a buffer of savings and to keep a bank account in the US.
Forward all your mail in the US to family, friend, lawyer, or service to keep you informed. Forwarding mail to Norway is possible, but it will be delayed by at least one month, which can be a problem for any bills that are due.
I'd like to point out that any country providing universal healthcare is going to be a big improvement in standard of living for many of my friends. The sometimes hellish nature of the USA's for-profit healthcare system is very real.
Then there's crippling student debt following you nearly to the grave, gun violence, etc.
We grew up being told we had more freedom than anybody else, only to learn as adults that not only does freedom carry a heavy price, but so does every flu and broken bone.
Freedom is ridiculous. It's not what Americans have nor want. It's free in a warzone. True freedom is total chaos. Americans do not have nor want real freedom.
Concerns over gun violence (or violence in general) are largely misplaced. Almost all of the violent crime happens in a handful of cities such as Baltimore, Chicago, and Washington DC that have been wrecked by decades of failed progressive policies. And even in those cities the violence is concentrated in few bad neighborhoods. We need to fix those places: the residents shouldn't have to live in gang war zones. But at the same time those aren't the same neighborhoods that HN users would live anyway. The rest of the USA is no more violent than most other developed countries.
That’s just not true. I’m from Europe but lived in Boulder for several years. For example this shooting (1) happened 5 min walking distance from my home. My kids’ school had several lockdowns due to gun-related stuff in the neighborhood. Something like that is unimaginable in Europe, and big part of why we moved back.
The state statistics are meaningless. As I already explained above, almost all of the murders in every state are concentrated in a handful of neighborhoods. It's a very localized problem.
As for the specific cities you mentioned, policies enacted by local governments over decades generally fall into the progressive category. State and federal governments certainly share some blame for the problem but because the causes are mostly local any solutions will also have to be local.
If gun violence is concentrated in a few neighborhoods and all states contain such neighborhoods, then state statistics do matter, don't they?
We can all agree that taking away peoples' guns would lead to less gun violence. (This is the part where you say "but that's impossible anyway" or "but the 2nd amendment" which doesn't really refute my point)
Not sure what is progressive about the fact that one can easily obtain a gun. Pool with many legal guns makes it easier to obtain it illegal one as well.
There would be even less violence in Mexico if they were not bordering USA.
From my experience, living in the US was dystopian compared to what I have experienced in Oslo. I have only been here for 6 years, so given a long enough timeframe that could change.
I think it comes down to mindset. For example You have what you need to live, but the things you want are expensive.
Housing is a problem, but it seems that is a problem almost everywhere. That said, it is not always “easy” to obtain what you want, but I think that is good for society. For example the second hand market is strong.
> A key finding is that a more equal predistribution of earnings, rather than income redistribution, is the main reason for the lower income inequality in the Nordic countries compared to the U.S. and the U.K. While the direct effects of taxes and transfers contribute to the relatively low income inequality in the Nordic countries, the key factor is that the distribution of pre-tax market income, particularly labor earnings, is much more equal in the Nordics than in the U.S. and the U.K.
Yes and this can be good or bad if you work hard and your colleagues do not. I have worked in Norway since 2017. I like it, but I do think that there are other options. Americans like to complain about everything but, at least as far as it goes on hacker news, they have way more options for high salaries than the same workers in Norway do. Of course there are exceptions but having easier access to salaries that are above 100k USD and can grow substantially from 100k USD really changes things. But on the academic side, American PhD students are treated like shit and make shit, whereas Norwegian PhD students get 50-60k salary (totally liveable in Oslo), pension, free healthcare, and likely no teaching requirements, and a lot of academic freedom.
In Norway there also is a strong emphasis on generational wealth being transferred forward. This has made the housing market in Oslo somewhat impenetrable if you didn't have a parent helping you out on your first flat when you are 20.
I'm not saying Norway is bad, I think it's a great place to live if you can accept the winter and that you will never be Norwegian. Also, you should accept that you live in a different culture and should try to figure out how best you can emulate and integrate. This is true for any immigrant situation in my opinion though. It was your choice to move to this country, why show up and think you know better?
I like having a ski mountain right next to the city and I like the university culture as it is more flat like American-style than hierarchical like European-style (I am a research scientist). That being said I lived the last two years in The Netherlands and I think it is better overall in terms of cultural acceptance of outsiders and I think I feel like I understand and, importantly, agree with the ideas of what makes the Dutch the Dutch. Who knows. I don't have all the answers, just my two cents.
> Inequality is never fun for those who believe that they are entitled to more than others.
Inequality is practical for those at the top/those that embody the reality of being entitled to more than others. More people to profit from like e.g. renting out apartments, more unemployed people means higher competition from jobs which can suppress wages, and so on.
The problem is do people work at all. Finland has had structural unemployment problem for decades, and second highest unemployment in Europe. The cost of this is high for the working members of society.
Yes, but that is not what you mean when you say it like this.
If you really stood behind this, then you would believe that the cleaning personnel who wakes up at ungodly hours take make sure areas are clean should be amongst the highest earners.
Academics in particular are not really aligned with what it means to work.
Edit: academic work is high risk, high reward. But procrastinating for weeks upon weeks to write a paper last minute is IMHO not hard work - though it can be valuable work.
I believe most academics are mostly kidding themselves on how hard they think they actually work. Haha. But I mean if you enjoy your job who cares how much you want to do it?
Seems plausible wrt my experience, though I've only skimmed it. This is gonna be vague but hopefully interesting.
I feel like there's a traditional job market in Denmark, and then a more recent, foreign-influenced market.
Most people work in the traditional market: there's a collective bargaining agreement, and you just get whatever you get. If they really like you, they find some peanuts within the budget that you can have, but you're not going to negotiate a 40% salary bump compared to similar profiles. You're on a fixed ladder that most of the people doing your title are on. Teachers, doctors, a fair few devs who work in traditional firms. Now and again, it hits the news that some union has demanded a bit more money, and there's some back and forth in the media. But nothing changes about the system, if you work one of these jobs, you are stuck with whatever the outcome of the negotiation is.
Now, Denmark is also a modern country with a lot of highly educated, English speaking people who know what people are doing in other countries.
There's a bunch of power traders in Jutland making a ton of money. There's a bunch of startups of the SV type. There's influencers selling toothpaste and makeup. There's guys trying to build nuclear power. There's private equity and consulting. These guys tend have a different ethos when it comes to salary.
It's more correct to say that the job market is split between unionized labor and high-skilled office positions ("funktionær" = "official"), which is basically anything requiring a university education. In recent decades, the latter category has grown exponentially as industrialized economies have turned into service economies.
Collective bargaining and stepladder salaries are not really a thing for officials, and never has been (outside of a few cases in the public sector, like doctors).
It's worth noting that Norway gets nearly a tenth of its GDP from natural resources, like oil and fish, which is far more than any other country with democratically elected leadership, so how Norway's economy works is very different from how other countries ecenomies work.
The paper sites Wage compression as the primary reason for income equality. I doubt that would go over well with most of the engineers at the US tech companies.
Having worked at a company with a collective agreement in Sweden, nothing within it restricted my salary or my ability to negotiate as an individual. Upon coming into effect, the agreement simply gave me more vacation days and set a minimum yearly raise to keep up with inflation (one that was always surpassed and enhanced further with individual performance bonuses etc).
One of the things I learned from some Norwegians on a trip to Norway:
In Norway, if a restaurant abuses its staff, it's not just the staff that will strike or sympathetic customers who will organize a boycott. It's the plumbers who won't show up to fix the sink that breaks, the carpenters who won't show up to patch up a dented door jam or install a new shelf, and the shippers who won't drive ingredients out to the restaurant anymore.
In the US, that kind of coordinated cross-discipline striking is explicitly illegal (I'd have to go look up my history to confirm, but I believe that was related to the federal intervention to stop the rail strikes because it disrupted mail delivery).
So freedom but not like that?
I think if more of the world, especially people living in the US, had more of the Norway mentality, "big tech" abuse wouldn't have taken hold in the first place (e.g. the Apples and Googles and Metas of today would never get their sinks installed, let alone 3rd party apps made).
Here's what I've seen first-hand in a "labour-friendly" country. An employee doesn't show up at his workplace a few days a week, for several months, without doctor's notes or any real reason. Employer finally fires them. Employee goes to court and after a year gets a $20k compensation for "unlawful termination", even though his absence on the workplace was documented (but not properly processed, apparently).
Nordic countries are higher-trust than America is, and so sometimes concepts like this do not need to be formally defined: "you know it when you see it" is a valid concept when people have sufficient dignity and respect for self and others as to not claim abuse when it's not actually present.
This breaks down in a system with different game-theoretical Schelling points - different "default strategies". If the default mode of behaviour for a large constituency of participants is to exploit all available weaknesses in the system, then the system has to become more formalized, more defensive, and eventually has to put firewalls around anything that could be exploited.
This is among the reasons why socialized medicine / welfare / etc work better in some countries than others. If it comes coupled with a high sense of dignity that makes one not want to fling oneself upon the commons unless it's strictly necessary, then it can do well; but if everyone wants to take everything that isn't nailed down, you simply cannot afford to offer as much, ever.
Probably best not to shoehorn in your specific experience into this comment this way, it’s not really applicable outside of your desire to start yourself off on a rant
Abuse is typically things like not paying their salary, withholding holiday contributions, breaking contractual scheduling obligations, threatening the staff with termination or reduced pay, and a host of other apparently normal behavior for certain kinds of employers.
“Unlawful termination” is only a thing when it is either in breach of contract, or discrimination. Typical contracts in Scandinavia mandate a 1 month notice in advance of termination. I don’t know why you would think that’s unreasonably long. (And yes, the social security net is the reason it can be so short.)
I'm not saying that stuff like that doesn't happen, but what do you think is the ratio between employers abusing their employees compared to employees abusing their employers?
And with the different kinds of abuse, which "side" do you think causes the most genuine harm to the other though their actions?
> In the US, that kind of coordinated cross-discipline striking is explicitly illegal (I'd have to go look up my history to confirm, but I believe that was related to the federal intervention to stop the rail strikes because it disrupted mail delivery).
No, it’s just a straight up federal law that bans striking in the railroad and airline industries:
The US’s people (by proxy of its democratically elected leaders) believe some workers deserve fewer rights than others.
It isn’t so different than an informal caste system, except it is far more flexible and allows a few to break through, especially if they can prove their economic mettle. The US makes a lot more sense once you realize much (the majority, I would say) accept that some people deserve more than others.
What is most important is trying to not be at the bottom, and staying ahead of those below you. Another easy example is the superior unions for cops and firefighters, who are typically used to maintain the status quo (similar to a king’s guards). These union members will readily support leaders who want to weaken other unions.
Right, the real crisis is all those Nordics sneaking into the U.S....
It’s the hottest destination. Who would not swap six weeks paid vacation and universal healthcare for a $100,000 out-of-network ER bill and five days off a year?
Why specifically to Norway, and not let's say to Tanzania?
I worked with bright folks located in Tanzania in ~2017 and developers salaries were like 1/10 of Canadian.
Sure, a general inflexibility. This is in particular present in doing extra when software is failing, staying up to date with one's vocation, and backing/assuming convictions.
It is also not binary, and likely more a selection bias, as the people who are actually driven already left these job markets (... To earn more elsewhere).
1) It makes me wonder where the surplus goes. Invested back into the corporations, so that the people who run them have a large amount of power? That would be dystopian. Unless I'm making an incorrect assumption, like...
2) Is it only downward compression, or does it perhaps act both upwardly AND downward? So there's little profit unspoken for, and anyone participating in the labor market is receiving a roughly equal piece of the economic output (or, at least, within a relatively narrow band).
3) That would suggest something rather radical to the (neo)liberal mindset of there being no ceiling on what spoils of productivity one can claw to oneself: instead, an acknowledgment that we're all roughly equal humans giving up a roughly equal portion of life, time, energy, and freedom to labor, regardless of the prerequisites to be competent at that labor (or of the opportunities to exploit one's position).
4) As for implications for other countries, I wonder if there are any for those in which social, racial, and class hierarchies are deeply embedded. Can the kind of robust wage bargaining described emerge even without all of that rectified? Maybe it's what catalyzes that rectification?
Income inequality is a red herring, and too often it is chanted without any thought given to what support for equality means or why inequality is ostensibly opposed. There are, of course, two classes of reasons that people have for supporting income equality.
1. opposition to income inequality per se
2. opposition to something other than income inequality, with inequality as a proxy for that thing
For (2), the person may either believe that income inequality necessarily results in the problem they're concerned about, or they may be confusing it with inequality per se.
For (1), one motivation is the classic envy of the have-nots for the haves, or a basic confusion about justice where it is misunderstood as entailing equality.
The first real problem is poverty. A double income upper middle class family with a $600k home is not equal to the millionaire or billionaire down the road in terms of income, but they are not suffering because of that inequality. Furthermore, the easiest form of equality is universal poverty, something socialist/communist regimes were quite good at arranging. Obviously, this kind of equality is undesirable.
A second problem is the influence money has in politics. This isn't the result of inequality per se, only the deranged relationship to money that people, including those in politics, have. The lust for money is the real culprit here, not money per se.
A third problem, related to the first, is one arising from ineffective markets. On the one hand, this might be the result of central planning or onerous regulation and other features of economies in collectivist societies. These can crush personal initiative and responsibility, and reduce the individual to an element of the collective, thus diminishing the dignity of the person. On the other hand, while free markets are quite good at allocating goods, they aren't infallible, and an idolatry of the market can encourage a participation in the market that flouts morality and regard for human dignity, resulting in a market that instead of contributing to the freedom and good of its participants, becomes a force for exploitation in which some enrich themselves through unjust practices. (I would also add a radical, totalizing libertarianism ideology that reduces the human person to an economic actor - full stop - and construes all human activity as economic, thus dehumanizing market participants.)
I would encourage people to read JPII's 1991 encyclical "Centesimus Annus" for a balanced summary critique of the dominant economic orders of the last century or so as a corrective for their errors.
Inequality can be a cause of suffering, as it can price average individuals out of essential, limited resources like power, land, and skilled labor. For instance, some combination of skill and knowledge held by a few scientists could be applied to develop technology that improves the lives of millions or to create luxury entertainment for a handful. In an environment of extreme inequality, the concentrated wealth of a few elites can more than the wealth of a million average individuals. Because of that the rare talent is more likely to be used for entertainment purposes.
I did a couple of quick searchers with help of ChatGPT, and it seems like in Norway, at least, a tenured professor would get ~$50k post-tax, a primary school teacher ~$35k, and a cleaner ~$20k. If anything, such low income inequality seems dystopian. I would expect talented and ambitious people rather move elsewhere.
Although not tenured yet, as a professor I know that not many could do the job I do, and I count myself lucky I don’t have to spend my time cleaning (or teaching in primary school for that matter). That I also get more paid than them feels like double dipping.
The average Norwegian monthly salary across every working person is USD 5902 per month - before tax. That works out to USD 70824 per year including 4-5 weeks paid holiday. These are public numbers https://www.ssb.no/en/arbeid-og-lonn/lonn-og-arbeidskraftkos...
Taxes are progressive which means if you earn below average you’re taxed a lot less than if you’re over average. If you have an average salary you’ll get taxed around 25%. If you have a salary twice the average you’ll close in on twice the tax, before any deductions.
Paid holiday, free kindergarten, free medical support and pensions savings are included in the tax you and your employers pay. The employer pays 14% tax on your salary.
This approach has its benefits: excellent infrastructure, clean cities, well maintained countryside, low crime rate and less pressure to "do, do, do it now!" Not everything is about money.
That said, the global economy is about the money, so I have a strong suspicion that this fact will hit Europe hard in the next few decades.
If you see life as some game to optimize only for yourself not the people around you then for sure as very high earners, easy to move somewhere else, and some do. But from my point of view that’s a sad outlook on life and it’s not all one sided, that professor payed nothing for top of the line education, or child care, or 9 months parental leave, or medical etc etc. The high earners put away some money instead and enjoy lower taxes than us on that part.
But mostly it’s the idea of people deserving a decent life and high base life quality anyway. Most of my colleagues instead come here from other countries.
Remember, the deal includes universal health care, tuition-free university, government-backed sick pay, five or six weeks of paid vacation, and more.
I'm from Sweden, which has a similar system. I could not have afforded to attend university in the US system. Here, I could -- with my (government low-interest) student loans being spent only on my living expenses, not tuition. As a result, Sweden has an extra engineer we otherwise wouldn't have, with a good salary contributing to the tax base.
Isn't it more dystopian that people doing jobs as essential as cleaning have to live in poverty? Just because everyone can clean doesn't mean the people doing it don't deserve a good life. Without people doing those "easy" jobs those talented people wouldn't have time to build and use their talents. The cleaners enable the talented people and so deserve a fair share of what they produce.
As a Nordic person, that kind of income difference looks realistic (without having checked). But I could never had imagined the difference to be considered as dystopian. If we would dig deeper into this, I would expect our different views to have something to do with differences on what expectations we have, values in life and how we relate to inter-personal statuses.
That sounds like what the paper is saying. To paraphrase, the equality doesn't come from tax redistribution as much as a flatter wage curve. I don't think they are saying it is good or bad, just explaining how it happens.
Fun fact, but there's essentially zero correlation between income inequality & wealth inequality- and the Nordics have some of the highest wealth inequality in the world. For example in 2019 by Gini coefficient, the most unequal countries in the world were #1 the Netherlands, #2 Russia, #3 Sweden, and #4 the United States (with Denmark coming in at #8). The data is clearly pretty noisy, but as far as I can see Sweden was again more unequal than the US in 2021:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_we...
Meanwhile Southern Europe has reasonably high income inequality, but not much wealth inequality. Just kind of an underdiscussed piece, especially as many people like to issue catastrophic warnings about how wealth inequality destroys a society- then quickly change the subject when you note that the Nordics are more unequal than America
High inequality, but also very high on social support:
https://data.worldhappiness.report/table?_gl=1*13j5g4a*_gcl_...
The thing about the Nordics is that you can not consume that wealth personally without being heavily taxed - when it is tied up in company assets.
Not to mention, flaunting wealth by conspicuous consumption also comes with its own kind of social stigma, even in upper class circles.
Doesn't mean it isn't done. The Lego family was caught flying their private jet all over the world so they sold it and now have exclusive renting rights to a plane in a hangar operated by another company.
Yes, everything is about the looks in Scandinavia.
Exactly and I'm glad to see this the top comment.
I live in Denmark. I am Danish. Too many people nurse fantasies of the Nordics as some kind of socialist utopia.
The fact is Denmark grows more corrupt by the day. They keep pushing the retirement age so I will be working until I'm 72. Healthcare quality has been dropping for more than 40 years now. The wealthy own the majority of land. We are currently home to a government that is leading the EU in its push for a surveillance mandate that is frankly terrifying in its scope. That same government pushed through the most garbage mega-project I have personally ever witnessed—that we the taxpayers are supposed to fund—despite voter outcry. Digital tenders get sold in backroom deals to a single company that is so ethically bankrupt they've been called out numerous times for workplace violations by our unions.
We're all fucked in the global slide toward authoritarianism and the wealthy's capture of the world economy. And while they get fat supping on our labor we're at each other's throats for who can be crowned the greatest victim.
It's unlikely you will have any retirement except your own savings, as the unfunded pension funds start to collapse globally. Maybe Danish is different but you can check from local sources.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pensions_crisis
Yes, but at least Mette Frederiksen got her photo-op in an F16 cockpit with Zelensky!
> Just kind of an underdiscussed piece, especially as many people like to issue catastrophic warnings about how wealth inequality destroys a society- then quickly change the subject when you note that the Nordics are more unequal than America
Ask someone from the Nordics about housing prices. Do you think they’ll change the subject?
> many people like to issue catastrophic warnings about how wealth inequality destroys a society- then quickly change the subject when you note that the Nordics are more unequal than America
A missing piece of the puzzle may be regulatory capture and a strong political/legal structure that resists the worst ambitions of cruel people whether they be wealthy or poor.
You can think of wealth like the potential energy of a spring under tension. If used properly it is capable of powering the most amazing and intricate social mechanisms but if poorly regulated it destroys social fabric and the well being of every day people.
Things like Citizens United and lobbyists representing cruel wealthy interests running unchecked over American democracy are examples of the socially destructive potential energy of wealth.
I'm also curious if there's a selection pressure in play where the more cruel wealthy people in the Nordic countries move to the US because they see more opportunity to make money and be cruel in that environment while wealthy people who have some affinity with their nation and the people of it choose to remain and don't or can't lobby for terribly antisocial policies.
> I'm also curious if there's a selection pressure in play where the more cruel wealthy people in the Nordic countries move to the US
That's an interesting thought! It would make sense that the people who care less about others and more about themselves would find it easier and more beneficial to leave. I wonder if anyone has ever done a study on the wealth, personality traits and political views of the people who leave.
People need to start getting specific about their grievances. It’s not inequality per se. People don’t care if some people have more than them. There are specific concrete things.
For Americans the big ones are: a health problem can destroy your life and your life’s savings, housing costs are too high, and college is too expensive and leaves people in debt.
Housing, health care, and tuition.
Two out of three of those are better in Europe, mostly: health care and college costs. They are better even if things are on paper more unequal.
High housing costs are a disease across the entire developed world.
Unfortunately wealth hoarding puts power and influence in the hands of the few, effectively creating a new aristocracy.
That's why we don't get legislation to fix the issues you cite year after year.
Wealth hording leads to the government working more for the wealthy instead of the working class.
There will always be wealthy and powerful people, but as Spock would say (sorry) "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one."
I will generalize but by my experience most Americans I have met just can't fathom to pay (= taxed) for some common good. Why should I pay for someone's healthcare when I live healthy and all I see that others are smoking? Why should I pay for someone's free train ticket when I only travel by car? This I saw across all genders, age groups, and political affiliation. Americans have this hyper individualist mindset that no other country does in the planet. It's good for some things like innovation (see the HN crowd) but not necessarily a benefit for the society.
Americans are literally socially selected for that mindset. Around the world, the vast majority of people don’t want to leave their home countries: https://news.gallup.com/poll/652748/desire-migrate-remains-r.... Even in sub-saharan africa, only 37% would emigrate if they had the choice. In asia it’s single digits. So a large share of America’s population is literally made up of the most antisocial 10-20% of the population that would leave, along with their descendants.
I want to question the assumption here that "pioneer mindset" is an inherited trait, and generally whether we can say anything useful about people living today based on the choices of their ancestors several generations back.
People emigrated from Europe to America because they were out of options. It was not a case of throwing away all of your possessions to go on an adventure. Rather, the vast majority emigrated because it was literally the only way to move up in a world where land ownership was the key to wealth, and your older brother already inherited the farm, or your family did not own any land in the first place. Or perhaps you couldn't even find an apprenticeship.
Keep in mind that all of Europe existed in an extremely rigid social hierarchy with practically zero mobility. Most people in Europe lived in abject poverty. America offered some social mobility, at least to those who came there by choice.
A good portion emigrated because it was either that or the gallows.
Yes, thank you. A huge percentage of historical European immigration to the US was by groups that functionally had zero wealth or social mobility in their home countries. Working in a steel mill in the new world was hell, but it beat generational rural poverty back home.
The hyper-individualism of modern America is something that has developed fairly recently, even if it had earlier roots.
But this does have some upsides, it appears.
Taxes as various European states and US states are sometimes on par. Everyone pays for somebody’s health problems, Americans as well, through insurance, it is just health insurance is mandatory in Europe. The other stuff boils down to effective use of tax money, it is easier to do it in a smaller state compared to US or Canada or similar. Individualism has an effect but at this day and age it is about lobby groups politicising any topic they do not like. FYI nobody likes to pay taxes.
>Why should I pay for someone's healthcare when I live healthy and all I see that others are smoking?
In the EU (I have no idea about America) tobacco is heavily (and I mean heavily in some countries) taxed because of this.
Also tobacco users cost less in healthcare because they far more often die right around retirement age, never incurring the far more expensive age related healthcare. Being a smoker also disqualifies them from many common procedures, and also the sin taxes smokers pay on tobacco often exceeds their entire lifetime medical costs.
People who blame smokers for healthcare costs are just looking for someone to blame because they either don't want to admit, or don't realize, that their 90 year old granny taking 30 medications a day, having hip replacements, and 3rd round of cancer costs as much in healthcare per year as most people do over 2 or 3 decades.
There are tobacco taxes in the US but it varies by state. Also it seems US is in the lower range on smoking rate compared to many other OECD countries.
https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/society-at-a-glance-202...
We are too well-programmed to be individualistic, the crowd said in unison.
And that was a typo: too well-programmed to not be individualistic or something.
But I guess it works both ways?
One reason is that it's unsustainable with a top heavy population age histogram, and leads to lower and lower quality of life for younger people.
>Why should I pay for someone's healthcare when I live healthy and all I see that others are smoking?
This is a common bad, not a common good. Fundamentally people follow incentives, and when you financially punish good behaviour and reward bad behaviour (make someone with healthy habits pay for someone else's unhealthy habits), you disincentivise the good behaviour and incentivise the bad behaviour. At a society-wide scale, that leads to more of the bad behaviour.
I think the incentive of not getting a life altering or threatening disease is much stronger than having to pay for the treatment yourself. If the cost has any effect on choices, it must be very small because it does not show in statistics.
Then explain the trend in overweight/obesity/diabetes/heart disease statistics?
It has long been known that over consuming carbs and sat fats leads to long term health issues, easily measured by excess weight.
And yet, the vast majority of people over consume.
Sure, but making people pay for those treatments themselves does not change anything. For many the quick satisfaction of good food is simply a stronger incentive than a healthy body or a fatter wallet 10 years later.
Carbs correct, saturated fats wrong.
Source: try keto diet with only saturated fats (like I do) and its great for weight loss (animal fat, coconut oil).
1) Excess calorie consumption has only been true since about 1990. Up until that point, average heights were still increasing, so that meant that a significant chunk of the population were still undernourished. We are only about one generation from that mark, so people's social habits still haven't moved on from scarcity.
2) Nicotine, in particular, is quite good for appetite suppression. Unfortunately, the delivery system most people choose (smoking) causes more problems that the obesity it suppresses.
3) How easily people lose weight on GLP-1 agonists shows that obesity isn't just lack of willpower. The human body has a lot of systems encouraging you to hoard calories metabolically and very few systems telling you to stop. It is quite impressive that a single drug can somehow flip those metabolic systems completely in the other direction.
> 3) How easily people lose weight on GLP-1 agonists shows that obesity isn't just lack of willpower
What? I’m about as pro-GLP1 as it gets - see past comments on the subject.
But if anything it absolutely slams the door shut on obesity about being anything but overeating when the environment made it so damn easy to do so. The method of action is you are less hungry and eat less. Full stop. Secondary effects are a rounding error.
Sure, there are societal reasons people are fat now. I don’t actually believe willpower is a real thing when surrounded by unhealthy addictive choices. But being able to turn off the hunger switch and turn to easy mode is absolutely the reason these drugs work and are life changing.
I’m not ashamed to admit my being fat was due to lack of willpower to not eat excessively. Having a way to make it so I didn’t need to engage said willpower even half as much was the reason I’m now down to 12% body fat and am in shape from working out heavily. It’s not like you take the drug and you magically get thin - you still need to work at it and make healthy choices. They simply become easier to do.
Pretending it’s otherwise for the vast majority of people is a disservice.
The best most honest way I’ve come up with to describe these drugs is a performance enhancing drug for your diet.
Changing society at a root cause level would of course be far better, but that’s not realistic on any human lifetime sort of scale. This is the best we have for people alive today.
I agree with your comment, except that framing it as "lack of willpower" is unfortunate, because it implies that you should somehow be able to ignore these signals - if only you had enough "willpower". It seems to require an untenable amount of willpower to sustain a resistance to these signals, so perhaps it isn't realistic.
One of the things that blew my mind when I moved to the US from Europe were the enormous portions and the amount of grease in every single dish when eating out. Even simple salads were shiny and drenched in oil. It only takes a small percentage of excessive calories over long periods to explain the obesity epidemic.
I eat whatever I want, don't really exercise and I'm not fat. I guess I just have awesome willpower.
Trust me, we live this. And it's always someone else's unhealthy habits; I remember a chainsmoking manager expounding at lunch about the awful burden drug users put on the economy.
I immigrated from the US to Norway.
You can’t really compare dollar to krone the difference of a US salary to a Norwegian salary.
I’m not sure how to explain it for those who haven’t lived in the nordics, but you don't need a high paying income to live a good life.
Norway is sitting on a gold mine, I mean, an oil field. It can afford many things other countries can't, while also prudently saving much of its oil income.
The US is the world's largest producer of oil
It looks like Norway's oil revenue per capita is somewhere between $20,000 and $90,000, while the USA's is between $200 and $800, depending on how you calculate it.
Denmark performs similarly to Norway and they don't have oil.
Denmark has several oil and gas fields. It's tiny compared to Norway but not completely insignificant.
It's largely insignificant when the question is "why is Denmark rich". Same goes for Sweden.
If you don’t mind me asking, how were you able to immigrate there? I have family that lives in Norway on my father’s side and I’ve sometimes fantasized about packing up my life and moving there after I visited them and saw what an amazing place it is. The few times I’ve been manic enough to actually consider its realistic plausibility I’ve always been stopped at the dead end of their immigration policy. Maybe things have changed but when I looked into it, it seemed like a very difficult bar to meet (I would’ve either tried to find a skilled trade immigration policy, or perhaps used my extended family as a reason, but neither of those routes seemed particularly possible).
That is a great question and I would be happy to share.
Varnish Software had a job posting in Norway and I asked them if they would consider a US candidate. At that time I was living in the US and was looking for opportunities to immigrate to Norway (or Finland).
After I accepted the position they helped with the “skilled workers visa” process.
Moving abroad has a lot of logistics. Depending on your situation in the US, I suggest to sell, rent, or store your belongings in the US and only bring what you can as luggage on the Airplane. In my case, we had an estate sale, asked family to hang on to sentimental items, and gave away everything else. When we left the US to fly to Norway, we had 5 suitcases of what we needed/wanted.
My partner (at that time) and I had a 6mo old child.
We started with an Airbnb in the Sagene area of Oslo. After landing we rented a car and drove to the Airbnb.
That turned into a 6mo rental (outside of Airbnb) as we explored the area for either an apartment to rent or buy. Again, it helped to have minimal possessions as we moved around to find the area that suited us and our family. Eventually we settled in an area called Torshov.
June or July is a great time move, the city is calm and almost everyone is on summer holiday.
It can take several months before you are in the banking system to receive your salary, so in advance you will need to have a buffer of savings and to keep a bank account in the US.
Forward all your mail in the US to family, friend, lawyer, or service to keep you informed. Forwarding mail to Norway is possible, but it will be delayed by at least one month, which can be a problem for any bills that are due.
Can you elaborate? The sibling comment called this situation dystopian, wondering how you cope.
What sibling comment? I couldn't find any such.
I'd like to point out that any country providing universal healthcare is going to be a big improvement in standard of living for many of my friends. The sometimes hellish nature of the USA's for-profit healthcare system is very real.
Then there's crippling student debt following you nearly to the grave, gun violence, etc.
We grew up being told we had more freedom than anybody else, only to learn as adults that not only does freedom carry a heavy price, but so does every flu and broken bone.
Freedom is ridiculous. It's not what Americans have nor want. It's free in a warzone. True freedom is total chaos. Americans do not have nor want real freedom.
Free Trade is the only freedom you should want or need. /s obviously.
Concerns over gun violence (or violence in general) are largely misplaced. Almost all of the violent crime happens in a handful of cities such as Baltimore, Chicago, and Washington DC that have been wrecked by decades of failed progressive policies. And even in those cities the violence is concentrated in few bad neighborhoods. We need to fix those places: the residents shouldn't have to live in gang war zones. But at the same time those aren't the same neighborhoods that HN users would live anyway. The rest of the USA is no more violent than most other developed countries.
That’s just not true. I’m from Europe but lived in Boulder for several years. For example this shooting (1) happened 5 min walking distance from my home. My kids’ school had several lockdowns due to gun-related stuff in the neighborhood. Something like that is unimaginable in Europe, and big part of why we moved back.
1) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Boulder_shooting
> decades of failed progressive policies
Birmingham, St. Louis & Memphis have the highest levels of gun violence, though? Not sure if those are the most "progressive" places.
Also Mississippi (more than 10x worse than e.g. Massachusetts), Louisiana, Alabama are the top 3 states by gun homicide rate.
If Mississippi was a country it would be in the top 10 (between Mexico and Columbia) by gun related murder rate which is quite an achievement..
Massachusetts
The state statistics are meaningless. As I already explained above, almost all of the murders in every state are concentrated in a handful of neighborhoods. It's a very localized problem.
As for the specific cities you mentioned, policies enacted by local governments over decades generally fall into the progressive category. State and federal governments certainly share some blame for the problem but because the causes are mostly local any solutions will also have to be local.
If gun violence is concentrated in a few neighborhoods and all states contain such neighborhoods, then state statistics do matter, don't they?
We can all agree that taking away peoples' guns would lead to less gun violence. (This is the part where you say "but that's impossible anyway" or "but the 2nd amendment" which doesn't really refute my point)
I know many people who would disagree with this.
> It's a very localized problem.
Yeah schools are pretty local.
Not sure what is progressive about the fact that one can easily obtain a gun. Pool with many legal guns makes it easier to obtain it illegal one as well.
There would be even less violence in Mexico if they were not bordering USA.
What progressive policies do you think these places were wrecked by?
From my experience, living in the US was dystopian compared to what I have experienced in Oslo. I have only been here for 6 years, so given a long enough timeframe that could change.
I think it comes down to mindset. For example You have what you need to live, but the things you want are expensive.
Housing is a problem, but it seems that is a problem almost everywhere. That said, it is not always “easy” to obtain what you want, but I think that is good for society. For example the second hand market is strong.
I’m not sure if that answers your question.
It’s not cope. You can compete for the same “quality of life” resources being in the median vs top 5-percentile. It’s not possible in the U.S. or UK.
From the paper:
> A key finding is that a more equal predistribution of earnings, rather than income redistribution, is the main reason for the lower income inequality in the Nordic countries compared to the U.S. and the U.K. While the direct effects of taxes and transfers contribute to the relatively low income inequality in the Nordic countries, the key factor is that the distribution of pre-tax market income, particularly labor earnings, is much more equal in the Nordics than in the U.S. and the U.K.
Yes and this can be good or bad if you work hard and your colleagues do not. I have worked in Norway since 2017. I like it, but I do think that there are other options. Americans like to complain about everything but, at least as far as it goes on hacker news, they have way more options for high salaries than the same workers in Norway do. Of course there are exceptions but having easier access to salaries that are above 100k USD and can grow substantially from 100k USD really changes things. But on the academic side, American PhD students are treated like shit and make shit, whereas Norwegian PhD students get 50-60k salary (totally liveable in Oslo), pension, free healthcare, and likely no teaching requirements, and a lot of academic freedom.
In Norway there also is a strong emphasis on generational wealth being transferred forward. This has made the housing market in Oslo somewhat impenetrable if you didn't have a parent helping you out on your first flat when you are 20.
I'm not saying Norway is bad, I think it's a great place to live if you can accept the winter and that you will never be Norwegian. Also, you should accept that you live in a different culture and should try to figure out how best you can emulate and integrate. This is true for any immigrant situation in my opinion though. It was your choice to move to this country, why show up and think you know better?
I like having a ski mountain right next to the city and I like the university culture as it is more flat like American-style than hierarchical like European-style (I am a research scientist). That being said I lived the last two years in The Netherlands and I think it is better overall in terms of cultural acceptance of outsiders and I think I feel like I understand and, importantly, agree with the ideas of what makes the Dutch the Dutch. Who knows. I don't have all the answers, just my two cents.
Inequality is never fun for those who believe that they are entitled to more than others.
Regardless - impenetrable housing markets are not a consequence of equality, so you are kind of self contradicting.
> Inequality is never fun for those who believe that they are entitled to more than others.
Inequality is practical for those at the top/those that embody the reality of being entitled to more than others. More people to profit from like e.g. renting out apartments, more unemployed people means higher competition from jobs which can suppress wages, and so on.
We can all make quips.
Ah yes, that was a typo: equality is never fun...
Aah...
>Inequality is never fun for those who believe that they are entitled to more than others.
Do you believe people who work harder or do things that others are unwilling/unable to do are not entitled to more than others?
The problem is do people work at all. Finland has had structural unemployment problem for decades, and second highest unemployment in Europe. The cost of this is high for the working members of society.
https://www.helsinkitimes.fi/finland/finland-news/domestic/2...
Yes, but that is not what you mean when you say it like this.
If you really stood behind this, then you would believe that the cleaning personnel who wakes up at ungodly hours take make sure areas are clean should be amongst the highest earners.
Academics in particular are not really aligned with what it means to work.
Edit: academic work is high risk, high reward. But procrastinating for weeks upon weeks to write a paper last minute is IMHO not hard work - though it can be valuable work.
I believe most academics are mostly kidding themselves on how hard they think they actually work. Haha. But I mean if you enjoy your job who cares how much you want to do it?
"Entitled" is not the same as "earned".
Seems plausible wrt my experience, though I've only skimmed it. This is gonna be vague but hopefully interesting.
I feel like there's a traditional job market in Denmark, and then a more recent, foreign-influenced market.
Most people work in the traditional market: there's a collective bargaining agreement, and you just get whatever you get. If they really like you, they find some peanuts within the budget that you can have, but you're not going to negotiate a 40% salary bump compared to similar profiles. You're on a fixed ladder that most of the people doing your title are on. Teachers, doctors, a fair few devs who work in traditional firms. Now and again, it hits the news that some union has demanded a bit more money, and there's some back and forth in the media. But nothing changes about the system, if you work one of these jobs, you are stuck with whatever the outcome of the negotiation is.
Now, Denmark is also a modern country with a lot of highly educated, English speaking people who know what people are doing in other countries.
There's a bunch of power traders in Jutland making a ton of money. There's a bunch of startups of the SV type. There's influencers selling toothpaste and makeup. There's guys trying to build nuclear power. There's private equity and consulting. These guys tend have a different ethos when it comes to salary.
It's more correct to say that the job market is split between unionized labor and high-skilled office positions ("funktionær" = "official"), which is basically anything requiring a university education. In recent decades, the latter category has grown exponentially as industrialized economies have turned into service economies.
Collective bargaining and stepladder salaries are not really a thing for officials, and never has been (outside of a few cases in the public sector, like doctors).
It's worth noting that Norway gets nearly a tenth of its GDP from natural resources, like oil and fish, which is far more than any other country with democratically elected leadership, so how Norway's economy works is very different from how other countries ecenomies work.
Looks like the paper free to download from here:
https://www.nber.org/papers/w33444
The paper sites Wage compression as the primary reason for income equality. I doubt that would go over well with most of the engineers at the US tech companies.
so in summary it's the unions?
For what its worth, unions don't do collective bargaining for tech workers in Denmark.
In Sweden: Yes, they are in charge of keeping the salaries of the educated "elite" working at Ericsson etc low. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saltsj%C3%B6baden_Agreement
Having worked at a company with a collective agreement in Sweden, nothing within it restricted my salary or my ability to negotiate as an individual. Upon coming into effect, the agreement simply gave me more vacation days and set a minimum yearly raise to keep up with inflation (one that was always surpassed and enhanced further with individual performance bonuses etc).
I "saw" that link. It says nothing about your claims at all. Here's my counterpoint: https://www.disney.com
One of the things I learned from some Norwegians on a trip to Norway:
In Norway, if a restaurant abuses its staff, it's not just the staff that will strike or sympathetic customers who will organize a boycott. It's the plumbers who won't show up to fix the sink that breaks, the carpenters who won't show up to patch up a dented door jam or install a new shelf, and the shippers who won't drive ingredients out to the restaurant anymore.
In the US, that kind of coordinated cross-discipline striking is explicitly illegal (I'd have to go look up my history to confirm, but I believe that was related to the federal intervention to stop the rail strikes because it disrupted mail delivery).
So freedom but not like that? I think if more of the world, especially people living in the US, had more of the Norway mentality, "big tech" abuse wouldn't have taken hold in the first place (e.g. the Apples and Googles and Metas of today would never get their sinks installed, let alone 3rd party apps made).
> if a restaurant abuses its staff
What exactly counts as "abuse"?
Here's what I've seen first-hand in a "labour-friendly" country. An employee doesn't show up at his workplace a few days a week, for several months, without doctor's notes or any real reason. Employer finally fires them. Employee goes to court and after a year gets a $20k compensation for "unlawful termination", even though his absence on the workplace was documented (but not properly processed, apparently).
> What exactly counts as "abuse"?
Nordic countries are higher-trust than America is, and so sometimes concepts like this do not need to be formally defined: "you know it when you see it" is a valid concept when people have sufficient dignity and respect for self and others as to not claim abuse when it's not actually present.
This breaks down in a system with different game-theoretical Schelling points - different "default strategies". If the default mode of behaviour for a large constituency of participants is to exploit all available weaknesses in the system, then the system has to become more formalized, more defensive, and eventually has to put firewalls around anything that could be exploited.
This is among the reasons why socialized medicine / welfare / etc work better in some countries than others. If it comes coupled with a high sense of dignity that makes one not want to fling oneself upon the commons unless it's strictly necessary, then it can do well; but if everyone wants to take everything that isn't nailed down, you simply cannot afford to offer as much, ever.
Probably best not to shoehorn in your specific experience into this comment this way, it’s not really applicable outside of your desire to start yourself off on a rant
Abuse is typically things like not paying their salary, withholding holiday contributions, breaking contractual scheduling obligations, threatening the staff with termination or reduced pay, and a host of other apparently normal behavior for certain kinds of employers.
“Unlawful termination” is only a thing when it is either in breach of contract, or discrimination. Typical contracts in Scandinavia mandate a 1 month notice in advance of termination. I don’t know why you would think that’s unreasonably long. (And yes, the social security net is the reason it can be so short.)
I'm not saying that stuff like that doesn't happen, but what do you think is the ratio between employers abusing their employees compared to employees abusing their employers?
And with the different kinds of abuse, which "side" do you think causes the most genuine harm to the other though their actions?
> In the US, that kind of coordinated cross-discipline striking is explicitly illegal (I'd have to go look up my history to confirm, but I believe that was related to the federal intervention to stop the rail strikes because it disrupted mail delivery).
No, it’s just a straight up federal law that bans striking in the railroad and airline industries:
https://railroads.dot.gov/sites/fra.dot.gov/files/fra_net/16...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Labor_Act
The US’s people (by proxy of its democratically elected leaders) believe some workers deserve fewer rights than others.
It isn’t so different than an informal caste system, except it is far more flexible and allows a few to break through, especially if they can prove their economic mettle. The US makes a lot more sense once you realize much (the majority, I would say) accept that some people deserve more than others.
What is most important is trying to not be at the bottom, and staying ahead of those below you. Another easy example is the superior unions for cops and firefighters, who are typically used to maintain the status quo (similar to a king’s guards). These union members will readily support leaders who want to weaken other unions.
... But in addition, solidarity striking is illegal. Taft-Hartley Act of 1947.
So you're saying you heard about the Norwegian shadow government?
edit: for the people who missed it, I was making a joke about the username of the person I was replying to. Not actually a conspiracy theorist
Right, the real crisis is all those Nordics sneaking into the U.S....
It’s the hottest destination. Who would not swap six weeks paid vacation and universal healthcare for a $100,000 out-of-network ER bill and five days off a year?
We'll take them up here in Canada instead, thanks. You're welcome too!
If you want cheap developers, come to Norway.
Why specifically to Norway, and not let's say to Tanzania? I worked with bright folks located in Tanzania in ~2017 and developers salaries were like 1/10 of Canadian.
Did not know Tanzania was in the Nordics and thus relevant to the topic, but hey, you learn something new everyday.
Cheap, but at least they are lazy (at least that is how it is most the other Nordic countries).
Can you please elaborate on this?
Sure, a general inflexibility. This is in particular present in doing extra when software is failing, staying up to date with one's vocation, and backing/assuming convictions.
It is also not binary, and likely more a selection bias, as the people who are actually driven already left these job markets (... To earn more elsewhere).
Every time you're doing extra for a company, remember that the second it's economically viable to boot you, they will.
Sure, you can justify laziness.
However, when they boot you, and you are not up to date with you skills and knowledge - the lazyness has been worse for you, than for the company.
Thoughts:
1) It makes me wonder where the surplus goes. Invested back into the corporations, so that the people who run them have a large amount of power? That would be dystopian. Unless I'm making an incorrect assumption, like...
2) Is it only downward compression, or does it perhaps act both upwardly AND downward? So there's little profit unspoken for, and anyone participating in the labor market is receiving a roughly equal piece of the economic output (or, at least, within a relatively narrow band).
3) That would suggest something rather radical to the (neo)liberal mindset of there being no ceiling on what spoils of productivity one can claw to oneself: instead, an acknowledgment that we're all roughly equal humans giving up a roughly equal portion of life, time, energy, and freedom to labor, regardless of the prerequisites to be competent at that labor (or of the opportunities to exploit one's position).
4) As for implications for other countries, I wonder if there are any for those in which social, racial, and class hierarchies are deeply embedded. Can the kind of robust wage bargaining described emerge even without all of that rectified? Maybe it's what catalyzes that rectification?
Income inequality is a red herring, and too often it is chanted without any thought given to what support for equality means or why inequality is ostensibly opposed. There are, of course, two classes of reasons that people have for supporting income equality.
1. opposition to income inequality per se
2. opposition to something other than income inequality, with inequality as a proxy for that thing
For (2), the person may either believe that income inequality necessarily results in the problem they're concerned about, or they may be confusing it with inequality per se.
For (1), one motivation is the classic envy of the have-nots for the haves, or a basic confusion about justice where it is misunderstood as entailing equality.
The first real problem is poverty. A double income upper middle class family with a $600k home is not equal to the millionaire or billionaire down the road in terms of income, but they are not suffering because of that inequality. Furthermore, the easiest form of equality is universal poverty, something socialist/communist regimes were quite good at arranging. Obviously, this kind of equality is undesirable.
A second problem is the influence money has in politics. This isn't the result of inequality per se, only the deranged relationship to money that people, including those in politics, have. The lust for money is the real culprit here, not money per se.
A third problem, related to the first, is one arising from ineffective markets. On the one hand, this might be the result of central planning or onerous regulation and other features of economies in collectivist societies. These can crush personal initiative and responsibility, and reduce the individual to an element of the collective, thus diminishing the dignity of the person. On the other hand, while free markets are quite good at allocating goods, they aren't infallible, and an idolatry of the market can encourage a participation in the market that flouts morality and regard for human dignity, resulting in a market that instead of contributing to the freedom and good of its participants, becomes a force for exploitation in which some enrich themselves through unjust practices. (I would also add a radical, totalizing libertarianism ideology that reduces the human person to an economic actor - full stop - and construes all human activity as economic, thus dehumanizing market participants.)
I would encourage people to read JPII's 1991 encyclical "Centesimus Annus" for a balanced summary critique of the dominant economic orders of the last century or so as a corrective for their errors.
[0] https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/d...
Inequality can be a cause of suffering, as it can price average individuals out of essential, limited resources like power, land, and skilled labor. For instance, some combination of skill and knowledge held by a few scientists could be applied to develop technology that improves the lives of millions or to create luxury entertainment for a handful. In an environment of extreme inequality, the concentrated wealth of a few elites can more than the wealth of a million average individuals. Because of that the rare talent is more likely to be used for entertainment purposes.
I did a couple of quick searchers with help of ChatGPT, and it seems like in Norway, at least, a tenured professor would get ~$50k post-tax, a primary school teacher ~$35k, and a cleaner ~$20k. If anything, such low income inequality seems dystopian. I would expect talented and ambitious people rather move elsewhere.
Although not tenured yet, as a professor I know that not many could do the job I do, and I count myself lucky I don’t have to spend my time cleaning (or teaching in primary school for that matter). That I also get more paid than them feels like double dipping.
The average Norwegian monthly salary across every working person is USD 5902 per month - before tax. That works out to USD 70824 per year including 4-5 weeks paid holiday. These are public numbers https://www.ssb.no/en/arbeid-og-lonn/lonn-og-arbeidskraftkos...
Taxes are progressive which means if you earn below average you’re taxed a lot less than if you’re over average. If you have an average salary you’ll get taxed around 25%. If you have a salary twice the average you’ll close in on twice the tax, before any deductions.
Paid holiday, free kindergarten, free medical support and pensions savings are included in the tax you and your employers pay. The employer pays 14% tax on your salary.
This approach has its benefits: excellent infrastructure, clean cities, well maintained countryside, low crime rate and less pressure to "do, do, do it now!" Not everything is about money.
That said, the global economy is about the money, so I have a strong suspicion that this fact will hit Europe hard in the next few decades.
If you see life as some game to optimize only for yourself not the people around you then for sure as very high earners, easy to move somewhere else, and some do. But from my point of view that’s a sad outlook on life and it’s not all one sided, that professor payed nothing for top of the line education, or child care, or 9 months parental leave, or medical etc etc. The high earners put away some money instead and enjoy lower taxes than us on that part.
But mostly it’s the idea of people deserving a decent life and high base life quality anyway. Most of my colleagues instead come here from other countries.
Keep in mind Norway has a population of ~5 million with ~$350k savings per person. The country is in a way a giant trust fund commune.
Some do. Most don't.
Remember, the deal includes universal health care, tuition-free university, government-backed sick pay, five or six weeks of paid vacation, and more.
I'm from Sweden, which has a similar system. I could not have afforded to attend university in the US system. Here, I could -- with my (government low-interest) student loans being spent only on my living expenses, not tuition. As a result, Sweden has an extra engineer we otherwise wouldn't have, with a good salary contributing to the tax base.
That seems like the opposite of dystopian to me.
There is more to life than money, and even when speaking of money a lot of things are already paid this way.
Isn't it more dystopian that people doing jobs as essential as cleaning have to live in poverty? Just because everyone can clean doesn't mean the people doing it don't deserve a good life. Without people doing those "easy" jobs those talented people wouldn't have time to build and use their talents. The cleaners enable the talented people and so deserve a fair share of what they produce.
As a Nordic person, that kind of income difference looks realistic (without having checked). But I could never had imagined the difference to be considered as dystopian. If we would dig deeper into this, I would expect our different views to have something to do with differences on what expectations we have, values in life and how we relate to inter-personal statuses.
Can't afford it.
Yep - for people who believe they are better than other and entitled to more, it is dystopian.
But then again, it also ensures that pricing and governance in the broader system is in check.
So it is either this or an oligarchy where people feed their egos
Debatable. Look at companies like Klarna. Pays their employees European wages, then goes public in the US.
That sounds like what the paper is saying. To paraphrase, the equality doesn't come from tax redistribution as much as a flatter wage curve. I don't think they are saying it is good or bad, just explaining how it happens.