Video: Road safety film from Norway asks drivers, would you act so aggresively elsewhere?

usedtobefaster wrote:

I've spent a week in Norway on holiday and it's how a country should be run. Great place but very expensive as a tourist.

Of course they had the insight to view the discovery of North Sea oil as a national asset and not allow it to be passed over into private hands, so they can afford to run a very pleasant socially aware community. I believe the countries investment fund is the biggest in the world and it's owned by the people.

Blimey where to start.

Norway uses a licensing system the same way that we do. Private companies with real expertise find and get the oil and gas out of the North sea. Yes Statoil is state owned but only when Norway realised it had oil and gas. British Oil companies were set up to supply Britain with oil and gas way before we discovered North Sea oil. BP was founded as Anglo Persian in 1909. It's a little trickier to nationalise a company that has been trading for 60 odd years and has assets and investors, contracts, and drilling rights and collaborations around the world than it is to just set up a brand new state oil company to exploit reserves on your own soverign territory.

That Norway invested the money in a sovereign wealth fund is to their credit. Very wise. But one of the very important reasons behind that is the fact that Norway is almost too dependent on oil and gas. It has used the sovereign fund to try to build up a hedge fund to counter that overdependency for when it runs out in a way that the UK has not had to and arguably doesn't need to.

And Norway is a very different country to the UK. It has a small very homogenous population. 5 million. It had a very basic industrial revolution again based on a few heavy industries but was mainly supported by agriculture and fisheries until the mid 20th century.

It doesn't have a large population with a legacy of a very industrialised urban centred diverse population.

You might have argued that the UK could have done the same with a sovereign fund. Unfortunately if the UK government had that kind of spare cash while not spending it on education, hospitals, increased benefits, or on tax cuts or defence there would be hell to pay politically.

So yes if you start with a small semi industrialised mainly rural population and you add oodles of petro cash quite quickly then you can have all sorts of goodies and spare cash to invest.

If you start with a large industrialised urban centred population undergoing de-industrialisation and you add the same amount of cash it doesn't go anywhere really.

Norway's GDP is around $500bn ($500,000,000)
population 5 million
Labour force 2.645m
45th largest economy in the world

UKs GDP is $2.5 Trillion (2,500,000,000,000)
population 63 million
Labour force 30.5 million
6th largest economy in the world

Can we please stop this nonsense of comparing ourselves with completely and utterly different countries in terms of scale and history and beating ourselves up about how well they are run. Yes we get it a nice new small specialised boutique with 5 employees is a lot easier to run and keep clean than a big older supermarket with lots of departments that keeps 63 people in a job.

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Blimey where to start.

Etc

You're entitled to your opinion, but I feel you're too dismissive of another person's comments here.