[wrong_variable]

To anyone who is thinking:

1) Yeah, they are a small resource rich country, not practical for the rest of us.

America, Canada, UK, Saudi Arabia and Australia were resource rich and still are ( America is the largest producer of oil ) and had the opportunity to do what Norway did but chose not to do it.

UK had a huge surplus from north sea oil during the 1990s which is allowed private companies to profit off. Same with America, Australia and Canada.

It is really remarkable how Norway was able to and still is able to think so far ahead then the rest of us.

[jpollock]

All of the countries mentioned have royalty regimes which companies have to pay to extract natural resources. Oil extraction in Texas has a 25% royalty rate [2]. This is typically based off of the retail price, not some interim price too.

Governments are very careful to set royalty rates appropriately. Extraction companies compare total costs, so countries with low labour and shipping costs can have higher royalties than countries with high costs. [3] I've seen a report out of New Zealand showing just how mercenary this is, comparing the cost-to-market from several countries complete with royalty rate comparisons.

The difference is in what the countries do with the royalties. For example, Alberta does have a sovereign wealth fund, but it also doesn't collect sales tax. Saudi Arabia has a huge sovereign fund - just not quite as big as Norway's. Saudi Arabia also has no personal income taxes.

Norway's genius is in sending the royalties through the fund, and then only allowing them to spend at most 4% of the total [1] - the estimated average annual return.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Nor...

[2] https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/green/report/2015/06...

[3] http://money.cnn.com/interactive/economy/the-cost-to-produce...

[oldmanjay]

Norway is culturally optimized for safe equilibrium. America is culturally optimized for risky advancement. It's pretty starkly different and makes direct single-variable comparisons into shallow exercises in meaninglessness

[larsiusprime]

Norway is also tiny and SOVEREIGN. Any similarly inclined USA state must answer to the other 49.

[rpgmaker]

How so? What stops any state in the US from doing similar things? Genuine question. California for example routinely establishes new and stricter (compared to other US states) environmental rules governing emissions and whatnot. Legalizing pot is similarly fairly out of the mainstream and it is being done independently by several states.

[larsiusprime]

> Legalizing pot is similarly fairly out of the mainstream and it is being done independently by several states.

And for a while those states were subject to ongoing raids from the federal government. The Obama administration has held off, but the legal framework that justifies said raids is very much in place. If opinions blow back the other way they could resume any time.

When you're not sovereign, then your sovereign can tell you what you can and can't do. If you're mostly on their side, it's not a problem, but there's no guarantee it will stay that way forever.

Say a conservative supreme court comes to power and says, "Yeah, pot is totally banned and states can't opt out of it." End of discussion.

[barney54]

The Clean Air Act allows the federal government to give CA the ability to set alternative standards for car emission controls, but it isn't likely it allows CA to ban all fueled vehicles.

[jdavis703]

They could almost certainly make the price of gas so expensive via taxes that it effectively bans them though.

[larsiusprime]

...aaaand the federal government (via congress, the executive, or the courts) could find some way to intervene and challenge that and hold it up indefinitely.

[orik]

If you ban sale of gas cars in say, California, everyone will just hop over to Oregon/Nevada/Arizona to purchase vehicles.

[whyenot]

California already has stricter emissions standards than most states. You can't purchase a car in Oklahoma and register it in California without making modification to the emissions system.

[toomuchtodo]

If you ban gas stations instead in California, where will they fill up? The federal government has limited control over state land use regulation.

[orik]

banning gas stations isn't a ban on new gas vehicles, it's a ban on all gas vehicles. very different, and the people will never vote for it until we are in a very different place than we are today.

[fleitz]

It's also much less diverse than America.

[adamnemecek]

How's that relevant?

[larsiusprime]

The more opinions there are from different people the harder it is to reach consensus?

[adamnemecek]

Are we talking about ideological diversity or ethnical diversity?

[larsiusprime]

I'm talking about the former, the latter i guess is at least somewhat correlated with differing opinions too. Reaaly its the vast difference in size that matters -- USA has SO many differing constituencies with differing needs and wants and opinions. Norway is a municipal government by comparison.

[badsock]

It's dog whistle for "Norway doesn't have black people"

[fleitz]

No, it's dog whistle for Norway is full of Norwegians.

https://www.google.ca/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&es... Ethnic groups. Norwegian 94.4% (includes Sami, about 60,000), other European 3.6%, other 2% (2007 estimate)

Of whom 80% belong to one religious denomination

Religions. Church of Norway (Evangelical Lutheran - official) 82.1%, other Christian 3.9%, Muslim 2.3%, Roman Catholic 1.8%, other 2.4%, unspecified 7.5% (2011 est.)

Not even a mix of 'white people', not even Baptists and Methodists, just Norwegian Lutherans.

[cm3]

It's a matter of different politics. Norway chose not to basically let private companies take all the profit from natural resources, while in the UK there's this weird system in place that has politicians ruining public orgs like infrastructure providers to afterwards claim they fixed it, once they pushed for privatization, and all they did was get it back to where it was before in quality of service. After that, it's profit-driven and the population has to fight for laws to keep up existing quality standards they pay for with taxes. There are European countries like Finland where you don't worry which school your kids go to because there are no good or bad school districts. Same for hospitals. If you have to pay taxes for public services, then it must be fair and of equal quality for everybody, or you must turn it all into a Friedman-style privatize-everything system, which may or may not work but sounds thought through and might.

[digi_owl]

Norway is turning UK year by year...

[to3m]

Can you elaborate?

[kwhitefoot]

The current government wants to sell off the Flytog (Airport Train). This is a state owned enterprise that even the seriously capitalist Norwegian financial magazine Kapital says is one of the best run companies in the country and should not be privatised. There have been serious suggestions that Statoil should be sold off completely. The electricity system has been privatised even though most of the energy is generated by rain that can hardly be said to be owned by anyone.

[tyfon]

Regarding Statoil. The government currently owns about 1/3 of it. The oil income for the state does not come from the profit of the company but the taxes they put on the companies that extract oil (which is about 80%) and the sale of licenses through Petoro. Selling Statoil (and the other ones) have absolutely no comparison to what Thatcher did in the 80s if that is what you are insinuating.

Regarding the power, the majority of the plants are owned by Statkraft, a 100% government owned company and is most definitely not privatized.

Flytoget runs well because even though it is owned by the government, they have had a very hands off approach and let them operate without interference. The same can be said of Statoil, the only reason it has done so well is that the government has been mostly hands off. My father was in the top management before retirement and has been very clear on this. Whenever the government tried to interfere it just made problems.

In essence, as a fellow Norwegian i disagree with you on these subjects (and some of what you write is simply not true).

[JupiterMoon]

So if companies are well run and profitable in their current state owned but hands off form why not keep them that way?

[kochthesecond]

Why sell off the train if it's earning money? Plenty of government run ventures don't.

[vixen99]

Venezuela is also resource rich.

[labster]

Venezuela is run by inept kleptocrats. Either the ineptitude or the kleptocracy part would be enough to keep a similar scheme from working in Venezuela.