Doing things the Norway

Notes from a rich country

Norwegians are among the happiest people on earth according to the World Happiness Report. Having spent much of this week in Stavanger, Norway, I could really sense that. It took me a while to realise what it was that was causing me a sense of disorientation. Living in Britain and travelling to Germany a lot, I’ve got used to a certain base level of grumbling. Here in Norway, everyone seemed unnaturally chilled. I couldn’t even get the taxi driver to rant about the government.

A tall man with an impressively curled 19th-century-style moustache picked me up from the airport. Sure, he complained a little about the fabulous wealth of the Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, who is a multimillionaire and frequently ridiculed for trying to be down with ‘ordinary people’. But apart from that, the taxi driver was happy with the general way of things — which is a sentence I don’t think I’ve used before.

He liked the Royal Family and isn’t alone in that. Around 80% of Norwegians continue to support the monarchy with King Harald (now Europe’s oldest monarch) being regarded as a moral authority. When I asked whether Norway isn’t facing the same pressures other countries are: healthcare, education, immigration, inflation etc, he chuckled a little and said, ‘we just throw money at problems and that tends to make them go away.’

That is indeed a huge benefit to the Norwegian system and one no other country in the world has in quite the same way. People often put Norway’s immense wealth down to oil alone. The state is one of the world’s largest exporters of this fossil fuel and made an estimated £60 billion pounds revenue with this last year – almost the same as its spending surplus(!), which amounts to 16% of GDP! That’s a lot of money the government can ‘throw at things’ like public services.

Predictably, there’s been much moaning about this from envious countries that can’t or won’t replicate this success. The BBC had a feature earlier in the summer discussing whether or not Norwegians should feel guilty about this and asking how sustainable this is given that the world tries to move away from oil. I think this is a nonsense question. Norway’s wealth has long stopped being dependent exclusively on oil.

Unlike most other countries, Norway has planned ahead and cleverly invested the revenue in a ‘Government Pension Fund’ which is now worth $1.7 trillion. For comparison, that’s nearly half of Britain’s GDP as the 6th-largest economy in the world. It’s a mind-boggling amount of money.

Even if all the oil dried out tomorrow, this diversification of state revenue would continue to serve the country well. It holds on average 1.5% of all of the world's listed companies. It’s enormous! There is so much money there that if the government spent it unwisely, it would rock the world economy, causing inflation and unimaginable economic havoc.

But Norway isn’t run by tinpot dictators. Regardless of political creed, the country’s parties are united in one thing: they won’t spend more than 3% of the fund annually. Of course, when a government holds that much money, it has an insane amount of responsibility. There is often criticism over individual companies or projects the money gets invested in, but virtually all Norwegians I spoke to over the last few days seem to trust their government to do it well and with minimal corruption — a rare thing indeed in a world where trust between people and their elected governments seems to have broken down in so many places.

The way this financial security takes the pressure off society is really quite something. Okay, I’m writing this in Stavanger, a beautiful and wealthy city on the coast. I’m sure Oslo has other pressures, but the statistics indicate that the general lightness of mood isn’t limited to this place and the unusually bright weather I’ve been blessed with over the last few days. Norwegians have some of the shortest working weeks in Europe yet some of the highest net earnings. They have very low crime rates and a good sense of community. As far as I can see that’s worth dabbling in a bit of state capitalism for.

I’ve also found that this makes it an incredibly welcoming country. It helps that everyone here seems to be able to speak perfect English (‘due to oil and American TV’ I’m told). But in general people are perfectly willing to talk about themselves and their country in a way that I’ve found less guarded and less acrimonious than I’ve experienced pretty much anywhere else on my travels in recent years.

I’m here for the Kapittel Literary Festival and our hosts have certainly done a great job at making everyone feel welcome. We were taken on an amazing 3-hour cruise through the stunningly beautiful fjords. The German Embassy hosted a delightful reception for the many German-speaking guests of the festival. The Norwegian organisers said that they were so touched by the continuous interest in Norwegian literature in Germany that they wanted to do their bit in return to foster artistic ties between the two countries.

I’ve found it fascinating to discuss German memory culture, freedom of speech and rightwing parties with Norwegian co-speakers and audiences to whom this seems to be of grave concern but one that doesn’t affect their own country in the same way.

Norway has the FrP or Progress Party as a rightwing force. The extremist Anders Behring Breivik, who carried out the horrific 2011 terrorist attacks, had previously been a member from 1999 to 2006. But when I asked people here if they were worried about the FrP, I was told by virtually everyone that it’s not the same dynamics as elsewhere. They have been integrated into the political discourse and coalitions for years and from a time when they were still comparatively small. As a result, the party isn’t as extreme as other right-wing parties in Europe. One Norwegian journalist (a Germany expert) told me that he would once have advocated the same course for the AfD but now he’s not so sure since the party has become bigger and more radical.

Over a couple of long evenings in Stavanger’s cosy bars and pubs with fellow authors, I found that debates that cause deep anxiety in Britain and Germany are largely intellectual thought exercises here. Take transport: as other countries find it impossible to fill pot holes and get trains to run on time, Norway is in pole position to become the first fully electrified state in the world. As I shocked people with horror A&E stories from Britain, someone told me that Norway has one of the highest healthcare spending rates per capita in the world and the highest nurse-to-patient rate in Europe. Healthcare is not a big deal to people here because it just works.

I can anticipate people objecting to this article as an overly optimistic view created during four days of sunshine and leisurely intellectual debates in one of the country’s most beautiful cities. It’s a fair point.

Of course, Norway has problems. Some of which it has now managed to tackle such as formerly high rates of suicide (particularly among young men) and alcoholism. Others remain such as an increasing wealth gap, deregulation and privatisation of some public goods such as the railway system – or ‘all that shit’ as one of my Norwegian interlocutors put it.

But there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the state of Norway is in much better order than most other countries in the word. The happiness index and the general mood that welcomes visitors here seem to back my general impressions.

As I sit by Stavanger’s harbour in the late summer sunshine, writing this euphemistic piece, I can’t even be bothered to grumble about the fact that I just paid the equivalent of £9 for a pint of the local brew. Such is the Norway of life.