Saturday 6 January 2001

Pic of the day: Partying. (Screenshot from The Sims.)

Norway is drunk

Since today is Saturday, the headline is also true in a more literal sense. The average Norwegian drinks less alcohol than most Europeans; but most of it is consumed during a few hectic hours on Friday and Saturday evenings. The typical Norwegian doesn't usually drink alcohol with his meals; he downs large quantities of it for the purpose of getting drunk.

I think that from my description of this matter, you can figure out approximately what I think about it too. But this is not the problem that preoccupies me today.

There goes a story about a guy who was taunting a drunkard mercilessly. At last the drunk man straigthened and said: "I am drunk; that will pass. You are stupid, and that will never pass."

***

When the last drops of alcohol evaporates from Norwegian brain cells sometime Monday morning, there will still be plenty of delusions left. For our long and mountaineous nation is drunk with its own imagined glory and greatness, and therefore we stumble in brightest day as if it were a moonless night.

I am sure arrogance is a natural part of any nation. Why would people even form a nation, or remain in one, if they were not proud of it? Yet there are some to which it seems to come particularly naturally. The ones I have noticed are Israel, the USA and Norway.

Israel, or rather the Jews, are sort of excused since their holy books tell them that they are a chosen people. Having inspired two other world religions and much of western science and art probably doesn't help either. But they might remain in better health if they tone it down a little, or so it seems.

The United States of America is feeling important not because of their religion, but because of practical experience. Unlike most other nations, they actually are important. They have an enormous economy, science and military. Their culture is rapidly becoming the world culture, as it is exported through books, magazines, songs, movies, and now also the Internet. Apart from being a democratic nations with pretty safe borders, they also have the benefit of rich natural resources that have only been exploited for a couple hundred years, and above all the sheer size of habitable land under a common government.

In contrast, Norway has the population of a large city (ca 4.5 million) spread over a rocky coastline stretching half the way from the Arctic Sea towards the Mediterranean, and from nearly as far west as London to further east than the capital of Turkey. A large, cold and mostly empty country that also currently happens to be the world's second largest oil exporter, through no fault of its own.

***

As a former Prime Minister of Norway put it, "it is typically Norwegian to be good". And indeed Norway has some of the world's best skiers. This tradition stems from the time when most of Norway was covered with snow for months each year. In parts of the country it is still that way, despite the greeenhouse effects. But people no longer use skis for practical purposes. It's anybody's guess how long we can lay claim to even this peculiar superiority.

We like to think that we have the best health care in the world, while in reality it is inferior to most developed countries. Our schools, despite gobbling up more money than most, are middle of the road in results. (At least we beat the Americans in primary school tests, but higher education is another matter entirely.) It is true that Norwegians have more personal computers and Internet access than anyone except our Scandinavian neighbors plus USA and Switzerland. But we don't use them productively - online shopping is much less common than in larger countries, and distance learning and distance working are both pitifully undeveloped.

Norwegian companies as well as the state invest much less in research and development than the OECD area (the developed world) in general. Not surprising then that productivity growth remains sluggish, and that return on investment is chronically lagging compared to our trade partners.

Any Norwegian you meet on the street will tell you that we are the world's richest country (which is almost correct), but I doubt than any one of them knows that Norway's economic growth for the last few years has been significantly less than in our fellow Nordic countries which don't have oil resources. For some obscure reason, people believe that the income from the North Sea oil makes us all into oil sheikhs. But it is only a small addition to the economy; knowledge industries are more important, and they won't be heartened by hearing that 35% of teachers flunked a mandatory maths test. Many outlying communities can only hope to see a teacher with valid education at all sometime.

***

I'm not saying that things are bad here in Norway. Things are rarely bad in long time democratic nations. History shows us that a nation that remains democratic for several generations necessarily grows prosperous. There is no way to avoid it, just as there is no way for a country to grow rich through war and atrocities.

But things could get so much better if we woke up, looked around and set our priorities straight. You don't need to be an experienced strategy gamer to know this (but it helps): Education, basic health care and communication infrastructure. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Once the basic services are in place, the people generate wealth and ideas automatically, and enough surplus to defend the nation too. It's high time we wake up from our drunken arrogance, before we are left too far behind.