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Comment by dominicr | Hacker News Reader

Related to this: customers need to pay more.

Many businesses have very small profit margins, so paying staff more or training staff could turn them unprofitable.

When you're buying products cheaply it's likely that somebody (or someone's environment) is paying a price for it. Once you bear that in mind there is such a thing as products being uncomfortably cheap.

(I live in Norway where nothing is cheap but almost everyone earns a good wage. The result is that people don't buy so much stuff but lead good lives.)

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If everyone earns 2x but everything costs 2x, what changes?

Because that never happens. TVs aren't affected by the price of milk. Your vacation in Germany costs the same whether you live in San Francisco or San Luis Obispo. Your iPhone costs the same. Etc. Etc.

It does happen to a certain extent, compare basic food like rice and bread in a third world country to a developed one, for a lot of products the price is more a case of what the market more than it is cost of creation.

If "everyone" and "everything" mean "the whole word population" and "all costs in the world", then yeah, nothing changes. But if it happens on a smaller region then oh, yeah. Lots of things change.

Thing is, it doesn't.

As an example cars are produced everywhere around the world but the same product costs roughly the same regardless of geography.

This way in rich countries people can afford domestically manufactured cars, while in poor countries they can't.

It's not that simple as the multipler is not even across all things and all jobs. Eating out or getting a take away is 2x or 3x the cost of the UK/US but your server & chef both make a decent wage without the need for tips. Electronics are about 1.2X the cost of the EU.

The starting salary of a supermarket worker is 2x that of the UK. But a software developer's salary is only a fraction more than in the UK.

The effect is that the range of inequality across the population is reduced. It's a social democracy, so in general the population like this arrangement.

Yeah the $1T oil fund ($200k per person) has nothing to do with it.

It has nothing to do with the point OP was making.

The oil fund is a result of that as much as a cause. Only a small percentage of the country's spending is from that fund. The aim of the fund is to save for the future and the government is only allowed to spend some of the profits.

What makes more of a difference is the feeling of social and fiscal responsibility that led to the fund's creation. Planning for the future and helping people through hard times sounds like communism to some people but in Europe is generally considered common sense.

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