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Comment by geon | Hacker News Reader

Right. (Swede here)

Norway and Sweden are virtually identical as far as I can tell. Though I haven't lived there, I work with norwegians and visit a few times a year since 2008.

Standard of living might be a bit higher, but not drastically.

Naturally, Salaries are a lot lower in Sweden, but so are the prices. Food prices in Norway are often double, rarely less than 150%.

One interesting detail is infrastructure. Due to all the mountains and fjords, building highways in Norway is super expensive. Lots of tunnels. Smaller roads tend to follow the natural, winding shape of the land, making them slow and long.

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I've got tons of Swedish friends, some of who live in Oslo. They basically say that you can speak Swedish in Oslo nowadays because of how many Swedes have immigrated there. Why? Because there are better jobs and they pay more.

The same is true in every major scandinavian country. I think it's a case of several factors conspiring:

1. There are more swedes in scandinavia than there are any other nationality.

2. Young people move to the cities to find work.

3. Youth unemployment rates are high across scandinavia.

4. Ease of mobility across the scandinavian cultures. Olso in particular is close to sweden, and swedes understand norwegian with very little effort (and vice versa).

Thus, you have young swedes moving into all of the larger cities in scandinavia, including Stockholm, Malmö and Gothenburg.

"3. Youth unemployment rates are high across scandinavia."

No, there's a clear difference between Sweden/Finland and Norway/Denmark.

http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=z8o7pt6rd5uqa6_&...

I'd say the data backs my statement with the exception of Norway, but yes, especially high in Sweden and Finland.

and swedes understand norwegian with very little effort (and vice versa).

Debatable ;) But yes transitioning from Swedish to Norwegian and Danish is much easier than say, French to Italian.

And if all else fails, there is allways english.

My reply to another thread a while ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2910005

Copenhagen is pretty much the same - I think the past few times I've flown out of CPH, everyone I've spoken to in a service position at the airport (check-in, bar, restaurant, gate) were actually Swedish.

From the GDP per capita adjusted by PPP you're right, there's not that huge a difference betweeen them (52k vs. 38k):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_...

Whereas the nominal GDP per capita is huge (84k vs. 49k in Sweden and 47k in the US)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomin...

So yes, $84,000 is nice, but it's much much nicer in Sweden than in Norway in terms of what you can buy with it

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