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Comment by tazu | Hacker News Reader

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This feels like after the fact reasoning. In an alternate timeline where Norway has no oil and is poor, I can imagine someone saying, "How could you expect them to succeed? Poor farming conditions, terrible winters, hardly any natural resources beyond fish."

After all, Russia also has some awful climates, and it doesn't seem to have resulted in strong social cooperation.

> In an alternate timeline where Norway has no oil

Norway was already the richest European country back in 1938, decades before oil was even discovered in the North Sea.

It resulted in such strong social cooperation that the majority of the population (the workers) succeeded in a revolution in 1917 and then for decades drastically improved their material conditions.

There are of course other factors than climate.

The October Revolution didn’t involve the majority of the population (workers). The Bolsheviks had strong support from railroad workers and the army specifically, and with key infrastructure captured they were able to eventually win the day, albeit after a famous civil war with working-class people fighting on both sides. Many successful revolutions throughout history were won by minority groups.

The October Revolution also wasn’t Russia’s first revolution that year. The tsar had already been ousted in the February Revolution, and considering that Russia had already begun to industrialize significantly in the final years of tsarist rule, it is certainly likely that Russia would have enjoyed rising prosperity even if Lenin had not returned from exile and made his coup.

You do realize that "the people " marching towards Moscow demanding change never happen? Instead it was apathy from the people that caused the revolution to be a success.

Where you literally had guards not caring if the revolutionaries took over the position or building?

And the material conditions did not drastically improve, the USSR struggled with living conditions until it's demise.

If anything the blatant corruption made social cooperation impossible.

Debatable whether that was the workers and the extent to which material conditions improved. Certainly, the political conditions were atrocious, and there was the whole Holodomor thing that pro-Soviet narratives like to leave out. Was killing millions an improvement?

And then Russia today has very low social trust, which is less surprising when you look at them being a totalitarian dictatorship for so long.

Russia had serfdom and dictatorship for most of its history.

Isn't that much of Europe?

If we compare with the northern latitudes, which my comment was a response to: For Norway / Sweden / Finland, no not really. Serfdom did not exist in a similar form after medieval times, and neither did autocracy from late 18th / early 19th century onwards. Finland, even though part of Russia for much of this time, did not have serfdom.

Serfdom disappeared almost 500 years or so earlier in Western Europe that it did in Russia (or most of Germany for that matter..)

Because in russia one bad word in good environment with some kgb buddy might get you a trip to gulag. So everybody was very careful choosing conversation partners and topics. That’s not the way to build strong social cooperation.

It sounds like a form of strong social cooperation to me, just one that no one likes. And since strong social cooperation sounds so good to some people, they start to look to separate it from the strong social cooperation they like, either knowingly or unknowingly, and we end up with a similar situation to the stereotypical "ah, but that wasn't real socialism" socialist, where it just can't be admitted to be anything similar.

I'm a libertarian so I'm already suspicious of such things, makes it easy to spot.

You'll "get hate" for it because it's garden-variety racial supremacist language.

If that was the case you'd see the same outcomes from Sweden, but you don't. The obvious differentiating factor seem to be oil, Norway was a poor-isj country until a few decades ago.

I'd argue that you see the same thing in Sweden as in Norway, but without the oil in Sweden's case.

The music industry in Sweden is huge. Check out who wrote and produced many of the US top hits over the last 30 years. Not to speak of the local Swedish bands who make it big internationally.

The software industry is also huge in Sweden (Spotify, Skype, Minecraft, Battlefield, Klarna, Candy Crush, etc). The explanation for this is largely that the kids who grew up in the late 70s and in the 80s got very good support from their parents in getting their own home computer where they could learn to program. This is very similar to young chess players in Norway.

Sweden also punches well above its weight in some sports. Winter sports are kinda a given for a Nordic country, but tennis doesn't fit into that mold. Yet Sweden dominated tennis for a while. This was due to parents and society supporting young kids learning to play tennis in the 60s and 70s.

> Norway was a poor-isj country until a few decades ago.

Norway was already the richest country in Europe back in 1938.

After WW2 Switzerland recovered it’s number 1 spot but in the 60s Norway still had a considerably higher GDP per capita than the Netherlands, and slightly higher than the UK and France.

Sweden is far more similar to Norway than it is to the rest of the world and they don't have much oil. Oil turbocharged Norway maybe 25%. Sweden still ranks top of most metrics people prefer.

> If that was the case you'd see the same outcomes from Sweden, but you don't.

Care to expand on that? I quite literally have no idea what you're talking about. From my POV both Sweden and Denmark provide broadly similar quality of life and wealth of opportunities to their citizens.

Nordic countries provide opportunities only if you dislike work. The more you work, the more money you earn, the more of it the state takes from you to give to those who don't care to work.

This in no way addresses the GP's point regarding differences between the Nordics. Seems like you're just desperately looking for any possible excuse to interject your political views no matter how left field the context.

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