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Comment by belval | Hacker News Reader

1. Have a large amount of oil & gas comparatively to your population

2. Sell the oil and gas to Europe

3. Use the money to finance the Utopia

I don't want to be too cynical, what Norway is doing is great, but I feel like whenever a case study comes up about why something works, ultimately it boils down to "money".

We can go full reductio ad absurdum and write "How Norway Built a free healthcare Utopia While Ethiopia is struggling".

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It has to be mentioned that Norway spends most of it's petromoney on the Pension Fund. We've got a rule that the government at most can touch 4% of that for whatever they want to do - but they keep it around 2-3% .

Even then it should be compared to a city in the US as they would sometimes not even be a top 10 by metroplex population

Sure, if that city stretched further than the distance from Minneapolis to Houston!

We're not exactly a densely population country. We've got enormous distances. A city would be rather easy, wouldn't it? Just pop up some big charging stations around the city in addition to home charging, and that wouldn't be a problem any more.

Remember that the population density of Norway is 1/5 of the population density of the US.

Surely you can think of all the reasons a sparse population is easier to maintain. Also you'd only be our 4th largest state so I wouldn't call this "enormous"

So how much do people of Norway have to save up from their income for their pension?

Also things these silly America sucks conparisons convenientlh forget:

1.The US is a republic of mini countries or states.

2. Norway is roughly the size of new england.

3. Norway has 5.4 million people vs America's 330 or 340 million

4. 95% of electricity is from hydropower

Just to be clear, 95% of electricity in Norway is from hydro. Not 4.95%

That's by far the biggest consideration, most likely. Having a ton of hydro is a godsend: you have extreme amounts of energy, but it's hard to export so you can't really hit the resource curse. It can still be a bit of a factor (because high-electricity business e.g. aluminium smelters) but nowhere near as bad as oil/gas.

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