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The lesson here is... The US should discover a really, really, really large amount of oil?

I mean, I don't take Booth's takedown of the Nordic countries very seriously, but the reason that Norway is in such great shape financially is that they have an enormous amount of oil that they sell. It's not exactly a reproducible strategy for nation-building.

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To put things in context. The oil industry is producing 20% of the total GDP of Norway and 50% of all exports. It's very important and it will be painful when it ends, but Norway will not be much worse than other European countries when the oil runs out.

The lesson here is how can you reasonably bash their economy?

For the record, I think the US economy is just fine, but I also think that things in scandinavia are A-O.K.

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