After I Lived in Norway, America Felt Backward. Here’s Why.

[Lodestar]

Young people who want to experience alternative models of government...visit Norway!

A crash course in social democracy.

Some years ago, I faced up to the futility of reporting truths about America’s disastrous wars, and so I left Afghanistan for another mountainous country far away. It was the polar opposite of Afghanistan: a peaceful, prosperous land where nearly everybody seemed to enjoy a good life, on the job and in the family.

It’s true that they didn’t work much–not by American standards, anyway. In the United States, full-time salaried workers supposedly laboring 40 hours a week actually average 49, with almost 20 percent clocking more than 60. These people, on the other hand, worked only about 37 hours a week, when they weren’t away on long paid vacations. At the end of the workday, about four in the afternoon (perhaps three during the summer), they had time to enjoy a hike in the forest, a swim with the kids, or a beer with friends—which helps explain why, unlike so many Americans, they are pleased with their jobs.

Often I was invited to go along. I found it refreshing to hike and ski in a country with no land mines, and to hang out in cafés unlikely to be bombed. Gradually, my war-zone jitters subsided and I settled into the slow, calm, pleasantly uneventful stream of life there.

Four years on, thinking I should settle down, I returned to the United States. It felt quite a lot like stepping back into that other violent, impoverished world, where anxiety runs high and people are quarrelsome. I had, in fact, come back to the flip side of Afghanistan and Iraq: to what America’s wars have done to America. Where I live now, in the homeland, there are not enough shelters for the homeless. Most people are either overworked or hurting for jobs; the housing is overpriced, the hospitals crowded and understaffed, the schools largely segregated and not so good. Opioid or heroin overdose is a popular form of death, and men in the street threaten women wearing hijabs. Did the American soldiers I covered in Afghanistan know they were fighting for this?

cont'd

http://www.thenation.com/article/after-i-lived-in-norway-america-felt-backward-heres-why/

Expat Blog on Life In Norway
http://www.lifeinnorway.net/

Check out Michael Moore's film about his visit to Norway
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1017335448

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[patricia92243]

1. Wonder why they didn't continue to live in Norway.

[malaise]

2. What an odd question

Shakes head

[patricia92243]

4. Why is it odd? I tried to read the whole article, but the site kept crashing. Maybe it

had an explanation that I was unable to read.

[malaise]

8. It's odd because the author has a right to assume a certain quality of life at home

rather than being asked why she returned home.

[Spider Jerusalem]

3. After living in pretty much any other developed country America feels backward (n/t)

[deutsey]

5. I remember someone saying that coming from where they lived in Norway (I think)

to New York City was like coming from the world of The Jetsons the The Flintstone's Bedrock.

[mdbl]

6. I agree with one of the comments below the article:

 Walter Pewen says:
January 30, 2016 at 11:21 pm

Right on--1980 was the turning point and not enough weight is given to it. Reagan came in, and began doing essentially unspeakable acts to our beloved New Deal. Most of what he did for eight years was either criminal, very negative, or just plain stupid. Fast forward to 2016: You get to see a society at war with itself. Jobs that don't work for people, housing that lines the pockets of the speculator class but people cannot afford. Arguing, endless arguing, brought on often by hollow people at places like Fox News. A sense by the disenfranchised like black people that they have been robbed. And they have. By 35 years of "let them eat cake" while highways, byways, and children died. It is a very sick place, this United States.

[The2ndWheel]

7. Diversity is messy

[Lodestar]

9. It'll be interesting to see how all the refugees pouring into their country

will impact and challenge their government, culture and lifestyle.

[pampango]

10. But manageable. Norway has a larger foreign-born population 13.9% than the US 13.1% - as of 2013.

I doubt their foreign-born population has declined in recent years. Norwegians are liberals acting like liberals.

https://data.oecd.org/migration/foreign-born-population.htm

[The2ndWheel]

12. It's not just that

Countries will differ from one another. If we like diversity, then having America as it exists today, and also Norway as it exists today, that's diverse. Two countries doing things in two different ways. No value judgments, just what is.

As with anything, it's a question of perception. If you have 100 people, all in one group, doing whatever they do, is that more or less diverse than those same 100 people, split up into 10 groups of 10 people, randomly, or by whatever criteria you would use to split them up, all doing their own things within those groups? I would say you can make a case for both being examples of diversity, as well as a lack of diversity, it just depends on which part of the picture you focus on.

[MisterP]

13. yeah, some countries are completely riven and whole provinces don't speak the same language

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada

[pampango]

11. Article from last year: "Bernie Sanders wants the U.S. to be more like Norway"

Wen asked what he means by "democratic socialism," presidential candidate Bernie Sanders typically points to the Nordic countries. In Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark, education is provided for free, social insurance is unimaginably generous, and times are good. We should follow their example, he says.

So what do the Nordics demonstrate? That social democratic policy can work. Government provision of health insurance, education, and paid leave has been a big success for those countries. It has not been a drag on their economic growth, especially if one examines output per hour worked.

Perhaps most notably (because the U.S. does very poorly in this regard), it is fairly trivial for a wealthy nation to essentially abolish poverty. Simply arrange your distributive institutions in such a way that every person gets enough income to get them over the poverty line. Wages are a big part of that, of course, but government steps in where market income falls short.

America is far behind most of Europe in providing for its citizenry, but there has been much progress over time, from Social Security to ObamaCare. Bernie Sanders suggests we can get the rest of the way there, through the same multi-ethnic political coalition that supported most of the pioneering policies of the American safety net. If he's right, it would be not only a great benefit to America's poor, but a good example for low-birthrate European nations struggling with de-homogenization. It turns out the Nordics may have as much to learn from the U.S. as the reverse.

http://theweek.com/articles/570205/bernie-sanders-wants-more-like-norway-that-even-possible