Norway Saudi-mized

The New York Times had an interesting story this weekend on Norway’s labor predicament, reprinted on the front page of the Seattle Times. “On an average day,” writes Lizette Alvarez,

about 25 percent of Norway's workers are absent from work, either because they have called in sick, are undergoing physical rehabilitation or are on long-term disability…. Throw in vacation time (five weeks for most people), national paid holidays (11 per year) and weekends, and Norwegians take off nearly half the calendar year, about 170 days, a figure that does not include time off for disability and rehabilitation, according to Bergens Tidende, the newspaper that made the calculations.

Is Norway a plague-ridden, accident prone den of dysfunction?

Nope.

But it does have $32 billion worth of Oil exports per year, much of which is used to pay for all the disability time, etc.

Kinda sounds like Saudi-Arabia, in a way, where the citizens became so accustomed to oil wealth in the ‘70s and ‘80s that they are now either ill-equipped or disinclined to perform much of the country’s technical as well as menial work. For that, they import foreigners.

As oil eventually declines in importance over the course of this century, look for more trouble in Arabia (and Norway) if they haven’t gotten their acts together by then.

Seems like a good thing that the founding fathers of our fair nation didn’t decide to nationalize our natural resources.