Viking Economics Read Online Free

notion of “resilience in employment.” These consultants urged the government to give up its full-employment policy, and allow unemployment to rise. That,the IMF pointed out, would encourage international investors to invest money in New Zealand’s economy.
    I realized that this would certainly benefit some New Zealanders, but only at the expense of others. Growing unemployment would increase the number of people willing to work for less money; this, in turn, would reduce the strength of trade unions; and both these results would benefit international investors and their elite associates in New Zealand. This thinking would later come to be called the “race to the bottom.”
    This type of pro-unemployment strategy I first took note of in the 1970s is being implemented today in much of the Eurozone and the UK, where IMF-encouraged austerity programs throw people out of work, increase the power of capital in relation to the labor movement, and create downward pressure on wages, as well as shred the benefits that supported a decent life for the working and middle classes.
    Yet the Viking countries remain on their own path. Norwegians I interviewed told me over and over that a job is a primary means for participating in society. Everyone who can work should do so. The responsibility of a country’s leadership is to generate a humming and vibrant economy with jobs for all. The path to such an economy is in alignment with both freedom and equality.
BUSINESS CYCLES EXIST, SO PLAN FOR THEM!
    It’s a fact of economic life: business goes in cycles. Globalization increases the difficulty that this poses for the small nations that make their living through trading, but only a pessimist would assume that nothing can be done about it.
    The Norwegian government, for example, long ago created
Husbanken
(the housing bank) to help people build and buy homes. When a business cycle goes into decline,
Husbanken
increases its activity, offering low-interest mortgages for first-time home buyers.
    Many Norwegian renters take the new opportunity to buy homes, which also means spending on construction, furniture, and so on. This rise in consumption not only helps adjust the economy, it also produces one of the highest rates of home ownership in the world. 4
    In the wake of the Great Recession, President Barack Obama pleaded with German and other Eurozone leaders to undertake major stimulus programs to counter the plunge of the business cycle. After all, the United States has an economic stake in keeping Europe prosperous, so consumers can buy American exports. Unfortunately for the President and most of the rest of us, those leading the Eurozone and the UK had an agenda focused on austerity.
IMMIGRANTS AND GUEST WORKERS
    Immigration in Norway is as old as the ancient Viking kings, and immigrants have provided important contributions to the country. Those kings found wives in foreign countries in order to strengthen their international alliances. Centuries later, the German-based Hanseatic League brought large-scale trade to Norway’s west-coast cities of Bergen and Trondheim, and the civil servants working in Oslo were immigrants. Foreigners came to Kongsberg to do mining, and immigrants facilitated the industrial use of waterfalls in the nineteenth century. When welived in Oslo in 1960, Berit and I spent a lot of time at an outdoor café on Karl Johans Gate. We would look out onto a sea of white, blue-eyed people carrying navy-blue raincoats and holding the hands of blond children. Now when I visit, I see Norwegians of many colors, wearing everything from soccer pants to head scarves. Two hundred nationalities can be found in the schools. In some classrooms, the majority of children are learning basic Norwegian.
    In 1990, immigrants made up about 4 percent of Norway’s population—today that number is about 14 percent: more than 700,000 people.
    A few years ago, I made friends with a young man named Michael, who had come to Norway from