Nordic Paradox: Income Equality and Rising Wealth Inequality Baffles Experts™

Meet a bunch of sociologists, featured in a recent legacy media piece, talking™ wealth inequality in Nordic countries--it's almost as bad as in the US, which raises serious questions about our future

Prelim: this is a long read, and I hope you’ll enjoy it nonetheless—and leave me with your comments below.

Translation, emphases, and [snark] mine.

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The Richest are Leaving Norway

Inequality in Norway is on the rise, according to a report. ‘In a way we’re not used to talking about in Norway’, says a sociologist [more experts™ are needed]

By Ole Reinert Omvik, NRK, 14 April 2025 [source]

‘Many people come into the shop and are surprised that there are so many sports cars in Norway,’ says car dealer Olav Medhus.

‘But this is only the turnover in 14 days’, he adds with a smile.

These cars [shown is a picture of a Lamborghini with a price tag of US$ 500K and up] cost up to five or six million kroner, and demand is growing. Medhus sells around 300 cars a year, most of them used, but also some new ones [new cars come with a hefty 25% VAT surcharge; used cars don’t].

‘Sales of Ferraris and Lamborghinis have increased in parallel with the rise in the fortunes of the richest Norwegians. They are outpacing the rest of us’, says sociologist Maren Toft [faculty profile at the Institute for Sociology and Human Geography, U of Oslo (where she’s always been)].

Norway Near the Top of Europe

‘The richest are getting richer, and they own more. In a way we’re not used to talking about in Norway.’ Thus Maren Toft.

Toft has been researching economic inequality for several years [in fact, that’s literally all she does research-wise (check out her faculty profile): in fact, I’ve looked at some of her stuff and I’m honestly underwhelmed: see, e.g., this recent piece, co-authored with what looks like her internal mentor Marianne Nordli, entitled ‘Dynastic cores and the borrowed time of newcomers’, (British Journal of Sociology, 73, no. 2 (2022), which has but 4 citations), in which C. Wright Mills’ 1956 classic Power Elites is mentioned, but there’s no mention of, say, terms such as ‘oligarchy’ or the like; this is explainable by the fact that the authors ‘follow Piketty (2014)’ and ‘dig more deeply into the kinship structures’ of wealthy people, or: ‘we explore the role of bequests and inter-vivos transfers among the super-rich. To our knowledge, this has not been previously studied.’]. She has noticed [sic] that Norway is slowly but surely climbing the international wealth charts:

In various rankings, Norway is now closer to the top in Europe when it comes to wealth inequality. [last year, Norway’s gov’t was responsible for 64% of economic activity: oligarchy and socialistic practices for the masses aren’t mutually exclusive]

Toft refers, among other things, to a study published in the renowned journal American Sociological Review [entitled ‘The Wealth Inequality of Nations’ (how…creative /sarcasm), which is not freely available] in which Norwegian inequality ranks second in Europe, just behind Sweden [oh, would you look at that: doesn’t this annihilate the nice left-softie talking points emanating from American Democrats about the good-working Nordics? We’ll do a little side-note here citing a few lines from the paper by Fabian T. Pfeffer and Nora Waitkus:

Cross-national patterns of inequality in wealth diverge sharply from those in income [so much for the ‘this hasn’t been studied previously’ notion]…we argue that housing equity should be the central building block of the comparative analysis of wealth inequality [i.e., real estate/assets]…Considering the role of housing equity, financial assets, non-housing real assets, and non-housing debt, we show that cross-national variation in wealth inequality and concentration is centrally determined by the distribution of housing equity [transcribed from the academese: ownership of real estate emerges as a proxy for the study of wealth inequality: what a stunning discovery (/sarcasm; all historians who study pre-industrial Europe have known this for 250 years, as well as contemporary grand tourists—gentlemen travellers—of the 18th century routinely decried)…

in capitalist societies, the universal right for shelter is typically not met by public provision but instead supported by subsidized private ownership [my Italics: who’s doing the subsidising, you might ask, and the answer is—taxpayers; this paper is so deaf-mute on the reality of mortgage lending, it boggles the mind—no bank would lend you money to buy whatever if they didn’t rip the ‘customer’ (rather: client) off via interest rates; subsidies come in two categories, broadly speaking, a) welfare payments from various gov’t agencies to borrowers (e.g., child support, tax credits, etc.) and b) the gov’t underwrites many shitty mortgage loans (see the 2007/08 crash) of borrowers who would otherwise not meet criteria of creditworthiness); the result is—very little risk for the lenders (who also create the ‘money’ they lend out of nothing, i.e., they have little costs) with the borrower, once overwhelmed by payments (during a crash, having been laid off, etc.), is kicked out of the house/apartment and turned into a renter]…

[hence, the paper speaks of a] correlation between ownership rates and welfare state generosity [is it really ‘generosity’ if one’s taxes pay for it?]…somewhat surprisingly [sic], research on financialized mortgage markets and on the financial cultures they produce has only just begun to explicitly consider their relationship to distributional outcomes [well, may it be because your research is funded by those who stand to be revealed™ as the bad guys?]

[I’ll skip most of the paper; if you don’t have access but wish to read it, drop me a line (I do have access courtesy of my work); basically, the authors take really existing data—from the Luxembourg Wealth Study—,re-analyse it, and estimate a) the Gini coefficient and b) concentration of wealth in the top 5% of working-age households: yep, you read this correctly, they took real data and turned it into a calculation

results include: the US is the ‘by far’ most unequal country in terms of income and wealth]

In the four countries that come closest to the United States in terms of wealth concentration—Austria, Sweden, Germany, and Norway—the wealthiest 5 percent own between 40 and 44 percent of national wealth. Note that the countries with the highest concentration of wealth come from all three “worlds of welfare”: liberal (United States), social-democratic (Sweden and Norway), and conservative (Austria and Germany).

[see what I mean? It doesn’t matter what ideology™ your cat espouses as long as it increases the concentration of wealth; curiously, Michael Roberts’ ‘Iron Law of Oligarchy’—which has its own Wikipedia article, for God’s sake—is absent from the study and Prof. Toft’s work: go figure…and now back to the NRK piece]

According to this study, Norway has greater inequality between the top and the rest of the population than the UK, Germany, Luxembourg, and eight other of Europe’s richest countries [let that sink in].

‘When it comes to wage inequality, we are more similar to the rest of Europe. The fact that we earn more equally, but that wealth still grows faster at the top, is known as the “Scandinavian paradox”’, says the sociologist [see the box below]. The perspectives report published last year also shows that wealth inequality is increasing in Norway.

[here follows a box explaining ‘the Scandinavian paradox’, which holds that ‘there is relatively low income inequality, but still high wealth inequality’.

Low income inequality: thanks to strong welfare states, progressive taxation, and a highly organised labour market, countries such as Norway, Sweden and Denmark have some of the lowest levels of income inequality in the world (congrats; all are rich countries with relatively poor populations)

High wealth inequality: at the same time, it turns out that wealth—especially financial wealth and ownership of companies—is highly concentrated at the top in these countries. Studies show that wealth inequality can be as high as in far more economically unequal societies such as the US.

Source: Pfeffer & Waitkus, 2021]

There’s also a second box:

The Richest 1% Increase their Wealth

According to the Perspektivreport 2024, entitled ‘Strong growth and increased concentration of wealth’, the richest 1% in Norway have increased their share of net wealth from 18.1% in 2012 to 22.3% in 2022. An important explanation for this is the strong growth in share and property prices, which has benefited the richest in particular [i.e., asset inflation due to otherwise piss-poor economic performance; note that this jump looks big—it’s as 23% increase in a decade—yet note that this is little over 2% per year annually, which is higher than economic growth during that period (hence the growing wealth gap), but it’s not spectacular

Here, the boxes/additional info ends, and the NRK piece shifts focus away from academia to what has been known to pre-WW1 sociologists (such as Marcel Mauss) as ‘conspicuous consumption’: as the top 1% grow wealthier, buying the umpteenth posh sports car simply isn’t good enough]

Good to Show Off the 44-Foot Yacht

‘We sell perhaps the finest boats on the market’, says Christoffer Olsen at Aaby Marine in the Oslofjord.

He used to sell BMW cars, but has now switched to selling luxury day cruisers. Several large Windy boats are ready for sale in the exhibitions hall in Asker, adding:

I would say that those who are resourceful today have perhaps taken larger positions on expensive boats over the past five years.

Olsen believes it has become more acceptable to show off your wealth now:

Ten or fifteen years ago, you could barely see a Ferrari, a Bentley or a Lamborghini. Now you can walk down Bogstadveien and see ten of them in no time. That’s how the boat business becomes intelligble.

Debate on Inheritance

Ten years ago, the book Capital in the 21st Century by the French economist Thomas Piketty sparked an extensive debate in the Western world. The author revealed a galloping increase in the wealth of the rich [honestly, there’s not a lot new stuff in there (except the fancy-looking equations)].

The main reason, he argued, was that inheritance and investments are taxed too low.

Labour Party leader Jonas Gahr Støre said that Piketty’s research had given new weight to the inequality debate. In Støre’s view, the findings were also relevant to Norway, and that they reinforced the need for a tax system that counteracts growing inequality [in theory, sure; read on to learn how Norway governed].

Earlier the same year, the Solberg government (Conservatives/Free Democrats) had abolished inheritance tax. That meant that all inheritance could be transferred from one generation to another, tax-free.

Critics believed this would lead to an even greater accumulation of wealth [no need for cult-believes, if you don’t tax inherited wealth (which I don’t think you should), inequality will increase].

In Norway, however, Piketty’s ideas did not lead to major political changes [well, the Støre gov’t introduced taxes on ‘unrealised capital gains’, which weigh very heavy on both the super-rich (who can afford to leave, preferably to Switzerland) and the few entrepreneurially inclined (who can’t leave)], although politicians such as Støre expressed support for his analyses.

When is There Enough Inequality?

Inequality researcher Rolf Aaberge at Statistics Norway and the University of Oslo says that the inheritance tax had its weaknesses, because the richest had ways of avoiding the tax. But he believes it should have been improved, rather than abolished [note that Støre’s left/far-left gov’t hasn’t done a thing about this]:

If you want to slow down the development we’ve seen over quite a long period of time, it would have been reasonable to keep an inheritance tax in place [there should be exemptions for middle-class and lower-class individuals to build equity]

If you don’t, you have to wonder whether politicians have any idea where the limit for the concentration of income and wealth in a few hands should lie [here’s an idea: why not ask the experts™ and politicos™ about this?].

Aaberge also refers to the Torvik Committee, chaired by economics professor Ragnar Torvik from NTNU in 2022. At the time, Torvik proposed reducing wealth tax and introducing an inheritance tax.

‘How much should the top one per cent have of households' total income and wealth? Should they be able to have 40-50% of the total income? Should they be able to have 80% of total wealth’, Aaberge asks rhetorically.

‘I would like to know if there is an upper limit for politicians’, he concludes [and here you can see the equally age-old adage of ‘he who pays the piper, calls the tune’ at-work: it’s also the one important issue that’s consistently avoided in both the cited academic literature and throughout the NRK piece].

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Bottom Lines

That read was both painful intellectually as well as insultingly ignorant. In what follows, I shall set the scene with two exemplary quotes by grand tourists of the 18th century:

Wealth is also the particular precipitate of the nobility of Bohemia, which is today quite mixed, most of it being from foreign Houses which have settled there. The Kingdom is like an open range, where all those who acquire wealth in the service of the Emperor come to invest it, the land being of great value, and the domain accompanied by all the privileges of Sovereignty, the subjects of the Lords are all owned [orig. de main morte] there, and quasi slaves; their goods and their persons, at least as regards work, belong to them, and they [the lords] can dispose of them as much as they please for their own service.

This is the reason why these peoples, who are thus subject to particular masters, do not like them at all, and it is assumed that they wish with all their heart to see some revolution in the State in order to take advantage of it and to achieve greater freedom…

It is certain that the Emperor draws very large revenues from Bohemia, and that the individual Lords, who are petty tyrants, pay him very large contributions [drawn from precisely these subjects] today. Are there not ways of holding the people in respect, without showing that they are feared by a general destruction of all kinds of fortresses, because they may become the support of a rebel?

Thus the Dominican Casimir Freschot in his Remarques historiques et critiques, which document his travels across Europe, first published in 1705 (vol. 1, 132-6).

A few decades later, Freiherr von Pöllnitz wrote about the same in one of his Brieffe (Letters, 2nd ed., 1738, pp. 227-8, the letter dates to 1729):

As I have told you of the Bohemian nobility that they are the most prosperous in the entire Roman Empire, so I must report the opposite of the peasants, who are poor beyond measure…in a country which is one of the most fertile in Europe.

I trust this sums it up.

None of the stuff in the NRK piece is new or something people—without a proper education™, such as professors Toft or Nordli—is new or unknown.

It is merely less discussed since around the interwar period, especially since the advent of what Wolfgang Schivelbusch in his Three New Deals (2007) calls ‘distant affinities’ between Italian-style Fascism, German National Socialism, and FDR’s New Deal: the overbearing tendency of technocratic managerialism, Western style, to bring about a highly centralised and collectivised society that retains (limited forms of) private ownership, as opposed to the Eastern/Bolshevik style of doing, essentially, the same thing.

The main differences between these two horrifying versions of highly organised, collectivist societies are twofold:

• the ways and means of achieving essentially the same outcomes differ (cf. the West’s elections™ and ‘soft’, gradualist approaches vs. the bloody social revolution in the East)

• in terms of results—millions upon millions of dead—both meta régimes are very much alike, albeit the Western one ‘outsources’ the killing to the third world while the Eastern one has done a lot of killing domestically

Isn’t it kinda, you know, odd that the go-to work the sociologists offer is C. Wright Mills’ Power Elites (1956) who was among the more renowned sycophants of the managerial liberalism that reigned supreme after the 1930s? It’s hard, if not outright impossible, to presume professors—Mills taught at the Ivy League—would espouse views that differ noticeably from those who run society. The same applies to, say, his contemporaries Arthur Schlesinger or Henry Kissinger: like their humanist predecessors in the Italian Renaissance, the primary quality of these intellectuals is—sycophancy.

I suppose we need not talk about Nobel prize-winning economists now.

Yet, it is imperative to remember that these sentiments were ‘firmly walled within the earth’ (Schiller’s Song of the Bell, 1798) of modern social science research in the final quarter of the 19th century. Scholars from a virtually all disciplines sought to explain—rather: make sense of—the comprehensive and rapid change during what Eric Hobsbawm has (in)famously called The Age of Empire; this was an era in which ‘man’s entire way of apprehending and structuring the universe [was] transformed in a fairly brief period of time…it produced evolution (which could be easily identified with secular “progress”, at least in human affairs)’ [see esp. Chapters 10, ‘The Sciences’, on pp. 243-66, and 11, ‘Reason and Society’, on pp. 262-75, with the preceding quote on 243-4].

Tucked away in these words, then, we find the association of ‘evolution’ and ‘progress’ are of utmost importance if one wishes to more comprehensively understand how pre-existing ideas, sentiments, and information were poured into a—the scientific—mould of late 19th-century Imperial German science.

Back then, Wilhelmine Germany was (one of) the emerging centres of the bourgeois-industrial world.

There is a huge academic cottage industry devoted to The Great Transformation (Polyani), the ‘dual revolution of the long 19th century’ (Hobsbawm), or The Birth of the Modern World (Christopher Bayly), all which are devoted to understanding the dynamics of political change, foreign and domestic, to bring about the economic integration of various (semi)peripheral areas into the modernising-industrial world.

This is the essential background, which underwrote most social science history enquiries into the progress of ‘the West’ vs. the relative ‘backwardness’ of, first, Eastern Europe and later the world. As mentioned before, many aspects thereof were fused with pre-existing ideas—stereotypes—of the ‘retrograde’ East dominated by increasingly anachronistic proprietor classes that exploited and oppressed the impoverished masses (‘serfs’).

However tentative and preliminary, I wish to emphasise two aspects that are, like the two-faced Roman god Janus, intimately tied together: first, the proximate origin of the idea that there were two fundamentally different halves of Europe (and later, between the centre/core and peripheries) harks back to Georg Knapp’s two-vol. treatise Die Bauernbefreiung (1887).

We note, in passing, that this work is virtually unknown to most historians, let alone social science practitioners, even though Knapp could not have been clearer about the subject of his book:

The history of the liberation of the peasantry is the history of the social question of the 18th century. The social question of the 19th century is less related to the peasants than to the workers, in particular with rural workers…thus, we are not considering agriculture but rather the people working in this industry, the rural constitution, the social relations of the various classes, and the positioning of the state in-between. In researching the liberation of the peasantry and the origins of the rural workers, we are investigating the socio-political history of the rural population. [vol. 1, pp. iii-iv]

Would you look at that, please: freedom and liberty are age-old and decidedly premodern/industrial issues; their modern qualities arise from the meta-changes wrought by the creation, via enclosures and other industrial policies, of a class of impoverished, landless workers.

Their welfare (no pun intended) is the social question of the 19th century, which was ‘resolved’ by the creation of Western welfare states in the 20th century.

We may thus point towards the social question of the 20th century: how to manage mass society?

Managerial liberalism (New Deal), Fascism (all garden varieties), and Communism are merely epiphenomena and all struggling to deal with the same root problem.

Whatever system will emerge in the 21st century will be, for all intents and purposes, merely be the resolution of the social question of the 20th century.

We may, however, infer that of the three options, at least the two openly totalitarian versions (Fascism and Communism) are certainly the least-desirable options; as liberal managerialism is morphing into tyranny before our very own eyes, questions about both its longevity and TINA (there is no alternative) arise.

Lastly, the age-old adage of ‘those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it’ certainly applies to the present: as the Wester meta-régime turns increasingly on its own people (inmates), the future of managerial liberalism is increasingly adorned with a large, and growing, question mark.