Deteriorating Infrastructure

There is something strange about Norway. It is one of the richest countries in the world, it is a democracy, and its people are peaceful, well educated and prosperous. It has all the qualities of a highly successful country, yet its infrastructure is in very bad shape. It has the worst roads in Europe, its trains are extremely unreliable and prone to accidents, many of its schools and other public buildings are in need of urgent repair, and the sewage and water system are also in a very bad shape.

Looking at its infrastructure, one would think that Norway was a relatively poor country and not one of the richest in the world, and since this can hardly be due to a lack of money, the policies implemented by successive governments over the years must take the blame for this sorry state of affairs.

Norwegian politicians have neglected vital infrastructure for decades and things are now starting to fall apart, but instead of dealing with the problem, the politicians are blaming each other for the mess. Almost every political party in Norway must take some part of the blame, it is argued, because almost all the political parties have been in power off and on over the period of neglect that stretches back for at least a generation. But spreading the blame does nothing to fix the problem, and apart from this blame game nothing much seems to be happening. Improvements are made every day, we are told, but no policies have been changed, and funding remain largely unchanged, so it is hardly likely that things will become better any time soon.

An interesting feature in Norwegian politics is that politicians seldom refer to experiences from other countries, or lessons from history, but argue within a narrow ideological range of ideas. The large and generous welfare state is never criticized in principle. Only very limited tinkering is discussed. All the parties talk about community and the common good. Only a few parties on the political right talk about individual rights and private initiative. Wealth redistribution is viewed as a political virtue by all the parties, and only the scale of this is a matter of debate. And the large and expanding role of the state in key businesses is largely viewed as uncontroversial.

The infrastructure that is currently falling apart is all state owned, while private infrastructure such as the telecom network is in good shape, yet the state has recently expanded into publishing of school books. It has also increased its stake in key businesses, with the conviction that centralized and large scale companies are more efficient than the free market place. Many politicians are openly skeptical to private ownership, despite the fact that history has pretty much proven once and for all that the free market is superior to centralized planning.

Norwegian politicians do not generally listen to other people than their own advisors, their civil servants and Norwegian university professors when they introduce new laws and reforms. However, the civil servants and professors have often been installed into their offices exclusively out of political considerations, and the advice they are giving is anything but objective and scientific, but simply a confirmation of accepted political dogma. The result is that the civil servants and professors do not function as the neutral advisors that they ought to be. Policies are seldom being scrutinized for adverse effects and flaws, but are more often judged to be desirable or undesirable out of political considerations, with little or no reference to actual results.

A resent school reform made it mandatory for all Norwegian schools to give all its students a PC, and declared that PCs should be used as much as possible. This is of course a very costly reform and illustrates that Norway has no shortage of money. However, independent research has shown that students who pay attention to the teacher and write their notes on paper do better at school than those who have their PC on during regular lessons, and the net result of the costly reform has indeed resulted in a further slide down on the international ranking of Norwegian school children, but the government has not responded to this adverse effect by issuing any form of advice or change in policy when it comes to the prescribed use of PCs in all aspects of school learning.

Norwegian students do not score very well on international tests despite the fact that Norway spends more money per pupil than virtually any other country in the world. Countries that score very well internationally, notably Finland, do not spend nearly as much as Norway, and the successful policies in Finland are well known and presumably easy to replicate. However, Norwegian politicians do not spend their time arguing that we should replicate systems that are shown to be superior by independent research, but discuss loftily whether our students may in fact be better off and happier than students in other countries based on other and less easily defined standards, and get their hopes confirmed by Norwegian university professors, who tell them exactly what they want to hear.

The latest attempt to improve the quality of teaching and cut costs has been the introduction of a state run publishing company that will serve as a monopoly, replacing the private publishing companies that until now have competed in a free market to provide school books. No country has ever done this with success, and history is clear on the likely and dismal consequence of this, yet this is the legislation that was recently passed in order to improve the educational system in Norway, while no effort has been made to replicate the Finns who have a proven record of success.

This aloof attitude towards hard facts presented by independent international research, and refusal to accept unintended effects of implemented policies as problems that should demand objective inquiry, can be seen in all aspects of Norwegian governments.

Norway has the worst roads in Europe, yet does not spend less money on roads than most other countries, so here again, one would naturally expect the government to look into how things are done in other countries, like Switzerland, that have much the same type of technical challenges that Norway has when it comes to building roads in its mountainous terrain, and the conclusion should be self evident and clear, because Norway finances its road projects in a very different manner than what is normal in the rest of Europe.

Almost every country in Europe let independent entrepreneurs build roads with minimal interference from the government, and a predictable budget for the whole stretch under construction. In Norway, however, politicians interfere constantly with road building and give only annual budgets, so that the entrepreneurs never know if they will be allowed to continue building the road the following year. The business of building the roads are also mostly given to companies under state control, and private initiative is generally avoided.

Confronted with simple facts regarding the superior efficiency of alternative policies when it comes to matters of schools, roads and other national infrastructures, the politicians brush it off as irrelevant, not applicable to the special nature of Norwegian circumstances, or simply unfair and undesirable in a larger context. The fact that Sweden recently completed a stretch of road building in their country three times as fast and at a third of the cost to that of a similar Norwegian road project has so far failed to make an impression on the Norwegian government. The cost of building roads in Norway is much higher than in Sweden, it is argued, partly because unemployment is very low in Norway compared to Sweden.

The idea that Swedish or other foreign contractors could be hired to build roads seems not to have occurred to most Norwegian politicians.

The consistently low unemployment rate in Norway is often used by politicians to explain why it is so expensive to build things in Norway, and is also a source of much pride by successive Norwegian governments. Very few people are unemployed. We are all out building stuff, we are told, and there are simply no free hands to do additional work however urgent this may be. Norway is as it were a victim of its own success.

However, 25% of working age Norwegians are on some sort of welfare at any given time. These Norwegians are not unemployed, but they are not working either. They are at home watching TV, despite the fact that Norway has one of the healthiest populations in the world, judged by objective standards such as life expectancy.

The UN has voted Norway the best place to live for several years in a row, and Norwegian politicians have been quick to use this to argue for the virtues of the welfare state, and also to tell people that we have little or nothing to learn from other countries. When the OECD warns that the size of the welfare state is likely to seriously disturb the economy by making it virtually impossible to hire people to do small but vital maintenance jobs, it is brushed off as merely an opinion.

When politicians refuse to look objectively at facts, and stubbornly implement policies that have been proven to have adverse effects, and refuse to copy successful policies of other countries, the result is inevitably inefficiency and failure, and the sorry state of public infrastructure in Norway is ample proof of this.

No amount of money can make up for the shortcomings of bad policies. And policies made independently of hard facts and in the face of evidence that they will not work are inevitably bad. However, future Norwegian governments are not likely to change their policies much, and the downward slide of its public infrastructure is likely to continue for many years to come.