It's seems totally reasonable to expect that Norwegians, who are still dumb apes like the rest of us, would be at high risk of suffering from "trust fund syndrome". Just like the countless families (and handful of countries) that totally burned through every dollar they didn't earn.

The author is basically pointing out that the country is now pretty much a country of trust fundies, and that usually that leads to higher levels of directionless meandering and lack of ambition. Scale it to country size and you would expect to see stuff like insane spending without much discretion, and a general careless approach to life.

Other countries have that. Other countries have lots of waste. But it's totally logical to assign Norway as high risk for "affluenza" and therefore monitor it's vitals with that idea in mind. It's not particularly hard for ~5 million people to blow $2 trillion in a few decades.

They need laws saying that they (the country) can only spend the income (at most). Pass it now while a different generation is in power. Require a massive majority to amend it.

For individuals, there should be a universal basic income but it should only put you at lower middle class.

Education should be free.

> The author is basically pointing out that the country is now pretty much a country of trust fundies, and that usually that leads to higher levels of directionless meandering and lack of ambition.

Which is a concern that those who back indiscriminate social programs and ideas like UBI need to take seriously.

Now, of course, a trust fund kid needn't be an aimless and vacuous hedonist, but that requires a disciplined upbringing many such kids seem to lack. Furthermore, even discipline requires a more expansive and higher sense of the human person and the purpose of life. Discipline for the sake of what?

In our culture, we absolutely lack a sense of higher ends. Our picture of life is summed up by the term "making it", which consists of becoming rich, or at least materially comfortable. In a liberal society, highest aims are necessarily privatized, so the common culture that forms among people living in such a society, that makes them a society, will necessarily degenerate to the lowest common denominator and some metastasized compounding of it. The culture pulls people back into the muck of mediocrity and contains a hostility to higher purpose. Higher purpose is divisive, even offensive! So, when you are poor, your concerns revolve around survival and securing the basic needs of food and shelter and so on. Once satisfied, because no higher aims of life seem to exist, certainly none that the culture can point us at, we fall into some cancerous and deranged worship of feeding our base appetites. This we may call consumerism. So, life becomes hedonistic, and nihilistic. There is nothing for the us to do, certainly not for the rank and file of society, beyond buying shit, stuffing our faces, stimulating our genitals, and pissing away our lives on entertainment and distraction until we finally die.

So, in a sense, wealth can become a temptation to fritter away one's life, but it is not the wealth per se that's responsible. You can, as a materially well off person, still have a life full of meaning and purpose. But for that, you must discover what human nature is oriented toward and how you should engage it. It isn't arbitrary.

> It's not particularly hard for ~5 million people to blow $2 trillion in a few decades.

That wealth will continue to grow (assuming wise investment), so the population can live on passive income, without touching the capital.