It is sad that Norway is not taking advantage of their unique situation. They could start making steps on redesigning capitalism and democracy. It is a combination of two flawed and never reviewed systems that together amplify their faults.

Capitalism has been tried in 100 countries over the past 100 years. Not a single country has reported a harmonious society without suffering and inequality. Failure over and over. Countries are running this program that is unfit for human society. Capitalism wasn’t scientifically researched nor updated according to the modern scientific knowledge in sociology, anthropology, economics, and human biology. In humans, it amplifies greed and materialism. It forces all humans into labour with less than 50% of jobs and occupations being useful, and another half is there just to employ people. Capitalism does not accept you for who you are, it will only accept you into system if you provide economic value, regardless if there’s already enough goods and food for everyone. And neither alternative to capitalism has ever been seriously researched. Not socialism/communism, but actually a professionally, scientifically researched and designed system? There were no serious attempts. We have institutions for physics, biology, construction, logistics, and every other science. And all of them make discoveries and move science forward. Except for this one. Why there’s no effort to research and design the social economic system to replace capitalism? Why is only this specific science in a standstill? And democracy is similarly assumed by everyone as some perfect system. Yet we use electoral democracy designed literally for 100 persons per representative. In Ancient Greece elected person knew every one of people they represented personally. And it grew now to 50,000 and more people per representative and nobody ever asked if that should be allowed. It wasn’t designed for this many, and it shows. Electoral democracy was the transitional system until we have computers capable of dealing with this amount of data. Elected officials were, and still are flawed human computers representing groups of people.

> Not a single country has reported a harmonious society without suffering and inequality.

What's wrong with inequality? Inequality is not the problem. If someone has a net worth of $500k and another person has a net worth of $10mil, is that bad? Of course not. That's inequality, but so what? Why this obsession with money? And a nation of poor people has high equality. Is that desirable? Equality is a red herring, and possibly an expression of envy.

Poverty is the problem. Oligarchic abuse of wealth for tyrannical purposes is. A society obsessed with money is. We should absolutely not be aiming for equality, as there is no reason for it or value in it.

But you are absolutely correct when you hint at the need to consider human nature. A sound philosophical anthropology is the basis for a sound society and a sound culture. The concepts of human nature our society and culture are built on are defective and emaciated, even deranged.

The economy exists for the benefit of society and its members. It is only a part of human life, but within that sphere, it should serve its participants. It absolutely should not be a means of exploiting others and extracting and concentrating wealth at the expense of others. This is what rapacious capitalism celebrates. Usury and financial speculation are perhaps the distillation of such state-sanctioned exploitation.