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Lumifer comments on Link: quotas-microaggression-and-meritocracy - Less Wrong
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Sigh. Do you bother to check your numbers?
In 2013 the productivity in Norway was 62.6 GDP/hour while in the US it was 57.5 GDP/hour (source). And I bet that's the consequence of the fact that a large part of Norway's economy is offshore oil and gas which are highly capital intensive and so generate very high productivity.
Note that in Sweden, a country with social policies broadly similar to Norway's but without the oil, the productivity is 45.0 which is noticeably lower than in the US and is close to the EU average.
The country as a whole is much poorer that the US because it is much smaller. I suspect you meant things like GDP per capita which for Norway is indeed higher that for the US (again, because Norway has a small population and pumps a lot of oil out of the North Sea).
I was using the OECD databases, except I was not using 2005 PPP to compare 2013 gdp. Which is what is in your link. Setting the exact same table to compare against the US as the hundred percent baseline gives a number for Norway of 130.2 Which isn't what I got from the table I was using, so obviously the OECD doesn't agree with itself at all times o,O Oh well.
Further checking the OECD quickly, no, the lead isn't down to petroleum alone - absurdly high in all sectors, save agriculture. Which is mostly down to Norway being an idiotic place to grow crops. And that lead is growing, so it is not a legacy - their current policies are successes.
If oil has anything to do with it I strongly suspect that it is via indirect political effects - No Norvegian politician can implement austerity or embark on a campaign to suppress wage growth due to the oil money, so the country doesn't shoot it's own economy in the knee on a regular basis like the rest of the west does.
But never mind statistics. Do you have issues with the basic logic? "Policies that remove gender based barriers to employment are good for the economy, due to the basic fact of life that housewife is a ludicrously low-productivity job sector". Heck, near as I can tell, a good chunk of the wealth gain's of the past 50 years has mostly been the working out of the productivity implications of household appliances - 2 income households are possible because the electric stove, the refrigerator and the vaccum means keeping house isn't a full time job.
Re: Being poorer than the US due to smaller size. That isn't how people use the word rich. Depending on which statistics you use, China has an economy which either is, or will shortly be, larger than the US one. Would you consider it reasonable to refer to China as richer than the USA once that absolute size becomes indisputable?
What do you mean "remove gender barriers"? Do you mean policies requiring companies to hire be "non-sexist" in their hiring practices etc.? Because if those practices increased productivity companies would use them anyway.
Also have both spouses work tends to result in the couple having a lot fewer children. In fact in another thread people were complaining that they couldn't afford to have kids because they couldn't subsist on one income.
I am sure they can subsist on one income, it's just that they don't want to.
I don't think that distinction matters much to the point Azathoth123 is making. (Personally I'd put the family in that thread in the grey area between "couldn't subsist on one income" and "maybe could but it would be terrible". Husband and wife on $10k/year each. I wouldn't want to try supporting a family of three on $10k/year, though maybe it could be done if "supporting" means "living on the streets and barely managing to feed" or "scraping by using every bit of government-supplied assistance available".)
I wouldn't want to support a family of one on $10K/year. But I think the context of this discussion is that the middle class feels the need for two incomes and so the wife works instead of being a housewife.
Link to numbers, please..?
I am sorry, I'm going to mind statistics. You seem to like numbers when they support (or can be made to support) your predefined conclusion, but when it turns out your statistics are wrong or misleading you go "never mind".
Yes, because you can't run a cost-benefit analysis without looking at costs.
That is how people use the expression "country as a whole".
Is a ton of air as a whole denser than a gram of gold as a whole? IOW intensive quantities are intensive.
Is “rich” an intensive quantity, like “dense”, or an extensive one, like “heavy”? Meh. I'd say it depends on the context, and in the context of Izeinwinter's comment I'd say it is clear which they meant.