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Worth adding also that European state-funded healthcare produces better health outcomes for less money than the US privatised system.
Plus - not all Norwegians pay more than Americans anyway. What tax you pay in Europe generally depends on what you can afford.
Not sure we quite fit the bill - but we did move from the UK to France in my 50s - wife late 40s - and with 3 school-age children. We were in a good position to do this because I was already self-employed and working internationally - so although in a sense my employment changed country, much of it in fact didn't change. My wife started her own business here in France.
There are of course many culture shocks - too many to describe in a social media post - but long story short, after 13 or so years living in France we feel we're better off in almost every respect than we would have been had we remained in the UK.
Kenan Malik on the Epstein files:
"“Cunt”, “bitch” and “pussy” pervade the conversations... Acquiring “pussy” is a constant obsession. “Promise an abundant [sic] of young pussy flesh”... “Thank you for a fun night... Your littlest girl was a little naughty.” These were private messages, never intended for public view. Nevertheless, they reveal how the “Epstein class” behaves when it thinks no one is watching."
There is more than misogyny, more than politics (inequality) in this objectification and abuse of women and girls - there is a more fundamental absence of everyday human qualities - empathy, imagination, sympathy, kindness.
We have allowed to flourish a system of wealth and power that promotes and rewards the very worst of us - and throws the best of us, like the Palestine Action protesters, into prison.
Even if it does make the news, they probably won't mention climate breakdown - the reporting of the floods in the UK and France now rarely say such extreme weather events are an effect of climate breakdown.
Agreed - and the other factor of course is consumerism hitting the wall of climate-ecological breakdown, radicalising new groups like scientists, academics, teachers and young people.
But bear in mind that it's not just the billionaires. Vast sums of money that middle-income people have tied up in savings, pensions, etc, end up in funds they know little about, controlled by fund managers that, in many cases, have a legal duty to maximise returns regardless of other negative impacts. It's systematic.
Random Facts from Jason Hckel's book 'The Divde'...
We rightly blame the sort of 'cowboy capitalism' we see in America for the system's worse abuses, but in fact the organising tax haven capital of the world is the City of London. The human population of the British Virgin islands is 25,000 people - but they have 850,000 registered companies.
Random Facts from Jason Hckel's book 'The Divde'...
Big Pharma tries to justify its 'intellectual property' rents - including denying life-saving medicines to poor people - as necessary to fund its medical research. In fact, 84% of medical research is paid for with public money, and only 12% by the industry - which spends far more on advertising than on research - and in some years, more on share buy-backs, an artificial means of raising shareholder value, than on research.
Random Facts from Jason Hckel's book 'The Divde'...
Neoliberal policies from the 1980s have been the cure worse than the disease. They were Intended to reduce debt, but have vastly increased it. External debt stood at 25% of national incomes in the global South in 1980, but increased to 38% in 1990, then to 39% in 2000.
The debt grew from $100 billion to over $1.5 trillion - of which only $400 billion was actually borrowed - all the rest is just rolled-up interest.
There is no way these sums can ever be repaid. They are, in fact, simply rents extracted by the wealthy from the poor.
Random Facts from Jason Hckel's book 'The Divde'...
The impact of neoliberalism on western economies has been disastrous - but on 'developing countries' it has been far worse. After making modest gains during the 'Trente Glorieuses' - as the French call the 30 or so progressive years after the war - from the 1980s, incomes in sub-Saharan Africa fell by 0.7% per year.
As a direct result of the adoption by the World Bank, etc, of neoliberal 'structural adjustment' investment conditions, the GDP of the average African country fell by 10%, and the number of Africans living in extreme poverty doubled.
Random Facts from Jason Hckel's book 'The Divde'...
While 30 million people starved to death in British India, UK companies increased profitable food exports from India. Over the worst years of famine, 1877-78, British companies exported a record 6.4 million tons of Indian wheat to Europe. Between 1875 and 1900 forced Indian grain exports increased from 3 million tons to 10 million tons every year.
Random Facts from Jason Hckel's book 'The Divde'...
Capitalism proposes to eradicate poverty through economic growth. In fact, to eradicate poverty by this means, global GDP would have to increase to 175 times its current level. This would entail such massive destruction of the natural world that it would actually make poverty immeasurably worse.
Random Facts from Jason Hckel's book 'The Divde'...
Colonialism in Latin America was responsible for 70 million deaths. In India, 30 million people starved to death under British rule. Average living standards in India and China, which had been the same as British before colonialism, collapsed, as did their share of world GDP, which fell from 65% to 10%, while Europe's share tripled.
The capitalist story - that it raised the world out of poverty - is the opposite of the truth. Outside rare natural disasters, mass poverty was unknown before capitalism, but common after.
Jason Hickel's book 'The Divide' - A Review.
A brilliant analysis of global inequality, though it suffers from the imbalance of most books of this type: it spends 250 pages setting out in detail how big and intractable the problems are, then just 50 sketchy pages on possible solutions.
It falls into 4 parts. The first is a detailed deconstruction of how western governments, their international agencies like the World Bank, and their supine media, have created the impression through statistical sleight-of-hand that international aid has been relieving poverty and hunger, when in fact the flow of wealth has been massively in favour of the West, and the truth is that poverty and hunger have been getting worse in most of the 'third world'.
Most blatant of all, they claim successes for capitalism and western aid that in fact have been entirely due to the very real development miracle in... communist China. Take China and its close neighbours out of the statistics, and almost everything has been going backwards fast.
The second part is a summary narrative of the true history of colonialism, revealing the enormous scale of wealth taken by the West from the rest of the world since 1500, and how indeed the West has not only plundered it, but actively prevented the non-white world from developing itself.
The third part describes how the violent exploitation of slavery and colonialism has changed form - into financial instruments and unfair trading terms - but not effect: massive transfers of wealth out of most of the world into the West.
The short final part offers Hickel's solutions. It is largely an appeal to governments to co-operate to better regulate multinational corporations, trade, debt and tax, and to democratise the international bodies for this co-operation: the UN, WTO, etc... All well and good - but Hickel neither deals with the question of how such progressive co-operation can be brought about, nor the structural problem of the publicly-traded share company model - even though this problem, which makes big business investor-driven and therefore largely indifferent to negative impacts on people and planet, is essentially the same as the indifference of 'investors' extracting interest payments from already impoverished people.