By Tim Hartnett
July 29, 2026
In the July 18/19 Weekend Financial Times Jinu Koola wrote about the differences in wealth distribution and social status perception going on between Oslo and her native United States. "What," she asks, "has the dependence on meritocracy given America?" Later noting, "The economist Raj Chetty shows that only half of America's young adults earn more than their parents, down from 92 per cent in the 1940s." The article, " Norway and the case for mediocracy," takes on the question of whether so-called "meritocracy" is fair, justified or an overall benefit to society. But even if an airtight case against meritocracy can be made, would that also be one favoring "mediocracy"?
There may be no relation, but Koola roils up reminition of the World Economic Forum's Great Reset controversy five years ago. The center of it was a 47 page tract aimed at getting the world advertising industry into one big globalist fleet to evangelize the gospel of stakeholder capitalism. It was loaded with quotes like these by David Orr:
"The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people"... "It needs people who live well in their places."
It wouldn't be right to lump Jinu in with the high-handed clutch of private jet setters gathering in Magic Mountain resorts every January. Still, whatever she thinks she means, holding people physically and socially in place is what to expect applying the ideas her article advocates.
She begins describing alarm with her son's second grade arithmetic where the students were still learning to count to 20 backwards and forwards. Her kid, Thor, was already way beyond such lessons. Counting to 20 - as the weak math student writing this recalls - would have been redundant for everyone in my second grade class, including me. Koola was "stunned" when in a meeting a teacher suggested the boy "could play Lego while he waited for classmates to catch up." Eight-year-old children still learning to count might not ever get there.
Although the piece doesn't say so outright, by its end the author seems to come around to the idea of stalling pupils on a faster learning curve for the common good. The sub-head of the essay reads: "Why striving for average could trump America's insistence on aiming for exceptional - and mean a more equitable life for all." Mrs. Koola believes that the pursuit of excellence is what deprives commonplace people. Is it possible the lady is misreading the trouble and its solution?
In something like 3000 words it's hard to find the connection between teaching kindergarten arithmetic in second grade and not skinning the working man financially. She does mention that Norse CEOs are paid less and regular workers paid more than in the States, which is obviously a valid point. There's also a lot of talk about local lore, custom and a tradition of anti-snobbery in Norway which is more remotely germane. "Luck" also comes up and certainly plays a part in anyone's success. But, in a nearly full-page piece about how American average Joe's are being shorted, she comes nowhere near to getting at what factors are driving the un-percent downward in the United States.
Mrs. Joola went to Harvard, worked at US Treasury and is now at a Norwegian asset management firm that handles about 1.4 trillion. If she's concerned about the breadth of income disparity, you'd expect a bit more examination of relevant numbers getting to the bottom of things. The anecdote about an Easter ski race that isn't really a race and a social code called Janteloven leave us less than enlightened.
The main cause of the poor getting poorer in the US is not cultural but systemic. When the money supply is expanded somebodies out there end up with all the new, watered down jack. As the Fed poured 1.84 trillion into the economy under QE3 - finance argot for flooding Wall Street with fiat money - the asking price for goods and services was bound to rise. How many of those goods or services were available to anyone whose pay remained unchanged could only decrease. This is easy to demonstrate comparing the minimum wage to product prices year by year. It is also a fair reason to be reluctant accepting libertarian objections to raising the minimum wage or even having one. A quasi-governmental entity that can whimsically declare new buying power has a grave responsibility toward those who will lose in the transaction. And it's one that has been long neglected. Richard Cantillion described this effect nearly 300 years ago.
In another imposition on the poor, our national debt has climbed over 70 times higher than when we left the gold standard in 1971. All those trillions went to people who bought steaks, wine, airplane trips, homes, resort stays, cars etc. The recipients might have been beltway bandits, bureaucrats, contractors, people who farmed government programs or common schemers. Whoever they were, spending borrowed money has the same impact on demand that "quantitative easing" does. The trouble is less a case of meritocrats being brilliant and deserving more, than it is a government and Federal Reserve System creating endless angles to consume without producing.
The stated motive for QE3 was the subprime mortgage crisis of W's final years and Obama's early ones. In 2018, when Gary Cohn resigned as Trump's chief economic adviser, a major media controversy erupted. The gang with access to 1600 Penn at the time called Cohn, who has Jewish ancestry, a "globalist." The term, as first applied in print by Ernst Jackh, referred to the Nazis. Once post-war fatcats began tinkering with worldwide politics and the international economy covertly the expression started landing on them. The major media, keen on the kind of anti-democratic subversion afoot in high-brow hobnobbery, stooped to the rhetorical judo of framing the word an anti-Semitic slur.
The news fabricating industry made a fraction of the fuss later that year when Cohn said: "Who broke the law ? I just want to know who you think broke the law, was the waitress in Las Vegas who had six houses leveraged at 100 percent with no income, was she reckless and stupid ? Or was the banker reckless and stupid?" Well, unlike the waitress, the banker was un-stupid enough to get bailed out. The peasantry naively believed that bankers - and not waitresses - were expected to be experts in amortization schedules and loan qualification.
Todd Prince at the Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday circulation 225,000) responded with this:
The former Goldman Sachs chief operating officer made the equivalence Monday at a Reuters Breakingviews discussion in New York on the financial crisis that was unleashed a decade ago this month, when Lehman Brothers collapsed amid surging subprime loan defaults.
Las Vegas was the epicenter of the housing boom and the Great Recession. Home values more than doubled, then fell as much as two-thirds. The collapse forced tens of thousands of people from their houses, through foreclosure, eviction and abandonment, displacing owners and renters alike. And Cohn's remark reopened local wounds that still haven't completely healed.
"He doesn't want to take responsibility for his mistakes and is just looking to blame others," said Paul Thistle, a UNLV finance professor, adding banks did not adhere to strong underwriting standards.
Goldman, where Cohn worked for nearly 30 years, was among the banks that issued and underwrote mortgages and securities backed by subprime residential loans that played a major role in the crisis. Loans made to individuals with low credit scores are considered subprime and carry a higher interest rate than prime loans.
Goldman received 10 billion in bailouts from the Troubled Assets Relief Program. It paid the money back but so might have an underwater borrower given such a lifeline. The transaction was also complex and various internet sources are less than clear exactly how it was engineered or if they only got 10 billion. In any case, neither TARP nor QE3 is recorded to have re-housed any evictees... unless some Wall Street players were sleeping under the bridge at the time.
Texas Realtors tell us that the average home price in 2011 was about $147,000. The census bureau says the population of Texas was about 25.7 million then. At two persons per household the 1.84 trillion of QE3 could have put all of Texas under roof with change leftover. At four per home several other states could be accommodated. But if you'd like to see where it all went head for Martha's Vineyard, the Hampton's, fancy Florida resorts in winter, exclusive country clubs and the fleshpots slopping gentry at $200 a head and upwards. And, while we're on it, the 37 trillion of debt is 3 trillion more than necessary to house the entire country at 4 occupants and the present average price of $373,000.
Plenty of people getting ahead in the US do it through capability, hard work and value creation. That is no comfort to anyone struggling against a system that is rife with avenues for consumption without production. What the finance sector of the economy consumes is much easier to examine than its elusive role creating value. What would improve average lifestyles enormously is a guy smart enough to force big banks and Wall Street to operate on the up and up. Making elementary school less demanding than it is now can only make things worse. Weaning Mrs. Koola's own "industry," finance, off paper profits and rent seeking tops the list of things necessary to improve Joe-Six-Pack's bottom line.