Aw come on, Norway has oil and it is small, but was social-democratic long before any oil, and both Denmark and Sweden have built successful welfare safety nets without relying so much on a natural-resources windfall.

Sweden is a big industrial nation. The relatively free market system allowed them to flourish.

In all of the Scandinavian countries the welfare state really didn't start until around the 1960s-1970s.

The government programs have only been possible because of the successful private economy to pay for it, just like in the US.

Although Denmark doesn't have the massive oil wealth that Norway does, there is still some and enough that Denmark is a net oil exporter. And the Danish state gets billions of kroner from oil each year.

Wow. In Norway, there is a similar problem with the "four-year" rule, which means it becomes very hard to fire someone who has worked for an employer for over four years. Now the PhD of course also takes four years, and PhD students are employees. In practice, almost no-one claims the four-year rule following, say, the PhD and a short-term research-assistant engagement (there was a recent case where two people in Oslo did something similar, and the university settled out of court, hiring them permanently, but it was quite unprecedented), but this means that universities much prefer the fixed-term contracts to be shorter than that, again reinforcing the glut of temporary positions; but if we had the three-contract rule, quite a few people I know would have been permanently hired already.

The PhD contract is just a single contract, and a position only becomes permanent after a third contract in a number of years I think.

Once you get your PhD, and you're rehired at the university, you get a different position, starting the counter from 0 again.

But no, if Norway had the three contract rule as I described, the people you know would have been fired already.

> the people you know would have been fired already.

I guess you're right, though who knows what those pesky unions might have said.

I am also doing a PhD in Norway, but in the humanities (ABD now). I agree with a lot of what is said here: PhD students in Europe, and especially in places like the Netherlands and Scandinavia, have it unbelievably good (not that you'd believe it if you followed the debate here, with "PhD oversupply" and "temporary contract abuse" a prominent topic; to be fair, most graduates from my program have found academic jobs both in Norway and elsewhere, though there is a tendency for people who have spent over ten years in temporary positions to call it quits). However, places like the Netherlands and Scandinavia, even if they punch above their weight in many fields, are not too big in the grand scheme of things. Again, I don't know that the situation is like in the hard sciences or in CS, but certainly in my field the fact that Europe has well-funded PhD programs and jobs does not help the pretty dire (as far as I can see) situation in the US. There are relatively few people who go on to positions in Europe after US grad school, and even fewer the other way around.