According to the AP, the UN has named Norway the best country to live in for the sixth consecutive year. It’s too bad they missed the main reason it would be sweet to move there — the country is home to the coolest metal bands.

Joking aside (even though I wasn’t kidding), the country is rated high because of its education, affluence, health, life expectancy and care for the poor. The UN presumably releases such rankings so countries low on the list can model themselves after the “better” nations. However, I think it says less about policy and more about who they have living there.

The Norwegian welfare state is immensely generous, and the distortions in incentives (paying people to be poor makes them less likely to work) have been slower to set in there than they were here in the U.S. Steve Sailer has pointed out that Scandinavian culture is the cause of this — not working is simply not an option for someone who wants acceptance in a community (and Scandinavians do). As a result, welfare in Norway helps the helpless without hurting the working poor, and people there live long lives with relatively little stress.

There is little danger of this culture breaking down, unless the welfare state itself does it. According to the CIA World Factbook, there is basically only one ethnicity in Norway, and 85 percent of them share the same religion.

So, Norway is a great place to live because of its traditions. The ranking is pat on the back to the country, of course. But by the same token, the Scandinavian model is not something replicable in other cultures. When they’ve tried — say, the U.S. Great ’60s Welfare Experiment — they’ve failed.

Robert VerBruggen blogs at http://robertsrationale.blogspot.com.