>>11922533You are right about offshore/oil and fish/fishfarming. Those are major industries and also fund a lot of R&D.
You are also correct in that there are a few really good researchers. A few have also won the Nobel Prize. Others, like the late Prof. Kåre Berg, had his hopes of publishing with emeritus status destroyed in a mess that ended in litigation. He is not the only one to have their working situation brought into court, which is one way to see the inner workings of academia here.
When industry is doing well, people are recruited before completing their studies and leave with a basic degree. During financial downturns people go for post grad studies, and neither industry nor politicians seem able to look much past the situation today or even remember from the recent past that the situation is not new, we have been here before and after rain comes the sun again. I am not sure this is just a rural mind set, it is part of the culture of the raw material economy, a developing country type of economy to be honest.
If you want to go deeper into this (and I do since I spent many years abroad and look at my country with a different perspective), there are two basic cultures here: the coastal culture where you take risks, and in-land culture where you do not. This to is from olden days when fishing was high risk and you never knew if you got home alive, and farming culture when everything was planned based on the calendar. And Oslo is very much in the latter group.
