Norwegian children are taught in school that Norway was Europe‘s most impoverished country in 1905, when the Norwegians unilaterally dissolved their royal union with Sweden and declared full independence. This is not quite true; Finland and Iceland were even poorer than Norway at the time.

There are more than billion people getting by on less than a dollar a day in the world. How much better would they be if their incomes rose to, say, $2 a day?