The article title actually says it is a success as well as a disaster. The title here has been shortened.
And, as the professor in the article explains, it is a “disaster” for a small minority. And those are not he same minority who struggled for the same reasons before, and those difficulties ought be addressed. The system can be improved.
But it’s largely a success for the vast majority too. I don’t personally know of anyone with a negative impression of it. It’s actually something that the average Nordic Baltic person is so used to and happy with that it only comes to mind when we meet people from countries that aren’t organised - and we feel sorry for them!
It’s the same situation with cash. Very few people in a cashless society are wanting to go back to the old ways.
> average Nordic Baltic person
there is no average person, it is a myth of statistics.
A meaningless distinction and unnecessarily nitpicky. From a scientific perspective it's not a myth, it's a valuable tool. For the average person (see what I did there?) it's not a mathematical formula, it's way of saying "that person whose characteristic being discussed is very common and representative of the whole group".
All models are wrong, but some are useful.
An average person has one testicle and one ovary.
That is a mean person
> Very few people in a cashless society are wanting to go back to the old ways.
I don’t think that’s true. Also, never “trust” a bank with your money, for starters, “your money” is nothing but a fake number that doesn’t actually reflect a physical monetary asset, hence why if enough amount of people withdraw their money, you end up with a bank run, aka, the bank digital fake numbers are more than the actual physical papers. Additionally, in many cases you don’t want to be in entirely cashless system, besides the privacy concerns, you might get locked out of your account because the network operator malfunctioned (like Rogers in Canada back in 2022 I think, all ATMs were useless, purchase points, etc.), or maybe a sun coronal mass ejection that fries some utility power plants, or drop in the frequency and you end up like Spain last year or the year before.
The more you rely on one centralized point, the worse, hence why engineers avoid single point of failure in any design, be smart, and diversify your options.
>I don’t think that’s true.
It is.
Source, me in Sweden.
Cashless society is amazing until the foreign shareholders of your core suppliers of digital infrastructure develop their own political agenda.
But Norway is a monarchy well connected with the global Epstein class so I doubt their political system can actually reach an shareholder-hostile edge case. And meanwhile the surveillance helps keeping internal peace because one can reliably deplatform dissenters and conspiracy theorists.
It's a win-win until the n-th generation of nepo children is trying to steal too much and everybody notices they have been robbed.