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I'm interested to see your view of the perfect society (or at least the best that you can think of), what would it focus on, what would that look like, how would it work, any interesting specs?

I do not trust “perfect society” blueprints. The best design I can imagine optimizes for freedom from domination: nobody’s survival depends on pleasing one employer, landlord, family, platform, or official. Food, shelter, healthcare, education, and network access form an unconditional floor.

Markets can operate above that floor, but no private actor gets veto power over essentials. Worker bargaining, cooperatives, antitrust, inheritance limits, public options, and hard carbon and water budgets keep wealth from becoming government by another name.

Government would use proportional elections, publicly funded campaigns, independent courts and civil service, plus randomly selected citizen assemblies for long questions. Decisions stay local until harms cross borders. Minority rights, appeal, and exit do not go to majority vote.

Institutional rule: private lives, public power. Budgets, lobbying, procurement, automated decisions, and ownership are inspectable. Laws expire unless reviewed. New policy begins as a reversible pilot with named failure conditions, an appeal path, and a public result.

I would measure health, housing stability, free time, ecological repair, class mobility, and the practical ability to say no. The design assumes capture will happen. Its job is to make capture visible, bounded, and reversible. Utopia with an incident-response plan.

How far are we from this in highly democratic countries like Norway?

Norway is one of the closest existing prototypes. It already has proportional representation, strong universal services, independent institutions, high union membership, disclosed party finance, and public capital through the sovereign wealth fund. Those are real anti-domination mechanisms.

The floor is still not unconditional. Social assistance is means-tested and locally administered; housing remains market-bound. Statistics Norway reports that 18.5% of households spent at least 40% of income on housing in 2025. Exit still depends substantially on assets, work, and family.

Democratically, Norway has 19 leveling seats and a 4% national threshold, but it does not generally use standing citizen assemblies or automatic sunset review. Its own current party-law review is still considering donation caps, third-party campaigns, and stronger disclosure.

The largest distance is ecological. Norway expanded its 2026 petroleum licensing area by 70 blocks. Its 2026 budget says domestic measures alone are unlikely to meet 2030 climate obligations. A hard ecological budget cannot coexist quietly with continued petroleum expansion.

I would not assign a percentage. Norway is close in architecture but materially incomplete: the floor is generous but conditional; anti-capture and reversibility are partial; climate and petroleum policy conflict. The missing pieces are structural, not decorative.

Sources: Stortinget’s 2026 election guide; Statistics Norway’s 2025 housing, social-assistance, and union tables; the government’s current party-law review, 2026 climate budget, and petroleum-licensing notice.

Interesting. And if you had to rethink the whole economical and society from scratch, think larger than you usually do. Would it be capitalism? Any important specs? How would it look like?

I am not ranking capitalism against another system. The sources I checked do not reduce the design to one label: Ostrom’s Nobel lecture warns against market/state panaceas and describes polycentric systems combining public, private, and community institutions.

One neutral way to map the design is by problem type, not ideology: competitive goods can use markets; natural monopolies can use public ownership or regulated franchises; commons can use user governance; essentials can be guaranteed publicly or supplied through tightly regulated plural providers.

Firm ownership is separate. The ILO’s 2022 report defines social and solidarity enterprises by democratic or participatory governance and limited profit distribution. Conventional investor-owned firms use transferable ownership and profit rights. These forms allocate control differently.

Property need not be binary. Ostrom separates access, withdrawal, management, exclusion, and sale rights. A constitution could distribute those rights differently across land, data, housing, firms, and natural resources instead of treating ownership as one absolute switch.

Success metrics are another design choice. The OECD’s How’s Life? framework tracks 80+ indicators across income, health, housing, safety, connection, inequality, and future resources. The IPCC adds a physical constraint: cumulative carbon budgets limit what any allocation system can sustain.

Those sources describe a mixed, polycentric design space, not a verdict. The unresolved specifications are which goods become rights, which assets may be sold, how worker voice works, who receives resource rents, and which decisions can be reversed.