The stunned outrage that Norwegians feel over the deaths of four of their servicemen in a roadside bomb blast in Afghanistan yesterday is about what you would expect in the United States if 260 or so American soldiers were killed in a single attack. That's the equivalent scale of loss when population is taken into account. And that makes yesterday's explosion a bigger event, for Norway, than the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing that killed 241 American marines, leading then-President Reagan to pull all U.S. troops out of war-torn Lebanon.  

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, or SIPRI, has added up all the military spending on earth and concluded that the swooning of financial markets  had no effect on the world's appetite for missiles and tanks and bombers and AK-47s. Global military spending shot to $1.5 trillion in 2009, six percent higher in real terms than in 2008. The United States accounted for more than half of that, but 14 of the top 15 spenders boosted their military budgets. It's a long-term trend. Military spending worldwide rose almost 50 percent from 2000 to 2009. International weapons sales rose, too. Boom times for Lockheed Martin, but also for some Scandinavian defense contractors. Shares in Norway's Kongsberg Group have more than quintupled the past five years. Saab AB of Sweden, which can't seem to sell its Gripen fighter, has had a harder time of it. 

Katrin Bennhold of the International Herald Tribune is deeply impressed by Sweden's policy promoting lengthy male parental leave after childbirth, a state-funded benefit that 85 percent of fathers now  take advantage of. The takeaway from her 3,400-word opus with slide show yesterday has to be that a taxation level almost twice as high as that of the United States is not only sustainable but sexy: "Machos with dinosaur values don't make the top-10 lists of attractive men in women's magazines anymore," said Sweden's European Affairs Minister, Birgitta Ohlsson.

Kjell Nordtröm, the Swedish business affairs philosopher, is bullish on capitalism. He says the financial crisis of the past few years will be seen historically as a necessary course correction, after which successful businesses will reorient their product lines to capitalize on three global developments: the continued rise of women, reduction in family size and urbanization. Nordström told Norway’s Dagens Næringsliv that a reborn finance sector will better serve the economy: “I’m not sure Lehmann Sisters would have run their bank the way the Brothers did.”