Imagine a country where the income of the person next door is a search away. Not a rumor or a guess based on their car, but a figure filed with the tax office.

Norway’s public tax lists show a person’s net income, net wealth and tax. And when looking became much easier, the gap in happiness between richer and poorer people widened.

What Norway actually made public

Norwegians have been able to inspect other people’s tax information since the 19th century. What changed was not the openness but how easy it was. For most of that history, if you wanted to see a neighbour’s income you had to visit a tax office or city hall and page through printed records during a limited period.

Then, in 2001, the records went online. Suddenly the country’s tax information could be searched online. It caught on fast. By 2013, nearly a quarter of the population had used the search sites, and according to some sources, most searches involved ordinary people rather than celebrities or politicians.

The records show something narrower than people tend to assume. Today they list net income, net wealth and tax, not a detailed salary history or breakdown of where the money came from. Enough to get a rough idea of someone’s financial position, but not the whole picture.

The natural experiment nobody designed

For economist Ricardo Perez-Truglia, the 2001 switch created a useful natural experiment. The information had already been public; what changed dramatically was the cost and effort of accessing it.

He examined survey data from 1985 to 2013 and used several approaches to test what happened after the records became easily searchable. One comparison looked at Norwegians with strong internet access against those with weaker access. He also compared Norway with Germany, where tax records were not public, helping test whether broader economic events around 2001 could explain the change.

As Perez-Truglia put it, “In economics there is a general intuition that when individuals have more information they can make better choices and thus they are better off.” His findings, however, suggested that transparency could also have less comfortable effects.

29 percent

After the records became easily accessible online, the gap in happiness between richer and poorer people increased by 29 percent, while the life-satisfaction gap increased by 21 percent.

The study points toward comparison as part of the explanation. When people can see where their income sits relative to friends, neighbours and coworkers, income becomes more than an amount of money. It also becomes a visible rank.

The pattern was strongest among people with good internet access. The American Economic Association’s summary of the research notes that after 2001, their happiness became more closely tied to their income level, while the same shift was not seen among people who had more difficulty getting online.

None of this makes transparency a mistake. The same visibility may also discourage tax evasion. Separate research on Norway’s move online attributed an approximately 3 percent increase in reported income among business owners to internet public disclosure.

Openness that cuts both ways

What Norway did next is particularly interesting. In 2014, the country added friction back into the system: people became able to see who had looked up their tax information. The records remained public, but anonymous snooping largely disappeared.

That principle still applies. The Norwegian Tax Administration says users must log in, be at least 16 years old and are normally limited to viewing tax information for 500 people per month. If you open someone’s record, that person can see that you searched for them.

That reform is why Perez-Truglia argues transparency should not be treated as a simple on-off switch. “We should not think of transparency as a policy lever that is either on or off,” he said. There are many ways to disclose information, and the details determine how people use it.

What we take from it

The records did not create social comparison. People have always sized each other up. What 2001 changed was the effort required. Looking went from a trip to an office and a search through physical records to something that could be done online in seconds.

Norway’s later reform kept the transparency but made the act of comparing visible too. That small difference matters. The information remained available; people simply had to accept that the person they were investigating could know they had looked.

If the incomes around you were only a search away, would you really want to know?