Ole Colbjørnsen

• 1. Introduction

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  Ole Colbjørnsen was born on the 30th of May 1897 in Vegårshei, a small municipality in Aust-Agder, Norway. He would go on to help reshape an entire nation's relationship with economic planning. Before he was 18, he had already passed his examen artium in Arendal. By the time Norway's Labour Party took power in 1935, his name had become shorthand for a new way of thinking about the state and the economy. How does a young student from a coastal Norwegian town end up shaping Soviet five-year plans, advising the United Nations, and writing the phrase that an entire political party would adopt as its slogan?

• 2. From Oslo to Moscow

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  As a student enrolled in 1915, Colbjørnsen studied natural sciences and worked as an assistant to two professors: Carl Størmer and Lars Vegard. While inside those university corridors, he also joined the Norwegian Labour Party and began identifying as a communist. The pull of the Soviet project proved stronger than the lecture hall. From 1921, he worked at the Russian Telegraph Agency, known as ROSTA. From 1922 to 1928, he worked directly in trade and finance for the Soviet Union. Eventually he took on the task of organizing and preparing the first five-year plan, one of the most ambitious economic experiments of the twentieth century. From 1929 to 1931 he ran a shipping company based in London, handling Soviet timber exports. That London posting gave him a vantage point over international trade at a moment when the global economy was convulsing.

• 3. Norway's First Plan Economist

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  Colbjørnsen returned to Norway in 1931 and took up work as a financial journalist at Arbeiderbladet, the Labour Party's newspaper, beginning in the autumn of 1932. The chief editor there was Martin Tranmæl, himself a prominent figure inside the party. Through his articles, Colbjørnsen spread economic ideas drawn from thinkers including John Maynard Keynes and William Beveridge. His writing caught attention quickly. He was invited to the Labour Party national convention of 1933, where he put forward a series of reform proposals. That same year, he wrote a pamphlet titled Hele folket i arbeid, which translates roughly as "the whole people at work." The phrase became the party's slogan. In 1934 he co-authored a document called En norsk treårsplan with Axel Sømme, laying out a detailed three-year economic plan for Norway. Historians have since called Colbjørnsen "Norway's first plan economist." The Labour Party had fought the 1930 general election on radical and revolutionary lines and lost badly. Colbjørnsen and Sømme helped build the alternative: they pushed the labour movement's focus from redistribution toward production, and they made it acceptable to work within the framework of the state rather than against it.

• 4. Committees, Parliament, and Gandhi

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  When the Labour Party formed a Cabinet under Johan Nygaardsvold in 1935, Colbjørnsen did not join the government directly. Instead that same year he was appointed to both the Trustlovkomiteen av 1935 and the Tiltakskommisjonen av 1935, a body whose explicit mission was fighting unemployment. From 1936 he served on the board of the Norwegian Industrial Bank, and from 1938 to 1940 he was its chairman. Following the 1936 general election he became a deputy representative to the Norwegian Parliament for Oslo, sitting regularly because Oscar Torp, the elected representative, was serving in the cabinet. He was considered one of the most pro-military voices inside the Labour Party in the years before 1940. In the late 1930s he repeatedly put forward Mahatma Gandhi's name for the Nobel Peace Prize. Gandhi never received the prize.

• 5. War, Washington, and the United Nations

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  When German forces reached Norway in 1940, Colbjørnsen left the country and took up a post at the Norwegian embassy in Washington, D.C. In 1946 he served as a delegate to the United Nations General Assembly, and in 1947 he returned in the role of advisor. That same year he also participated in the United Nations Economic and Social Council assembly. He became an advocate for Norwegian membership in NATO. In November 1948 he came back to Norway to serve as acting director of the Direktoratet for økonomisk forsvarsberedskap, a directorate concerned with economic defense readiness that no longer exists. He had married Veslemøy Ihlen Larssen in 1936, and through that marriage became a son-in-law of Olav Johan Sopp. He died in Oslo in November 1973.