Knowing me, knowing you

I chuckled when Italian tax authorities published the income levels of all Italian citizens online. But I did not find it surprising. Where I live, these numbers have been public for years.
In Norway, all you have to do to find out how much your neighbours earn is to log on to any newspaper's homepage (bt.no). Type in the name (skatt.vg.no), and pop, there you have all the details of how much taxable net income they have earned, and how much they contributed in taxes.

It's addictive. I discovered that prime minister Jens Stoltenberg (income: £110,000, taxes: £48,000) is earning about the same as a-ha frontman Morten Harket (income: £107,000, taxes: £29,500).

Ingmar Bergman's muse, Liv Ullmann, paid a lot more tax in 2006 (£17,700) than she did in 2002 (£3,700). And writer Åsne Seierstad, author of the hit novel The Bookseller of Kabul, is doing very nicely with an income topping £310,000.

There are other fun options. You can check out two people's income side-by-side, for instance former Man U striker Ole Gunnar Solskjær and Aston Villa's John Carew (the numbers aren't staggering, but then again, they make their money abroad). You can also find out that the taxes of foreign minister Jonas Gahr Støre can finance three children's places in a public kindergarten. You can even turn the tax search engine into a Facebook application.

Norway makes these figures available to increase transparency in society. The idea is that when everyone knows what everyone else is earning the risks of personal corruption are less. The figures are published every October, so you can guess what Norwegian journos are busy writing about that month.

My jaw dropped when I first heard about this system. Surely that can't be legal? What about my right to privacy? Surely my income is my private business. Of course, three seconds later I was checking out how much my friends and colleagues were raking in.

But after doing this for a while, I got bored. So other people earn less or more than me. Who cares? Now I think it's an excellent idea. It means less chance of people taking bribes. And it demystifies money. Cash is no longer something secret that is embarrassing to ask other people about. In the end, money is only a figure on a bank account. Or a website.