Been a lot of Norway recently (#1519566, #1515430, #1516054, #1520076, #1522989). I'm sorry?

"Why are some resource-rich countries poor while others grow spectacularly wealthy off their natural world?""Why are some resource-rich countries poor while others grow spectacularly wealthy off their natural world?"

The relevant question isn’t why some places or people are poor, since that’s the default state of humanity, but why some places and times and peoples have stumbled upon institutions and economic operations that propel them into unfathomable wealth (at least relatively speaking).

resources aren’t economic wealth until humans figure out how to use them. Production creates wealth. Unconsumed savings, when invested carefully, can preserve and multiply wealth—massively, as it compounds over decades and fiat money deterioration.

Anyway, go read the full thing. It's pretty good if I may say so.

When Norway found oil in the North Sea in the late 1960s, the frigid Arctic country largely escaped this fate. And strangely, nobody contributed more to Norwegian prosperity than an Iraqi petroleum geologist born in 1934. His name was Farouk al-Kasim, and the series of serendipitous events that led to him expertly guiding Norway’s rise to one of the wealthiest countries in the world is truly astonishing.

Norway did not become wealthy because it possessed immense quantities of oil beneath the North Sea. The list of countries situated on top of oil reserves is long and ignoble: Venezuela, Nigeria, Iraq, Russia, etc.

"The difference lay not beneath the seabed but above it, in institutions that rewarded entrepreneurship, respected property rights, and prevented politics from consuming tomorrow’s wealth.""The difference lay not beneath the seabed but above it, in institutions that rewarded entrepreneurship, respected property rights, and prevented politics from consuming tomorrow’s wealth."

#1515430

In Dick Cheney’s infamous words, “The good Lord didn’t see fit to put oil and gas only where there are democratically elected regimes friendly to the United States.”In Dick Cheney’s infamous words, “The good Lord didn’t see fit to put oil and gas only where there are democratically elected regimes friendly to the United States.”

And Norway avoided the other side of the tricky resource-extraction balancing game, too: not degenerating into a socialist, confiscatory regime (al-Kasim had seen plenty of that, too). Instead of treating petroleum finds as free money and spending it lavishly on government projects, the funds mostly went into the Oil Fund—invested into stocks, bonds, and real estate abroad in what’s one of the best-performing and cheapest-run funds in the world.

Mises tweet today, too: