Yes, but as someone else said, this article is behind a paywall. Which is too bad, I think, as I think the article that was posted was only scratching the surface. There are several things I was wondering after reading this article:

- what are the structural differences between Libya and Norway that would make Libya succumb more easily to the temptation of oil? I suppose Libya is in a direr situation than Norway, but is that all?

- exactly, what are the cons of investing some money from the oil in infrastructure of education?

Education is only useful up to a point. A PHD in Aerospace Engineering sounds great, but even in the US there is little demand for such people so they often waste most of that education. The worse the economy / infrastructure / social infrastructure the lower the benefit from high levels of education.

PS: It's been suggested that a balance of subsidizing government services and giving everyone an equal rebate like Alaska may be the best overall approach. However, doing so in a corrupt society often simply breeds government waste so a pure refund is probably the best long term option.

Well, that is true if you are talking about higher education, but people still need to learn some basic skills (writing, reading, counting, etc.). Learning English is often useful as well (note that before replying to your comment, I expected Libya to have a low rate of alphabetization, but it turns out their alphabetization rate is rather high (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libya#Education)).

On top of that, they probably need some skills in the fields of medicine, or petrol engineering.

They have the trade off between paying for that with oil money directly now, or being able to continue to pay for less of it, but being able to continue "forever" by investing the oil money, while the principal grows rapidly as long as their oil revenue keeps coming.

It's the age-old tradeoff between saving vs. immediate gratification.

The link you give is behind a paywall. As well to note that the article is from august 2011.

Apparently, it works fine if you go trough google: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=the+i... But otherwise it's a no-no. Strange.

And I know the article is old, but - It's interesting (it's what matters, right ?) - It wasn't "news" in 2011 when it was posted either - The title of the hacker news submission is exactly the title of this article. So I think the OP wanted to point to this.

OP here.

Yeah, I deliberately took the title as the headline from the FT article. The planet money podcast and the FT article have somewhat different content, but both are well worth consuming. The FT article goes into more depth on the story.

The reason I found it worth posting was because Norway set up specific rules that most other countries don't consider when they find oil (heavy taxation on the oil industry so that the oil profits benefit the whole country, only invest the interest not the principal, don't drill all the oil at once, get a higher percentage out of the ground than elsewhere, agree not to use oil as a political tool around elections). It's important to note that strong institutions like a stable political system, and strong, independent judiciary are needed for these rules for even be considered, let alone enforced.

It's also interesting to note that at a time when so many sovereign balance sheets are weighed down by misguided bank bailouts, Norway has managed to build up a sovereign wealth fund such that for each it's citizens it has a positive $100,000 value.

I have to say I honestly don't care if something is "news" as much as I care that it's novel to me and interesting. You hand me an article written fifty years ago that I haven't seen and is still interesting and I'd upvote it on HN.