It’s kinda is yes.

But more specifically to this post, the UK and Norway both discovered oil in the North Sea around the same time and took very different approaches to hope to manage this new resource.

Norway treated the oil money like communal property and heavily taxed oil production. Norway used the taxes to further develop oil drilling and exploration technologies, so that they would still have access to harder to reach reserves in the future BUT more importantly the oil taxes had to benefit Norway as a whole after the oil is gone.

The most obvious result of this is the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund, which is basically an endowment with the intent to continue to improve the lives of all Norwegians for future generations. Norway uses the dividends from this massive investment portfolio to continually support the welfare state reducing the tax load on its citizens.

The UK, under Thatcher, just used the oil taxes to cut taxes elsewhere. The problem is, the easy to reach oil is long gone. The new technology to reach remaining oil reserves is increasingly expensive AND there’s no more oil money coming in. So now services are being cut and some politicians want to privatize others to make up the funding gaps.

There’s plenty of other factors at play, but at the end of the day the UK took a short term economy approach while Norway took a long term communal approach to the same scare resource at a similar point in time. Norway is still seeing the benefits to their approach while the UK has nothing to show for theirs.

I’m so tired of this Norway is only successful because of oil cop out.

Norway, and all other Nordic countries, by adopting social-democratic policies of the Nordic model, became rich before the discovery of oil.

Norway just happened to get incredibly lucky afterwards with oil, but even after becoming a petrostate, still has similar incomes and high standards of living to the rest of the Nordic countries, who don’t have oil.

And, as the other commenter pointed out, both the UK and Norway (and the Netherlands while we’re at it) discovered North sea oil at the same time. The three pursued three rather different policies; of them, the Nordic policies have produced the most fiscally healthy outcome.

Let’s say Norway is a petrostate.

The point is the UK could have done the same with their North Sea oil.

They didn’t. Just pissed the opportunity away letting all the money go into private hands.

ever heard of bp? british petrol

and the brits have been at the exploiting natural resources for centuries