The Norwegian success is the single biggest piece of evidence as to why the Venezuelan catastrophe was largely avoidable, and the fault of irresponsible leadership.
Venezuela produces ~70k barrels per person per day. Norway produces a little more than half as much total oil, but with one-sixth the population it works out to ~330k barrels per person per day. An order of magnitude per-capita difference.
Even then, so, Venezuela produces 1/5th per capita the oil of Norway. Why doesn't there exist a fund with $37k/person in Venezuela?
The UK policy was, effectively, 'paaarty!'
Sceptical.
Also, consider if 25% of Norway's oil revenue is sufficient to provide a basic functioning government. Now you have Norway saving 75% of their oil revenue every year, and Venezuela still sucking 5% out of other funds, resulting in a long-term extremely wealthy Norway and a destitute Venezuela.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_produ...
Second - the output itself depends on management, so I'm not sure it would be fair to compare current production numbers to show the potential help to the population. In fact - Venezuela has more proven reserves per-capita than Norway, by an incredible margin:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_proven_oi...
Venezuala's problem was just overleveraging
They basically got margin called on their long oil position, and then their political ideology became apparent
The oil curse is very real and, for Venezuela, largely unavoidable.
Also Kuwait is doing good as well, and they have a retarded amount of oil.
But, in general, I agree that it often hurts instead of helps. But select countries like the US, Norway, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia have become very prosperous from natural resources and nothing terrible has happened because of it.
Have you ever been to Riyadh and seen the poor state of housing, the laughable state of repair of motor vehicles, the constant complaints about the state of the education and health systems?
Perhaps they are given massive handouts but it doesn't seem to be translating into functioning infrastructure.
Here's a chart that shows Saudi per capita income from the 70s: https://d3fy651gv2fhd3.cloudfront.net/embed/?s=saunygdppcapk...
You can see that their per capita collapsed in the 80s along with oil prices. The royal families in those countries are incredibly corrupt by modern standards, but they have established a system that keeps everyone outside that circle in line with subsidies, religion and threats of imprisonment.
[0] https://youtu.be/rStL7niR7gs?t=733 (Relevant segment is about 60 seconds)
One step would be to move it away from an insurance model and raise the cap on contributions. Another would be to modestly increase the contribution rates.
This is essentially what happened in the mid-90s with the Canada Pension Plan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_Pension_Plan#1996_refor...): an increase of contribution rates to move beyond PAYGO solvency to a partial advance-funding model. As a result, the CPP now has a few hundred billion dollars in assets (invested largely in equities) providing income to support long-term solvency.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/07/us/alaska-university-budg...
Yes, it's much better for the government to allow a single person to appropriate all that wealth for themselves. /s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund#Annual_i...
Usually where there are significant amounts of minerals, there are separate mineral rights. Mineral rights trump surface ownership, and usually the rights were sold off decades or centuries ago. If you find something under your property, it probably doesn't belong to you.
Also, state laws vary in weird ways. Should you find gold in New York, it's the property of the state.
Yeah, they squandered their natural resources on the way to becoming the richest, most powerful nation in the history of the planet...
How can people say things like this with a straight face? The fact that there are some tough political issues that have or may span a couple decades doesn't erase centuries of history, or millennia of future prospects.
The things that made America so wealthy were changed pre-2000. It takes time for those changes to really impact society, and for people to realize it. And no one really talking about "fundamental" change. They're talking about raising taxes back to what they used to be like in the 60s and 70s. Not just in terms of the rate, but the percentage of the tax burden that falls on each segment of society.
1) There is a tendency to focus on the negative
2) The general trend of wealth inequality has been going in the wrong direction for many, many years and it is only getting worse
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite...
US prosperity is largely a function of imperialism and military might, not some magical economic formula.
For instance, in South America:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
The US government overthrew a democratically elected government for the prosperity of a _fruit company_.
> all it seems anyone talks about is how to fundamentally change the systems that made it that way.
Many of the people are fighting the systems that have heavily exploited poor countries around the world for the last ~100 years because they see it as fundamentally immoral. The US doesn't _deserve_ the standard of living it has achieved, and it's built on the blood of dead South Americans and Middle Eastern people.
It's honestly pathetic that poor Americans aren't provided for given the absolute spoils of war the elite have enjoyed.
The USSR was imperialist, and did achieve massive increases to the standard of living of the elite through imperialism. It's much easier to feed Russia when you can starve Ukraine.
Colonial Britain and the Dutch East India company both achieved massive gains in wealth through imperialism.
The only argument you've made is that strong property and contract rights with rule of law and low corruption can prevent squandering the spoils of imperialism. I'm not sure if I agree with that, we're too early into the US's age of dominance to tell, but it's adjacent to my point.
There is a big ideological drive to show that communism works, and as such all the problems Venezuela faces are just imperialism at work (In their argument).
In other words, to me the situation in Venezuela does not prove anything, in terms of political ideology.
People are opposed to regime change because the US government has a long history of destabilizing foreign governments in deference to US capital interests. It's unlikely their motivations are just, especially as the people involved were responsible for some of the worst atrocities in Southern American governments in the 50's-90's.
Furthermore, applying economic sanctions hurts the material conditions of poor Venezuelans without significantly affecting the corrupt government. This is evidence the US does not have a strong interest in helping poor Venezuelans, but primarily forcing regime change to a government more amenable to the interests of US oil companies.
If the US was truly a force for good, wouldn't we see the same pressure on the Bolsonaro regime in Brazil? The story is similar, a corrupt rise to power achieve through unjustly jailing political opponents. If you doubt this, read Glenn Greenwald's reporting in The Intercept.
My point is not to actually get into these details but to point out that capitalism does not give the answers. Capitalism can only start after you have nailed down the rules about how public and private property work.