Hacker News Reader

Comment by cagenut | Hacker News Reader

I can't stand this ideological sports-team type of commentary, so just to add some real information and context (after my downvote):

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.

View on HN

First, a nitpick - your numbers should be per million people, not per person:

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...

That's not an order of a magnitude.

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?

You could ask a similar question of the UK.

This is a question I ask.

The UK policy was, effectively, 'paaarty!'

Well - capitalise trade in The City of London; without the oil it's pretty clear London wouldn't have developed the way it did.

Rather than the story of financial degregulation?

Sceptical.

Sad but true. One shining light in this dismal situation however is that Shetland managed to do something similar to Norway: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.scotsman.com/news-2-15012/g...

And North Dakota. The resource curse can happen anywhere.

The UK has the same amount of oil spread across 12x as many people. Yes, the Tories wasted it but it could never have had the same impact on the whole UK that it had on Norway. Perhaps if Scotland had been independent (most of the UK's oil is in its waters) it would have been similar.

Nonetheless it would have ha some positive impact, And, while I'm as anti Tory as anyone there does not appear to have been a lot of objection to the way the oil income was handled from other parties.

Norway had a per-capita GDP 10x that of Venezuela when they launched their fund. The option was a luxury that they were granted by already being a fairly wealthy country.

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.

Venezuela was the 4th highest GDP as recently as the 50s. It saw sharp declines in economic health after Chavez and Maduro.

Venezuelan oil costs more per barrel to extract than Norwegian oil...

While your point about per-capita production is well-taken, I don't think the original comment was intending to score ideological points. It simply said the Venezuelan crisis was avoidable and happened due to mis-management, not that Chavismo is an inherently evil ideology...

Yes, thank you. I deliberately avoided attributing anything to ideology. At the end of the day, both countries are chiefly comparable in having nationalized their oil resources for the public benefit, at least de iure. Also Venezuela was actually doing quite well I believe in 2013 when prices were high. It was a singular failure of their stewards not to diversify the profits.

If Venezuela had a fund of 20k per citizen they would definitely not be in the same state as today...

You sure?

Venezuala's problem was just overleveraging

They basically got margin called on their long oil position, and then their political ideology became apparent

Reply on news.ycombinator.com