What should you do with an oil fortune?

That extra education third explains away why he donated so much towards libraries in the US and Scotland.

Does labor self-organize and endeavor in creating its own wealth-creating machine?

Who would be a better distributor? The government, those with a self interest, or idealists like Bill Gates or Buffett, etc? I personally don’t know.

> Charity is a cold, grey loveless thing. If a rich man wants to help the poor, he should pay his taxes gladly, not dole out money at a whim.

Yes. Large groups can't formulate answers to complex questions. The way hive minds make great decisions is by using algorithms to select the handful quickly and effectively.

Consider an online forum with comments and voting. The top few comments are usually much more insightful than the average comment - the forum can be very intelligent. But only a handful of comments actually express that. The same basic forces hold in politics. For any decision there are only a handful of people needed to get a good result and the major complication is finding them, appointing them, resourcing them and determining if the people are corrupt.

> go to mars[1]. The fuck!?

After a century, technological processes trumps most other concerns for bettering the lot of humanity. Without ill-will, if you're feeling an emotion it is more than likely pulling you away from long term gain and towards short term certainty. The reason people like Musk get to make the decisions is because they are a lot better than average at doing the rational thing rather than falling into the emotional trap of burning the seed corn.

If watching governments attempt to budget teaches us anything it is that collective groups completely suck at managing resources long term. They are appallingly bad. It is hard to overemphasise just how bad mass voting is at managing a budget. The US is doing comparatively well as far as governments go - and it is the largest debtor in history. It is just a big whirlpool sucking effort in and putting it all towards unproductive projects. You can argue for better or worse, but it is a lesson in why billionaires are allowed to be that wealthy. Someone has to generate the wealth and the government isn't up to the challenge.

The idea that one man might even possibly be able to make humans a multiplanetary species by expending a lifetime earning that amounts to less than 3% of the US government spends per year, or less than 1/5th of what we spend on 'defense' per year, is, to me, one of the strongest arguments I've ever heard in favor of private capital. If we were able to take that sort of efficiency as a given, we might now be living in the world that people in the 60s and 70s thought we'd be living in today.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wealthiest_Americans_b...

Even if you're actually able to accumulate masses amounts of wealth, would you be able to better redirect it based on 1. other ideas of 'better' 2. how you achieved it.

It's a very tough question to answer.

Importantly, the goal is NOT to make a better world in general, but to secure income for the future generations while avoiding "clearly very bad stuff". Typical middle of the road stuff. This is a political discussion, and some parties want to "pull the wealth out of the hands of the money-bureaucrats and back under democratic controll" and use it to make a better world, even if means spending a significant chunk of future generations money. But currently the dominating view is that the primary goal of the wealth found should be a stable income, while avoiding the worst companies.

I don't know if this is a satisfying answer to what a private person should do with their inherited wealth. Does she feel a moral obligation for her descendants to also be rich? Maybe she feels some obligations towards those suffering from climate change? Is she afraid of destroying local economy with inflation? Anyway, Norway don't have all the answers.

> When libertarian or right-wing plutocrats buy influence—fossil-fuel executives pushing for deregulation, hedge-funders who want lower taxes—it’s easy enough to understand what they’re up to. But leftist class traitors are harder to pin down. They can always be suspected of performative reputation-laundering, or dilettantism, or dual loyalty. The left is wary of them for having been born into an obscene level of privilege; the right resents them for not having the common sense to shut up and enjoy it. It’s one thing to be a rich liberal—acknowledging your unearned privilege, endeavoring to leave the world a little better than you found it—and another to be a rich anti-capitalist radical, galvanized by the conviction that you are complicit in a historic injustice.

Norway's oil fund, as far as I know, was started to exchange the country's hydrocarbon revenues for less volatile income and, in more recent years, avoid investing in places and companies that it deems unethical. It is still basically about growing investments, and its ethical choices are much more conservative and institutional than those covered in the article. I don't see how anybody could actually read this article and think it's asking a question that Norway's oil fund answers.

Is it increasingly scarce? Proven know oil reserves have been stable since ~2012 and are now about 50% higher than they were back in 1990.

Of course the extraction cost has been going up as well since shale is not economical below a certain market price.

It also means when push comes to shove invade Norway they have all the oil isn't everyone's top priority.