When Norway found oil in the North Sea in the late 1960s, the frigid Arctic country largely escaped this fate. The British example with the same oil in the same North Sea around the same time offers a dismal counterexample. It illustrates a few political-economy principles all at once: resources aren’t economic wealth until humans figure out how to use them. Today, the Norwegian oil fund owns something like 1.5 percent of every listed company on the planet. Norway did not become wealthy because it possessed immense quantities of oil beneath the North Sea.