Can a country get too rich?

NORWAY’S TRIBUTE to Edvard Munch, Scandinavia’s most famous painter, is an impressive 13-storey slab of recycled aluminium and glass built on the harbour front in Oslo. Completed in 2021 at a cost of $350m, it was even more impressively late (by a decade) and over budget (by a scream-worthy $200m). Looming above thick mist blanketing the sea on a winter’s afternoon, the museum encapsulates the country that paid for it: sophisticated and so loaded that money is no object.

Norwegian oil has built an economy that is the envy of other rich countries, not to mention poor ones. GDP per person is a cool $90,000, behind only city-states, tax havens and Switzerland. Since 1991 the government has amassed a sovereign-wealth fund worth $2.2trn, or $400,000 for every one of Norway’s 5.6m people. Proceeds sustain one of the world’s most generous welfare states.