Solow on Sustainability in '91
I enjoyed this talk by Robert M. Solow, given in 1991, on Sustainability and the sober perspective on the topic. I won’t try to summarize it and simply suggest you read it. Instead, here is a bit is only tangentially related but which is interesting to revisit, now that it’s been 32 years.
Commercially usable volumes of oil were discovered in the North Sea some years ago. The two beneficiaries of North Sea oil were the UK and Norway. It is only right to say that the United Kingdom […] wasted it[…]. Norway, on the other hand, went about it in the typical sober way you expect of a good Scandinavian. The Norwegians said, here is a wasting asset. Here is an asset that we are going to use up. Scandinavians are also slightly masochistic, as. you know. They said the one thing we must aviod is blowing this; the one thing we must avoid is a binge. They tried very hard to convert a large fraction of the revenues, of the rentals, of the royalties from North Sea oil into investment. I confess I don’t know how well they succeeded but I am willing to bet that they did a better job of it than the UK.
The fund was opened in 1990, a year before this talk. According to Wikipedia1
The Government Pension Fund Global, also known as the Oil Fund, was established in 1990 to invest the surplus revenues of the Norwegian petroleum sector. In 2023, it has over US$1,370 billion in assets, and held 1.4% of all of the world’s listed companies in 2019, making it among the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds. In December 2021, it was worth about $250,000 per Norwegian citizen.
Solow, apparently still around and nearing his 100th birthday, would probably approve.