Salmon seems like a very different resource than oil or rare earth metals. My understanding is that with the oil, it was a resource that largely came out of nowhere. One day Norway had little oil. Suddenly you find this vast field of immense unclaimed resources. It’s a huge resource that no one has a claim to. Thus, it’s reasonably easy to divide it in an equitable way. But salmon? People have been harvesting that resource since the dawn of time. There must be centuries of various rules, laws, ancient royal decrees, relating to who can harvest how much salmon. And there’s going to be people that if you tell them how much salmon they can catch, they’ll point out that their family has been harvesting salmon for generations, and it’s not fair to…And on an on.
Oil seems like a much easier resource to divide equitably, simply because there’s not such a cultural and legal history behind the management of the resource.
Yes, we did. But with the current political climate I’m less and less sure that we’ll be able to handle it as well as we did with the oil.
If you want an example of an industry where we didn’t do a great job of spreading the wealth, you can look at our other major export: Salmon.
Salmon seems like a very different resource than oil or rare earth metals. My understanding is that with the oil, it was a resource that largely came out of nowhere. One day Norway had little oil. Suddenly you find this vast field of immense unclaimed resources. It’s a huge resource that no one has a claim to. Thus, it’s reasonably easy to divide it in an equitable way. But salmon? People have been harvesting that resource since the dawn of time. There must be centuries of various rules, laws, ancient royal decrees, relating to who can harvest how much salmon. And there’s going to be people that if you tell them how much salmon they can catch, they’ll point out that their family has been harvesting salmon for generations, and it’s not fair to…And on an on.
Oil seems like a much easier resource to divide equitably, simply because there’s not such a cultural and legal history behind the management of the resource.