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There’s a country of 5.6 million people that has $1.9 trillion. You might have guessed which country I’m talking about, it’s NORWAY.
In the 1960s, Norway found oil in the North Sea. And instead of doing what most countries do.. let corporations extract everything, give a few politicians some nice deals, and move on.. they did something unusual.
They taxed the oil companies heavily. Took the surplus revenue. And parked it into a sovereign wealth fund.
That fund is now worth over $340,000 per Norwegian citizen. It owns small pieces of about 7,200 companies across the planet.
And here's the wild part. It generates more income for Norway than oil itself.
It's one of the greatest economic decisions any country has ever made.
I'm bringing this up because OpenAI just published a policy paper. And the core idea in that paper is basically.. let's do the Norway thing. But for AI.
And I've been thinking about it for a few days now.
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What OpenAI Is Actually Saying
The paper is 13 pages long. It's called "Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age." and I talked about it in my previous article.
And the central argument is something I think most of us would agree with.
AI is going to get really powerful. It's going to automate a lot of work.
When that happens, the wealth generated by AI will concentrate in the hands of a few companies.
And the systems we currently have.. unemployment insurance, social security, welfare.. they were built for a different era. They're not designed to handle what's coming.
