The lesson of Norway is how to manage a valuable natural resource. I.e. Don't sell it off in a one time auction to the highest bidder who then reaps all the gains. Norway tightly controls access to its oil and the profits have been very well managed.

I agree that other nations like Venezuela and the US have squandered their natural wealth when compared with Norway's careful management.

That being said, I agree with the parent that the aforementioned lesson isn't particularly universal, as a perquisite is having a plentiful and valuable natural resource to manage.

So what lesson can a country like the UK or Germany take from Norway, given their natural resources are, for the most part, already exploited?

Norway has 9-10x the oil output per capita of the US and over 5x that of Russia. Norway is a well run petro state. For the US to match Norway on that, it'd have to produce more than the equivalent of all the annual oil output on earth.

Total oil production per day per capita in 2017.

Norway: 1.9m bbl/day, 0.365 barrels per day per capita.

US: 13m bbl/day, 0.04 barrels per day per capita.

Russia: 11.2m bbl/day, 0.07 barrels per day per capita.

Interestingly, an Iraqi immigrant was responsible for setting up Norway's wealth management system: https://www.ft.com/content/99680a04-92a0-11de-b63b-00144feab...

I always think about this when I read comments on HN declaring that immigration implies a breakdown/dilution in the value of the host nation's "superior culture".

Furthermore, Sweden and Denmark have similar outcomes, without the oil and gas

Venezuela has almost totally collapsed under Chavez-Maduro's "socialism".

Russia is a kleptocracy of Putin and his inner circles of billionaires.

The US economy has seen a fairly significant boost from shale gas and fracking.

Better counter-examples than those 3 would be Saudi Arabia and (to a lesser extent) Nigeria. And yes, as those 2 demonstrate it's not that simple, it's easy to fall prey to "the resource curse" aka "Dutch disease": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease

Norway has been wiser in its approach.

The difference is in the political system. Read The Dictator's Handbook for more on that (but also, just read that book, it's an awesome book).

Russia and Venezuella never diversified their economy which made them highly reliable on oil industry, promoted corruption/populism politics and backfired badly when oil prices dropped.