Just today I finished the chapter in Andrew Nikiforuk's Energy of Slaves dealing with the rise of the petrostate. Norway was indeed a rare exception to the rule of what happens to states that find oil, with its policies guided in part with the man who helped find the off-shore oil, a petroleum engineer from Iraq.

By contrast, that same oil play led to Thatcher's disastrous rise, the privatization of too many until then sacred public trusts in the UK, the rise of the financial class—problems that beset Britons to this day.