Mr. Sebastian Barnes:

The amount probably far exceeds anything that we could ever hope for. The Norwegians run it in a slightly different way. Interestingly, they take the value of the fund and assume a notional return, which is something like 3%. They spend a very small proportion of the total value of the fund. The fund has reached astronomical proportions so the 3% is worth quite a lot relative to incomes in Norway.

The Norwegian model is very good. Recently, we had a conference where one of the people who designed the fund explained to us how successful it had been. The success was partly due to using the money sensibly for future generations and not blowing it all at once. It was also because the Norwegians had a bad experience in the past with overheating their economy by spending all the money. It is a good model that is worth thinking about, although the circumstances are a bit different from ours.