Saturday, February 11, 2012
Not a universal curse
Polistra recently discussed the 'Curse of Natural Resources', the idea that a country is generally better off without a valuable resource like oil or diamonds.
Taki has a vivid account of Nigeria's cursedness, with constant civil wars between various tribal and religious factions driven by oil. We've seen the same thing across Africa and Central Asia for a LONG time.
It's easy to see why this happens.
A resource-poor country like Japan needs oil and has none of its own, so Japan has two choices: (1) Take over the world; (2) Make enough money to buy oil. Japan tried the first choice from 1905 to 1945. Fun while it lasted, but rather unpleasant at the end. Since 1945 they've taken the second choice, which turned out a lot better for Japan's own people. They work productively, they receive money for work, and they don't get bombed.
The exact same thing happened to Germany.
Resource-rich countries like Nigeria or Iraq or Congo have plenty of oil or diamonds or copper, so they don't need to learn how to work. In such places the reciprocity is not Work for Money, but Ownership for Money. The tribe or government or rebel group that owns the resource-bearing land gets the money. Net result: endless war.
But the curse is not universal. North America has plenty of natural resources but doesn't fight tribal wars about them. Oddly enough, our biggest dispute is not about who gets to own the resources, but whether we get to use them at all. Normal businesses are trying to extract the oil and copper and gas in a civilized way; the marauding enemy army EPA is trying to prevent us from extracting any of it.
Why no curse? Maybe because our culture came from England, a resource-poor island. Admittedly the colonization of North America happened because England was trying to take over the world at that time, but England's reason for colonizing here was agriculture, not minerals. Thus the emphasis was still on working, not extracting.
It's one hypothesis, anyway. ¶ 5:59 AM
Taki has a vivid account of Nigeria's cursedness, with constant civil wars between various tribal and religious factions driven by oil. We've seen the same thing across Africa and Central Asia for a LONG time.
It's easy to see why this happens.
A resource-poor country like Japan needs oil and has none of its own, so Japan has two choices: (1) Take over the world; (2) Make enough money to buy oil. Japan tried the first choice from 1905 to 1945. Fun while it lasted, but rather unpleasant at the end. Since 1945 they've taken the second choice, which turned out a lot better for Japan's own people. They work productively, they receive money for work, and they don't get bombed.
The exact same thing happened to Germany.
Resource-rich countries like Nigeria or Iraq or Congo have plenty of oil or diamonds or copper, so they don't need to learn how to work. In such places the reciprocity is not Work for Money, but Ownership for Money. The tribe or government or rebel group that owns the resource-bearing land gets the money. Net result: endless war.
But the curse is not universal. North America has plenty of natural resources but doesn't fight tribal wars about them. Oddly enough, our biggest dispute is not about who gets to own the resources, but whether we get to use them at all. Normal businesses are trying to extract the oil and copper and gas in a civilized way; the marauding enemy army EPA is trying to prevent us from extracting any of it.
Why no curse? Maybe because our culture came from England, a resource-poor island. Admittedly the colonization of North America happened because England was trying to take over the world at that time, but England's reason for colonizing here was agriculture, not minerals. Thus the emphasis was still on working, not extracting.
It's one hypothesis, anyway. ¶ 5:59 AM
