This is indirectly related to public higher education funding, but it’s one of those ideas that just won’t stop scratching at my head to be let out. I’d love to hear from my wise and worldly readers about what you think of it.
On an episode of Marketplace last week, the journalist Brendan Greeley connected two dots that I had never thought to connect. This gets a bit wonky, but it’s worth the effort.
The first idea is the resource curse, a well-established concept in political science that holds that countries with an abundant resource often lag economically behind countries that don’t. In countries with those resources, power tends to concentrate among those who own the resource, rather than those who are the most productive. That has a downward effect on productivity over time. It also has a distorting effect on politics, as those who hold state power are accountable (at first) only to a few oligarchs. Oil is the textbook case; OPEC isn’t exactly rife with thriving democracies.
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