Best Thing I've Read All Week: Steve Randy Waldman on the Resource Curse

If you've missed it, stop reading here right  now and pop over to Interfluidity and read up on the new, pervasive, worldwide "resource curse" as understood and explained by the ever-provocative Steve Randy Waldman.  Takeaway:

Clucking about places like Nigeria is almost a reflex, a familiar tic among Western economists. But meanwhile, we’ve hardly noticed that technological and international supply-chain developments have snuck the resource curse in through our own back doors. In aggregate, the goods and services we require have grown ever more tradable, and production has grown ever more amenable to control by relatively small groups of people. There’s a sense in which we are all Nigerians now.

Repeat--link.  There's some good stuff in the comment thread also, though predictably not always easy suss out.  For background reading, you could go also to The Economist's briefer on "generation jobless," as in: youth unemployment is not just your harebrained nephew, it is a world-wide pandemic [I think I was struggling for the same point in my winsome and artless way a few days ago myself].

And for a generalized proto- crypto- neo- Marxist spin, go here.  No, wait, really.  I understand what you're saying: the very name of Jameson is usually as effective a soporific as a cosh at the back of the skull, but this guy draws a straightforward and thought-provoking inference.