11–20 of 52 posts
I guess what I don't understand is why thought this was good news. Look around the world at countries whose economies depend on non-labor-intensive natural resource extraction. Saudi Arabia, Russia, etc. These resources form a natural monopoly and quickly become the subject of political power.
Regardless of the political motivations that sparked the announcement, I was excited to hear about it. I became interested in Afghanistan in 2001, along with everybody else. Before that, my only exposure to the country was my reading of "The Man who would be King", by Kipling. Everything that I've heard about the Afghanistan economy has had to do with opium and heroin. To have it announced that there was a very real…
New or not, this story in the NYTimes at least brought an old perspective to the new generation. Lot more people (due to Lithium take of the story) is now aware of the potential of Afghanistan, irrespective of the conspiracy theories etc.
I don't buy the concept that this fixes more problems than it causes.
How does someone previously citing undiscovered resources contradict the idea of those resources now being discovered?
I guess what I don't understand is why thought this was good news. Look around the world at countries whose economies depend on non-labor-intensive natural resource extraction. Saudi Arabia, Russia, etc. These resources form a natural monopoly and quickly become the subject of political power.
Seems to be going great for Norway.
Regardless of the political motivations that sparked the announcement, I was excited to hear about it. I became interested in Afghanistan in 2001, along with everybody else. Before that, my only exposure to the country was my reading of "The Man who would be King", by Kipling. Everything that I've heard about the Afghanistan economy has had to do with opium and heroin. To have it announced that there was a very real…
Your demographic is showing. Some of us became interested in Afghanistan back in '79, when the Soviets invaded, and President Carter (remember him?) re-instated draft registration. Seemed pretty important at the time, but seems to be forgotten now...
I guess what I don't understand is why thought this was good news. Look around the world at countries whose economies depend on non-labor-intensive natural resource extraction. Saudi Arabia, Russia, etc. These resources form a natural monopoly and quickly become the subject of political power.
I guess it's a good thing we replaced the Taliban with the CIA then.
Regardless of the political motivations that sparked the announcement, I was excited to hear about it. I became interested in Afghanistan in 2001, along with everybody else. Before that, my only exposure to the country was my reading of "The Man who would be King", by Kipling. Everything that I've heard about the Afghanistan economy has had to do with opium and heroin. To have it announced that there was a very real…
How about educating the population, improving the infrastructure and so on? Lots of places without any real natural resources seem to do fine.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Canada too.
Those places have good government, I guess that's what saves them.
- It is bad to be resource rich and have a bad government.
- It is good to be resource rich and have a good government.
Why not instead just say
- How good things are will significantly depend on how good the government is.
Since that claim holds true for both resource rich and resource poor countries.