If you're in a competitive market you're forced to innovate.
If you're a monopolist you can just sit there and extract wealth. Which Intel was for a while.
By the way, your little theory has support and a name, it's the resource curse in political economics.
When billions are raining from the sky, whether you do good work or not, the rational plan is to fight over those free resources, rather than work to create new ones.
> coined in 1977 by The Economist to describe the decline of the manufacturing sector in the Netherlands after the discovery of the large Groningen natural gas field in 1959
The graph of the distribution for value per person must be wierd, and definitely not flat. Maybe based on a power law, but I am unsure how to model the people that provide negative value, for example bad managers.
Though actually note that the classic Mancur Olson result is "the exploitation of the strong by the weak". That is, the person who has the largest share of output contributes disproportionately much to the public good.
Simple proof: write individual i's marginal benefit from the company's total effort X as
s_i f(X) - x_i
where s_i is i's share of the output f(X), and x_i is i's own effort. Taking everyone else's effort as given, i will equate marginal benefit of own effort to marginal cost, so that total effort solves
s_i f'(X) = 1
equivalently
f'(X) = 1/s_i
Now suppose the person with the largest share satisfies the above. Then everyone with a smaller share must have
f'(X) < 1/s_i
and therefore, if they are contributing more than the minimum possible, they have an incentive to reduce their contribution. So, this extreme version has that only the largest "shareholder" does any work. (A more realistic model has a convex cost of effort, so smaller shareholders do something, but they still contribute less than their output share.)
Intel is not a cooperative.
Fungible employees (the majority?) are paid a market clearing price (salary) for their effort. The company can derive much more value from an employee and the employee earns very little of the excess (perhaps bonuses to align working incentives).
Maybe those countries would find themselves in a similarly bad state (or worse) without those resources. Maybe their bad state is due to historical reasons - being former colonies with very little power on the world stage - and resources just couldn't help much.
Countries with a dominant resources that only found them when they were already developed don't suffer from the 'resource curse'.
In such cases not having resources doesn't mean you turn into Switzerland or Canada rather it means that it will be harder for one dominant dictator to hold on to power. In some African countries that are now proto-democracies, dictators simply couldn't hold on to power without easily available resource base.
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita work in 'The Logic of Political Survival' and ' The Dictator's Handbook' is quite interesting.
Also the USA is the poster child for this; it's arguable that without the California gold rush there would be no USA as this is what is thought to have capitalised the federal government sufficiently to impose order on the west and fight the south.