Will Qatar Always Be Rich?

I will never understand why oil rich Arab countries build massive glass greenhouses(skyscrapers). Can you imagine how beautiful some of the cities could have if instead of spending trillions on these generic tall skyscrapers that they built their cities in traditional Arab architecture? It would be a sight to behold.

the most interesting bit for me was that by outsourcing civil society to foreign "mercenaries", it was essentially easier for the regime to maintain power.

> And that pattern is completely normal in these states. It’s easy to think of it as kind of mercenary in some sense. And that’s not, I think, a false analogy. And it creates a variety of different sorts of conflicts in a sense but also advantages because one of the things that this means is that you don’t get the buildup in many of the Gulf states of civil society in the form that we understand it. You don’t get the uppity lawyers, the difficult journalists. That is contained by the fact that the vast majority of the people in those kinds of positions don’t have citizenship rights. So for the point of view of the stability of the regime, it actually has an upside. You might say they are less loyal, but they’re also more disposable. This is part of the mercenary model, and we should take the mercenary analogy seriously because it’s really in the military that is most pronounced.

The "age of combustion" is very quickly coming to a close. The middle east will see a very different economic landscape and, is in fact, already seeing it with constant shrinking of the enterprise value of fossil fuel producers.

Will the middle east be able to turn their current mountains of cash in to a functioning economy without oil? My guess is no, primarily because their current cultures are not well adapted to thriving in a complex economy with many human resources that can't just be pumped out of the ground.

It will take extraordinary leadership for any of the gulf states be successful post combustion. Oman though, is a model that might make it and lead others. But it's not the way to bet.

It is a nice read about Qatar and covers diverse topics. What I found interesting cause I did not know is that there is such a thing as islamic economics, which is trying to avoid the inequality between creditors and debtors and also derivatives and gambling:

> So the obvious way of doing this is simply various types of share participation where rather than making a loan, a bank takes a stake and then the person receiving the money from the bank has the option of buying the bank out progressively like it’s essentially an equity-stake type model.

Would that work in the west?

Only as long as oil is cheap.

No.[1]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...