> Venezuela was doing "alright" (relatively of course, their economy was too dependent on oil) That bit about oil is a pretty significant caveat. Economists ha

> Venezuela was doing "alright" (relatively of course, their economy was too dependent on oil) That bit about oil is a pretty significant caveat. Economists have spent many decades studying concepts like the "resource curse" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse) -- the way that countries whose prosperity is disproportionately driven by the sale of natural resources (like, say, oil) tend to end up mired in poverty and autocracy -- and "Dutch disease" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease) -- the way that a booming resource-extraction sector tends to crowd out development of other economic sectors, like manufacturing and services. The Venezuelan economy under Chávez was virtually a case study on these ideas, as he rebuilt the entire economy on top of an upward surge in oil prices. When those prices collapsed, the whole system came down with it.