> It's always a great place to live while the resources are being extracted. Intuitively you would expect that. The thing that's so difficult for us to wrap ou

> It's always a great place to live while the resources are being extracted. Intuitively you would expect that. The thing that's so difficult for us to wrap our heads around about the resource curse is that intuition is completely wrong here; a sufficiently valuable natural resource can ruin a country even while it is being extracted. The short version of the reason why is that it breaks the alignment of interest between the rulers and the people. Manufacturing industry needs a healthy and capable workforce, but as this excellent video puts it, a gold mine can run with dying slaves and still produce great treasure: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs