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> A world where Russia or Iran or Venezuela was run by decent government would be a great improvement! There is no guarantee that whoever comes out on top afte

• PeterisP 7y ago
  There's a structural difference in the needs that a government needs to satisfy in order to stay in power depending on these economic factors. If your economy runs on extraction and export of a few raw commodities, then any government that can keep that concentrated industry running will be successful, and it does not need a strong citizenship, quite the opposite, it needs a weak citizenship so that it's easier to control that concentrated source of wealth - that's part of the "resource curse" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse) that facilitates dictatorships in such areas. A similar country without oil or comparable resources, on the other hand, simply has to rely on decentralized citizenship producing wealth through their labor and skill, and its leadership needs to facilitate a strong population even if it wanted to be an extractive dictatorship, because otherwise there's nothing to extract. In the long run, these circumstances push towards a society structure that's more reasonable and beneficial for the population masses than the resource-rich countries.
• BurningFrog 7y ago
  True. But when are there ever guarantees? There is also no guarantee civil wars will happen.