Here's a cool article courtesy of Pleiades. This bit halfway in got my attention:
During boom times, as we saw in the years leading up to 1973 and again after 2002, the rise in oil demand strengthens oil producers, which reap massive profits by intentionally underinvesting in oil-production capacity. Oil prices continue to rise, filling their treasuries with a sudden influx of capital that cannot be absorbed at home. Petrodollars flow out, seeking returns in already inflating financial markets and pushing bubbles to dangerous levels.
As the business cycle turns, the euphoria begins to wane. Investors assess financial risks more accurately. Interest rates rise, further feeding the downswing. The irrational exuberance that amplified the boom quickly reverses course, accelerating the bust. Demand for oil collapses, causing oil prices to crash. Petrodollar flows dry up, hitting financial markets and real-sector growth still harder. Then, reduced liquidity and credit prevent oil exporters from investing sufficiently in productive capacity during the recession, and our story eventually repeats, each time more dramatically than before.
The geopolitical component of this megacycle is equally insidious. As oil-producing countries amass substantial financial reserves, they tend to allocate investment and expenditure disproportionately less to oil-production capacity and more toward areas that benefit the ruling elites. In the Middle East, significant portions of oil receipts have been spent on arms purchases, which protect the ruling class from both external threats and internal challenges -- indirectly, by appeasing military leaders who might pose a threat, and directly, by stifling opposition through robust internal security spending. (Military personnel as a percentage of the labor force is a very high 3 percent in the Middle East and North Africa, and military expenditures as a percentage of GDP are also consistently high, for example 9 percent in Saudi Arabia.)
Oil-importing advanced economies such as France and the United States, which eagerly sell weapons as a means of recycling petrodollars, cannot escape their own complicity in this game. Middle Eastern arms races boost not only the arsenals of national militaries, but also of subnational militias and even terrorist organizations. Iran's long-standing support of Hezbollah, for example, is well documented. The flow of weapons increases geopolitical risks, once again increasing oil prices as fears grow that military conflict or terrorist threats will disrupt supplies. Put bluntly, a little bit of terrorism is good for oil exporters.
And the links between oil and terrorism don't stop there. As oil exporters mimic the consumption behavior of advanced economies during booms, young populations develop highly unrealistic expectations, premised on a sense of entitlement to oil wealth. It's these frustrated expectations that drive youth toward radical and militant ideologies, not poverty per se. In Saudi Arabia, for example, real per capita income in the early 1980s was higher than that of the United States. Saudi nationals were accustomed to free housing, guaranteed incomes, and subsidized electricity and gasoline until low oil prices caused budget cutbacks in the mid-1990s. The Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers, after all, were mainly educated middle-class men. They were undoubtedly influenced by the arguments of Osama bin Laden, who in the 1990s was raging against "the greatest theft in history," arguing that the real price of oil in late 1979 should have persisted for the next two decades.
Does anybody feel that gasoline/petroleum is actually under-priced give its value to our society? A bottle of water can cost more than the equivalent volume of oil. That's really weird - or it tells you that the next 'commodity' for us to run short of will be drinking water, and not oil. I'm not sure.
The last bit in the excerpt got me thinking about the nature of the hyper-angry Islamist Terrorist types who recruit from poor workers working in the oil fields, as depicted (in Hollywood style, that is) in 'Syrianna'.
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