Oil-rich Middle East countries have done worse economically than oil-poor ones

Evidence

One is sometimes left with the conclusion that those countries which have no oil have, for this very reason, done rather better economically than those that have. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1631

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the ‘resource curse’ literature and qualifies straightforward narratives of oil wealth as benefit — relevant to economic-representation work in the cluster. — connects to: Oil wealth fails to translate into human development in most petro-states — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 274
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting…, 1631