There’s a syndrome that you occasionally see with states that are blessed with mineral wealth or some other natural resource, like oil or gas deposits. It’s called “Dutch disease” after the experience of the Netherlands following a large natural gas development beginning in the late Fifties.

It’s fairly complicated and it happens in different ways, but you usually see an appreciation of the local currency as export revenue grows. (Foreigners need to buy your money before they can buy your goods.) Eventually, the resulting imbalance starts bleeding investment and human resources away from existing local industries and into the export sector. Broad-based economic development, which may or may not have already been in progress, starts to go backwards....