What I find interesting after reading the linked wikipedia article is that the USA as a whole is not suffering from the resource curse. I wonder, just tangentially, because:
1. We are net exporters of many vital resources (food, in particular wheat and corn, is one I can think of off hand)
2. We have an abundance of natural resources and a wide variety of those natural resources to grow our economy
3. At various stages in history, we were basically the word's largest exporter of raw and manufactured goods and materials.
Yet, we aren't classified as having suffered through this.
Odd right? Or is my casual understanding just incorrect?
The resource curse occurs when there are abundant natural resources and a group of people small enough to coordinate action controls those resources.
In the eastern half of the USA, most of the land is owned by (relatively) small holders, who are too numerous to not compete against each other. That is slowly changing as consolidation continues to occur, but the base ownership of resources is so diffuse that there would still need to be a lot of consolidation for resource cartels to become dominant.
Besides winning the Civil War and outlawing slavery, the Lincoln administration also passed one of the most momentous series of laws in American economic history with the Homestead Acts, which sold almost 10% of the total area of the US for pennies as long as the land would be homesteaded, that is, occupied by someone who worked the land. This was a deliberate policy of the Free Soil movement to prevent moneyed interests, primarily plantation owners, from gobbling up the frontier.
In eastern places where large estates had already been assembled, such as Appalachian coal country and the Mississippi Delta, politics has been predictably corrupt and exploitative.
Where the frontier land was not homesteaded (mostly arid western lands), "land barons" gained control of much of it and began to manipulate local politics in a similarly predictable way.
The remaining western public lands also benefited from the notion of "scientific administration" in vogue during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Some land agencies are worse than others (Parks service is a far better steward than the BLM, for example) but by and large the federal agencies have succeeded in preventing the formation of new land baronies.
We were immensly helped by the world wars wiping out so much capital abroad. Even before that, the civil war while costing much life only jump-started our industrial capacity as the fighting was never that far north.
The resource curse is basically a mercantilist problem where the resources extracted are almost entirely exported, and little domestic industry outside of resource extraction.
1. We are net exporters of many vital resources (food, in particular wheat and corn, is one I can think of off hand)
2. We have an abundance of natural resources and a wide variety of those natural resources to grow our economy
3. At various stages in history, we were basically the word's largest exporter of raw and manufactured goods and materials.
Yet, we aren't classified as having suffered through this.
Odd right? Or is my casual understanding just incorrect?