Economists and political scientists call this the resource curse. Countries with abundant natural resources tend to experience poorer economic growth and higher rates of poverty than their economically diverse peers.3 There are many factors that lead to the resource curse, but a core one is the incentives they create to stop caring about your people’s economic well being. Because they earn money from resources, rentier states have no incentive to pay regular people today or invest in them for tomorrow. Building better schools doesn’t earn them more money. They invest just as much as it takes to move the oil out of the ground, onto trucks, and out to the ports.4 It’s not that their citizens couldn’t do anything worth taxing, it’s that there’s no reason to develop them into a taxable population. Why ask your people for money when you can get it from the ground?

The intelligence curse describes the incentives in a post-AGI economy that will drive powerful actors to invest in artificial intelligence instead of humans. If AI can do your job cheaper and faster, there isn’t a reason to hire you. But more importantly, there isn’t an economic reason to invest in your lifelong productivity, take care of you, or keep you around. We could produce unparalleled value with a fully automated economy, but if the spoils are distributed like the worst rentier states it will not result in prosperity for the masses.

To summarize: the resource curse disincentivizes states from investing in their people, often to disastrous results. To break it, we have two relevant approaches: Trusting institutions to control the resource and stay anchored to the public good Diversifying the economy to put people at the center

We’ve seen how richest states are those that have the richest, best-educated, most-productive citizens, and that grant those citizens the most extensive freedoms to work and think as they please.