On oil and the advantages of being a journalist.

• Author: Adams, Tucker Hart
• Position: [the] economist

"Now that I'm writing a monthly column for two magazines," I e-mailed my favorite newspaper columnist, "I have a new respect for your ability to come up with a topic several times a week."

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"I try to get all my ideas from other people," he shot back. "There's no way I could come up with all this stuff."

"Remember the old Tom Lehrer song?" I queried. "Plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize ... and call it research."

"Well, here in my shop," he replied, "we rewrite it and add the attribution. Then it's called journalism."

I thought about that exchange the other day as I read the May/June 2008 issue of Foreign Policy, In it, Michael Ross writes about the so-called oil curse. Now that I'm a journalist I can rewrite his article for this month's column.

Rising resource exports, says Ross, push up the value of a country's currency, as importing nations scramble to purchase the local currency to pay for the export. This makes the country's other exports more expensive and less competitive in world markets. The country becomes more and more dependent on its resource export and extremely vulnerable to volatile resource markets.

The exporting country also has a sudden glut of new money. This can be tucked away in a rainy day fund, used to benefit the citizenry, squandered on wasteful projects or reinvested in the importing countries.

From this point, the Ross article veers off into politics and war--corruption, weakening democracies and armed conflict--subjects I find singularly depressing and uninteresting. But I continued to ponder the economic implications of the price of a barrel of oil going from $9 a barrel in the 1990s to $26 a barrel in 2003 to more than $130 a barrel in 2008.

The six members of the Gulf Cooperative Council, with a combined gross domestic product of only $800 billion last year, can expect more than $9 trillion in oil revenues by 2020 if the price remains above $100 a barrel, according to the McK-insey Global Institute.

The media is full of stories about the fabulous new buildings springing up in the Gulf countries--the world's first seven-star hotel and the world's tallest building in tiny Dubai, seven new cities complete with hundreds of thousands of new jobs...