Petrodollars don’t fund repression

The website I’ve been working on for a long time has finally launched its new interface and its really cool. I’m an editor and I also write for it (as do some of my friends) and I have some cool stuff coming out. Check it all out at Policymic.com

I saw this today which seems like a reputable, recent, quite well done paper. But the result is also incredible, which is that high oil prices do not help repressive regimes fund their repression. Now, in one sense, I can agree with this, because I think optimal profits from oil revenue come at around 40-50 dollars a barrel. So that at high prices, money per barrel goes up, but total barrels is going down because of conservation efforts that start making sense at higher prices (all of a sudden oil is so expensive that it makes sense to have your pizza delivery boys bike their deliveries, no matter how cold the pizza gets) This is oil elasticity stuff that some people spend their whole lives doing.

But this study doesn’t say that (well it doesn’t give that rationale), it just says that there is no link between prices and democracy, looked at from a rigorous statistical perspective. Really? If oil went to $10 a barrel, Saudi Arabia wouldn’t have to think about not spending 10% of its GDP on the military?

I guess, to be fair, the article’s conclusion, that there is no general relationship between democracy and oil prices, is compatible with thinking there is such a relationship in specific countries.

What does it all mean? Two things. One is that we don’t have feel so guilty about using oil cause it doesn’t fuel repression. Its a kind of “oil doesn’t kill people, oil dictators kill people” result.

Second, any argument for getting off of foreign oil will have to be pretty heavily (almost exclusively) environmentally based. Environmentalists step up.

(look at this for the opposite perspective)