[h34t]

Do you have any evidence these arguments always boil down to who has control of the raw materials?

I think access to intellectual capital and social capital are far, far more important. In the future, perhaps, access to raw materials will become more important. But now, you can get access to raw materials easily if you have the rest (intellectual/social capital) -- people will sell them to you in exchange for renting out your brain & the smoothly operating institutions of your well-managed community.

It is nearly as simple for a man in China to order a container of wood as a man in Canada. But you cannot simply order a container of culture, or a container of civilization, or institutions, or habits, or education. And these things set the west apart far more than access to raw resources.

Low-resource cities fabulously wealthy due to great social/intellectual capital: Hong Kong (where I"m writing from, a city built on a rock with a great port and not much else), Singapore (built on swampland), numerous others.

High-resource locations mired in conflict, poverty, and struggle: Democratic Republic of Congo; Guatemala; numerous others.

[duncanr]

I agree with your post 100%, but I think I'm generalising more than you're thinking I am.

My cards out on the table: I'm not a student of Economics (a deficiency I intend to correct, as time permits).

In terms of evidence, I have none. However, I think I need to be clear as to what I mean when I say 'raw materials'. It's probably a poor phrase to use (I guess it has a well-defined meaning in Economics); I consider even intangibles to be 'raw materials'. As an example, education is the 'raw material' on which 'intellectual property' is built. As a web developer, the LAMP technology stack (for example) is the 'raw material' (along with many others, including education) on which websites are built (and aren't we hackers lucky that people make much of that technology available to us for no cost? There's huge value in those 'raw materials' for us. Most people in the world aren't so lucky). For me a raw material is anything that acts as an input into a process that leads to a monetisable output. Of course, money itself is perhaps the ultimate 'raw material' in this sense, creating an interesting situation where one of the raw materials used to create the desired product is the product itself. Perpetual motion machines may be a physical impossibility, but a perpetually expanding economy apparently is not.

There are certainly many examples of low-resource cities that do very well; at least, low in terms of the amount of stuff that can be dug out of the ground. These are obviously not the only saleable resources or those cities wouldn't exist (I'm not sure about Hong Kong, but didn't Singapore first become wealthy due to its strategic location?).

As to the high-resource locations mired in conflict and poverty, I would suggest that much of this conflict is indeed related to who controls the raw materials. Whilst this may or may not be true, I was more thinking originally about internet posts on economics and 'social justice' in my first comment, which seem to me to boil down to whether ownership of resources (of many types) should be 'more equitably shared' by some 'fairness' metric, or owned only by those able to compete effectively for them (or who just get lucky). Of course there are many threads on what is actually meant by 'more equitable sharing', since all participants seem to feel that their approach is the most equitable without exception :-)

Hopefully I've not led too many people down dead-ends with my rather wooly use of the term 'raw material'.

[h34t]

Ah, thanks for the clarification -- our thinking has a lot more in common than I thought. FWIW, I'm no economist either. I did major in Political Economy for a short while, but that just means that I had enough time to gobble up some conventional thinking on the matter (including that strict definition of raw materials) -- if I judge by my classmates in those courses, my studies are certainly no guarantee that I understand anything at all about the real world :-).

I don't have a lot of time right now, but in brief -- I like the way Warren Buffett puts it when he mentions that we're all indebted to the "ovarian lottery" for much of what we have in life... if he'd have been born in some poor African country, there's little chance he'd have had the success he has, because they don't have "raw material" (in your sense of the word) necessary to take his talent and create wealth out of it.

Also -- you're perfectly right that a lot of the conflict in a place like the Congo is caused by conflict over raw resources. I was using that sort of example to show how an abundance of raw material doesn't necessarily lead to wealth "in general" for the country; it can actually have the opposite effect.