[jariel]

" too busy feasting off of the intermittent boom cycle to prepare their people constructively for the bust that comes later."

It's much worse than merely 'feasting and fasting' - the problems are very deep, another way of putting it, there was 'not much at all' in these places at all, then they had oil, and the absence of other parts of the economy isn't quite so much an artefact of dysfunction, rather, it never existed in the first place.

Many of these places had 3% literacy 2 generations ago, and much of the civic institutional infrastructure (I mean like 'laws' and 'Judiciary' and 'Governance' etc.) is as new as many of those shiny buildings.

Let alone the absence wide networks of useful artisanal know-how spread from generation to generation, or at least, such information that can be used to found industry.

If Oil permanently crashed, it would be very bad and there would be no recovery. The Gulf States would be the poorest states in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia would be like Yemen or Algeria.