Lessons on the Resource Curse: Educating Thomas Friedman, # 2754

It's Sunday, which means that Thomas Friedman will be proudly pushing some misguided thesis in his NYT column. Today's topic is the resource curse.

Friedman points to a graph that the OECD has constructed showing the relationship between the share of natural resource rents in national income and a country's student test scores. The graph shows a strong negative relationship, meaning that the more resources a country has, the worse the test scores.

Friedman's take away from this story is that ...