Maybe, but not necessarily. Ostensibly, if half of your human intellectual capital as a nation is getting underutilized, it makes sense that you're gonna be poorer, and poorer countries are probably inherently less stable.

South Africa is a rich nation with high inequality and extremely high unemployment. Under utilization doesn't seem to make nations poor as long as they can export in-demand products.

My point is that there is a huge difference between people being poor and nations being poor.

South Africa is not a rich nation. In per capita GDP, it is 113th out of 213 and at $5,444 is less than half of the worldwide average of $11,339[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...

> Ostensibly, if half of your human intellectual capital as a nation is getting underutilized, it makes sense that you're gonna be poorer, and poorer countries are probably inherently less stable.

That depends. Slavery underuses the intellectual capital of slaves but makes the society richer. Humans don't only have their intelligence to offer.

That doesn't explain the economic success of Japan, S. Korea, and other parts of Asia?

Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia are doing quite well (economically).

The Asian countries have broadly diversified economies versus the countries you listed which are primarily resource exporters, so I don't think that's a meaningful comparison.

Whoever wrote this article doesn't seem to understand correlation and causation, but I think some natural resources might have their foot on the scale in your example.

They also have extremely authoritarian forms of government. It’s easy to be stable when you can lock up anyone who’s causing trouble (at least in the short term).

They're the exact opposite of stable. That's why they're so oppressive. They're constantly fighting against high levels of instability that never leave the system. All dictatorships and authoritarian systems have a lack of stability to varying degrees based on their systems. If you have stability, you don't have to oppress, murder, purge people to maintain power.

They play whack-a-mole with the constant instability.

People get this backwards very commonly. It's not stability they always have, with occasional instability. They always have instability, it's a constant, and the regimes exist in never ending fear of the population because of that. Their actions are the process of removing the greater extremes of instability as they creep up to threaten their power or as they become threatening enough to be noticed.

The most common example of this I see, at least over the past ~20 years, is Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq. There is a forever stream of claims that: hey, at least Iraq had stability before the war. No they didn't, they had the exact opposite of stability. They had extreme oppression, extreme instability. If you have to constantly oppress people to keep your power, it means your system is wildly unstable. Saddam had to constantly murder and purge people, even within his own ranks, to fight for keeping control against the never ending instability that his regime prompted. Saddam could never stop fighting against that instability, or it would have toppled him rapidly.

The constant instability can also be seen in Afghanistan, where a strong regime such as the Taliban can impose stability.

Where it gets hard, is what are the underlying reasons to the constant instability.

Poverty and a very religious population seem to be two factors that go hand in hand.

How does lower intellectual utilization logically lead to the country being poor?

Both factors are the effect of a third cause: liberalization of their cultures.

Conservative tribal societies simply don’t like new ideas. That’s bad for women’s rights and it’s bad for economic progress.