> The nations that found themselves on top of oil or coal or the fertile crescent at just the right time in history did not plan that.
Doesn’t that undermine your point? Because Bangladesh doesn’t exactly look to Iraq, West Virginia, or Libya as the symbols of affluence and development. Conversely, the UK, Sweden, the Netherlands, etc., aren’t replete with oil and minerals.
So all the countries with plenty of sun are going to get lots of cheap energy independence soon. I guess we should cargo cult from whatever they did to achieve this amazing success? I know the liberals want to claim it's geography and 'hours of sunshine' or some other politically correct nonsense but really I think it's all about the wide brimmed hats they wear and avoidance of the corrupting influence of ice hockey. But they won't teach that in schools!
And close to home examples like Google should make this more obvious to HN readers. You can't separate them from the early dot com era and what their competitors at the time we're doing, notably monopolist Microsoft trying to kill the internet rather than embrace it, yet accidentally inventing AJAX.
There's the whole conversation about the 'Good to Great' book and how the business lessons from these success stories were obviously bullshit with just a tiny amount of hindsight.
What your're proposing is just a form of the Just World Hypothesis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis
The nations that found themselves on top of oil or coal or the fertile crescent at just the right time in history did not plan that.
It might make people feel more in control of their lives to think that bad things only happen to bad people but it's clearly not true.