News
Is Russia the richest country in the world?
2026-02-09
How many times have I heard that Russia is
the richest country in the world? The world leader in natural gas, diamonds,
nickel, gold, silver, iron ore, forest area and water resources. That it is in
the top five in reserves of oil, cobalt, zinc, copper, uranium... In short,
that the entire periodic system of Mendeleev is found in Russia.
Now I will not begin to explain and justify
that, along with having such reserves, it would be good to have a head on its
shoulders and a brain in its head. This time, let's just talk about raw
materials as the treasure of the nation.
The thing is that any raw material
constantly and inevitably becomes cheaper over time, and the reason for this is
almost always the same - progress.
For example, salt has been an important,
practically life-saving resource for millennia. Soldiers were paid with salt,
wars were started over salt; remember the salt rebellions, or Mahatma Gandhi's
salt march. Today, salt is practically worthless.
A similar story happened with sugar. At one
time, it was a symbol of luxury and medicine. Then came plantations, slave
labor, sugar cane or sugar beets and their extraction, chemistry, selection...
Today, sugar can be extracted from anything and is so abundant and accessible
that it has turned from a delicacy and a luxury item into a significant, global
public health problem.
Guano was also once a strategic resource:
fertilizer, gunpowder, explosives... Peru, Bolivia, and Chile went to war over
Chilean guano. Then Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch managed to synthesize ammonia
from air, and humanity received an inexhaustible source of nitrogen.
In the second half of the 19th century,
aluminum was more valuable than gold. The French emperor Napoleon III served
aluminum plates to important guests at his table, and gold plates to less
important guests. Then the Hall-Heroult process and cheap electricity appeared,
and the metal that adorned the emperor's festive table was transformed into
disposable foil and containers for fast food and soft or alcoholic beverages.
The same happened in the field of
telecommunications with magnesium and nickel, and later with copper. The price
of copper was breaking all records at the time (“What can we make wire from?”),
but optical fiber made of sand quickly drove down the price of copper, because
it was no longer an indispensable raw material.
Two economists made the famous prediction
at the time. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich repeated the ideas of Thomas Robert Malthus
in his best-selling book “The Population Bomb” and predicted mass starvation
and the collapse of civilization in the 1970s and 1980s. The Club of Rome’s
1972 report “The Limits of Growth,” based on computer modeling, predicted the
depletion of major natural resources (oil, copper, gold) in the coming decades.
In response to this alarmism, economist Julian Simon published a book called
The Ultimate Resource, in which he argued that humanity’s resources will never
be exhausted to an absolute limit, because the same thing always happens:
1. As soon as the reserves of any easily
available resource (for example, copper) begin to run out, its value begins to
rise.
2. The rising price becomes the most
powerful stimulus to human intelligence and business.
3. And in response, people begin to look
for new deposits, ways to use existing resources more efficiently, and
substitutes for the scarce resource.
However, the most interesting thing
happened next: to prove his point not by word but by deed, Julian Simon offered
Paul Ehrlich a public challenge in 1980 - Ehrlich had to choose any 5 metals
(he chose chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten) and "buy" them
for $1,000 in virtual money, and after 10 years they would check together
whether their value had increased or decreased, taking into account inflation.
Ehrlich's position: As the population
grows, demand will also increase, resources will be depleted, and the price of
metals will rise.
Simon's position: The increasing value will
stimulate innovation (new methods of extraction, processing, finding
substitutes), which will lead to a decrease in real value.
In 1990, it was discovered that all metals,
taking into account inflation, have fallen in price: Julian Simon beat Paul
Ehrlich.
Now let's go back to Russia. To get rich
with raw materials,
First:
You have to be very smart, which, to put it
mildly, is unlikely to apply to Russia and its ruling regime: let us recall
that in order to "bring" Europe to its knees, the Russian
"Gazprom" itself cut off gas supplies to Europe, and as a result, it
lost the most expensive, solvent, profitable and profitable market in the
world.
Second:
The country should not have so many people
living in it, as, for example, in Norway or, say, in the United Arab Emirates.
It is fair to note that Putin's Russia is actively working on this second
issue, by reducing its own population at a rate unprecedented in the 21st
century.
Well, yesterday, coal mining in Russia
became unprofitable. Today, before our eyes, oil production is already losing
money. Timber is being sold at cost in China. Metal prices are falling. The
country is practically bankrupt, and sanctions are sinking it deeper and
deeper. The infrastructure, which has not been modernized since the Soviet
Union, is collapsing rapidly. Entire industries are stagnating and slowly
dying: Putin's Russia is already in debt, fighting a war with credit, and
burning the future of the country and its people in this senseless war.
As a result, there are 3 ways left:
1. Syria, when the government will be
overthrown by armed groups.
2. Venezuela, when a quarter of the
population will leave the country, and those who remain will live in chronic
poverty.
3. Iran, when 40% inflation per month will
become the norm, the desperate population will take to the streets, and the
government will not spare a bullet for them and, at the same time, will try to
bribe them by distributing 7 dollars to each person.
Then someone told me how Moscow has become more beautiful and how all the restaurants there are full. So try not to repeat the same nonsense about the richest country in the world.
Dito Tsotniashvili