I don’t know a whole heap about life in the Gulf States (by which I mean Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman). But I’ve formed impressions from reading some online articles, looking at some stats, having a stopover in Qatar and observing the Gulf from a plane.
I will now list some observations based on this very incomplete picture. As an exercise, you might like to list out a few items of your own before reading further. You will also notice that the items are negative — I’ll address this at the end:
- They are very wealthy countries (Qatar being the wealthiest in the world). But this is largely due to accidents like having oil as opposed to things we’d consider “merit-based”.
- They spend a lot of effort on showy projects that are technologically brilliant (eg. the Burj Khalifa) but also opulent and tacky.
- The expensive, high-quality nature of these projects also makes them sterile and a bit lifeless. As a coworker described it, it’s “plastic”.
- These projects are entirely driven by foreign workers who come from much poorer regions like South Asia, live in shitty conditions with few rights and often die due to inadequate labour practices — it’s estimated that Qatar’s upcoming World Cup alone will be built on the corpses of 4000 foreign workers. Workers live in squalor, have their passports taken, are abused and often face conditions of slavery.
- Speaking of which, they are an environmental disaster. Qatar is consistently the highest carbon emitter by capita at 44 tonnes. For comparison, Australia and the US are under 20. Out of the top 15 emitters, 6 are from the Gulf States. And it’s no surprise given that they regularly build ice rinks in the desert and are starting on the world’s largest lagoon coming in at 40 hectares. Flying over the 2 major cities in the UAE, I was tempted to yell: “Turn a few lights off! The streets are empty anyway”.
- Naturally, these states would not be self-sufficient and generally rely on other countries for food they import. It’s the many supporting the few — Saudi Arabia has 30 million people and the others put together had 20, which is of course a blip on the world scale.
- When they try to do something good it’s even more infuriating than anything. On Qatar Airways they do a lot of hawking of Qatar’s Educate a Child charity. And it seems reasonably solid but I just wanted to yell “if you reduce your emissions and treat foreign workers properly, you’ll end up educating a helluva lot more children”!
You might be thinking that I’m being judgemental and I am. But now, read the list again and see if it reminds you of any other countries.
If you live in a developed country, the above list of complaints is about us. It’s just easy to see in the Gulf States because some of those aspects are exaggerated there. For example, while there are definitely issues with industrial relations in Australia, the situation is orders of magnitude better than in Qatar, UAE or Saudi Arabia. The Gulf States example was salient for me because it took what was normal for me and turned it up to 11. But the problems that make it REALLY obvious that the lifestyle of the Gulf States unsustainable are “our” problems too. They’re even more the problems of western countries because they have much bigger populations. While the Gulf States might emit the most carbon per capita, in terms of total emissions they’re not huge. We are the proto-Gulf States and how we see them is how citizens of poorer countries should be justified in seeing us.
Did you ever get the feeling of fascinated resentment when boarding a plane and looking at the people stretched out in first class? “Why pay $14,000 for a flight when you can pay $2,500? What kind of people are these?” you might have thought. Well, it’s exactly like the Gulf States. First class people are just us turned up to 11. If you earn more than $11,200 a year, you are the equivalent of the world’s first class. You make 5.6 times more money than the average person’s $2000 a year — the same distance as exists between an economy and first class plane ticket.
This is one really good benefit to travel in shaking your brain up. It’s really easy to spot the mote in another country’s eye because you haven’t gotten used to it. But do yourself a favour and look in the mirror.
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