Comments by "Paul Aiello" (@paul1979uk2000) on "Why Small Countries Are Getting Insanely Rich" video.

I've not watched the video yet but I will and will edit my comment if needed after I've watched it. But I suspect the reason smaller countries do better than big countries is because of having less of an ego, less arrogance and not as wasteful on forign adventures like many big countries are. Basically, smaller countries are more inwards looking compared to big countries, that offers the advantage that the government can put a lot more time, effort and resources on its people, smaller countries seem to do better for its citizens than bigger countries. This isn't always the case for small countries, they still need to be modern with a competent government, but when you look at Europe, the small countries are dominating the quality of life indexes and for most of us, that's what really matters in life. The other factor is that smaller states are more likely to listen to people's concerns in the country compared to bigger states, where your voice gets lost as a statistic, also, like the video points out, bigger states should be a lot more successful, but there's so much waste and corruption that a lot of that wealth ends up being lost or ends up in too few hands. When it comes to natural resources, that can be a blessing and a curse, depending on the country, it's a blessing with a well competent government like we see in Norway, but it can be a curse for many others that get wasteful with that resources and more important, start to take that resource for granted and end up not doing reforms to the economy to become more productive, it's ironic that countries with less natural resources tend to do better, except for Norway, countries without that natural resources have to adapt, that puts their economy on a better footing longer term compared to other countries that have a lot of natural resources or that depend on it a lot. Speaking of natural resources, oil and gas for instance, countries that buy a lot of it from external sources will overtime have a massive windfall each year in savings once they move to cleaner energy sources they can generate internally, the two areas I can think of are EU countries and Japan, these stand to benefit by massive amounts of money each year as more energy is generated internally, whiles at the same time, the ones they buy that resources from, ends up losing out, this is the blessing and the curse thing, in the case of the EU and Japan, it's a blessing, for Russia and much of the Middle East, it's a curse. and the sums of money, we are talking close to a trillion Euros saving per year just for the EU countries alone, now clearly that won't all be savings, there will be a potion of that going to alternative energy sources, but it will be a fraction of what it is now., that money being saved could go on social programs, military budget or many other things. Also, recycling is going to be another area that developed countries will likely save a lot, once we can do that effectively enough, we'll end up buying a fraction of resources from around the world we do now and end up recycling and reusing a lot of it, all countries should benefit from that but especially countries that buy a lot of natural resources from external sources stand to benefit.
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