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rudrigu

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the message that some politicians have been using ("trade agreements are evil!" "immigration is bad!" "the EU is making us abuse you!") has taken hold

Or, perhaps, the dissatisfaction was there all along, and the politicians are merely exploiting the pain of a faction of the electorate. Humans are tribal. They don't become tribal overnight because a politician told them to do so.

It is safe to assume that people with non-trivial power are very seldom sincere when making public statements.

If Dubai's elite's descendants will be riding camels some decades from now, then why does Dubai have a national wealth fund?

The truth is that Dubai's wealth fund may invest in YC or in VC funds, and some of those mocking Dubai's future will be working indirectly for the elites that run Dubai. To distract people from such master-slave reality, a bit of self-deprecation can be charming.

That is a matter of wealth preservation. What about wealth creation? How much Saudi wealth is there without stability and security?

Also, why should all children inherit equally? Marry the daughters into wealth, and make sure only capable sons inherit.

Quoting Samuelson, if a man marries his maid, the GDP goes down. That is how smart GDP-based arguments are. Wait until the population gets close to the carrying capacity again, and let's see how your GDP argument holds.

Perhaps you only know tech oligarchs. But if you look at the list of billionaires, you find also mining oligarchs and fossil fuel oligarchs. So much for the argument that raw materials do not matter...

Physicists invented nuclear racketeering, which made them celebrities in the 1940s and 1950s. We live in the age of the MBA, not in the age of the scientist. That golden age is gone, unfortunately.

Be careful to not reproduce in excess

Or, alternatively, reproduce abundantly and use your children to make alliances with families that actually do matter.

You're advocating having few children in a thread related to Saudi Arabia, a kingdom whose founder had 20+ wives and some 100 children. That is how all the warring clans in the Arabian Peninsula were united and pacified: by marriage.