The Wealth of Nations.

For the last couple of days I've been mulling about a blog post for the wealthy nations. Why are some nations wealthy and some are not? It seems that the wealth of nations is built with the tears and blood of other nations most of whom are now poor.

We have a handful of wealthy nations - the US, Japan, Germany, UK, the rest of the G8 countries, and depending on how you define wealth, a handful of other nations. Most of these wealthy nations are either former colonial powers, or have been aggressive in conquering other peoples resources. At first glance, Japan seems to be the underdog of this club but remember that prior to the two nuclear bombs dropped on them, they were quite aggressive in looting and pillaging the East Asian nations. They might have lost a lot of resources during the war but a lot of the wealth was still preserved. Their mistake was to take on another wealthy nation - the US. The US is a different beast - it has been an imperial power since before the days of Teddy Roosevelt's presidency.

What is Armenia to do in this environment? The Armenian nation has been the colonized and hasn't been a colonizer since the days of Tigran Metz a couple thousand years ago. Before she can start conquering another nation, there is the huge task of returning what has been conquered from us - we all know what these territories are.

It's a difficult task. Militarily it's an impossible thing to do. Diplomatically it can be done easier if the opportunity is seized at the right moment just the way Turkey did when they managed to take what now is Eastern Turkey right after WW1.

There seems to be another avenue. It won't make Armenia a wealthy nation but it will make sure that Armenia is not a poor nation. I have written about developing clusters of economic excellence. I identified a few areas that this might be possible to do a while ago.

Here is a study of that might be helpful in implementing such a development program (here is a light primer on how the study was done). To develop some of the clusters might be easier for Armenia than another country - there are already existing scientific infrastructures that can be utilized for generating high value added intellectual property.