The Brunch Table

Here’s the most interesting statistic I’ve heard all week. (Never mind the wildfire stats, which the LA-area local news kept cheerfully plopping up onscreen–people killed, acreage burned, firefighters on duty, cost of firefighting, property damage, you name it–while being very stingy with the actual maps that told viewers like you how far they were from those up-to-two-hundred-foot-high, up-to-one-hundred-mile-wide, up-to-forty-five-mile-an-hour-travelling walls of fiery death. One came within a half-mile of our school at one point; at night it looked like something out of Lord of the Rings.)

Anyway, this article from the Economist tries to tally up the expense of American oil dependency, and comes up with this remarkable figure:

According to one American government estimate, OPEC has managed to transfer a staggering $7 trillion in wealth from American consumers to producers over the past three decades by keeping the oil price above its true market-clearing level.

Now, I’m not so sure that OPEC is actually able to act independently of the big Euro-American oil companies these days (I gather that the political independence of the OPEC countries is very restricted, compared to the 1970s, when Nasser’s Arab-Nationalist movement had real teeth.) But it’s the figure that fascinates me…

…it might go a long way towards explaining how the U.S. can pull in so much cash every year, but as a nation remain so (relatively) damn poor.