20 August 2013

Thomas Friedman’s “FLOP” – First Law of Petropolitics

NYT eXaminer

This is a book excerpt from Belén Fernández’s The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work (Verso).

By Belén Fernández:

One overly simplistic theory that somehow continues to elude the very minimal amount of scrutiny that is required to debunk it is Friedman’s First Law of Petropolitics, which I will refer to by its convenient acronym. The FLOP, which debuted in Foreign Policy magazine in 2006, posits that “in oil-rich petrolist states, the price of oil and the pace of freedom tend to move in opposite directions.” READ MORE AT NYTeXaminer.