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It is remarkable, although I have heard the Saudis have made attempts to create sustainable industries. It should be quite clear to modern leaders what will happen when the oil wealth runs out.

I'm not as critical of Golden Age Spain. Markets were poorly understood then and mercantilism was the economic theory of the day. Even in Western Europe economies were overwhelmingly agricultural. The conventional wisdom how to build a wealthy empire was to accumulate land by conquest or diplomacy. When the money ran out Spain lost its European possessions and limited to the Iberian peninsula Spain didn't have the population or wealth to be a great power.

An alternative path would have been for Spain to follow Britain and use its colonies and navy to build up into a great trading nation. But that would have required Spain to support private enterprise and not just government fleets. It would have had Spain act contrary to the way the Spanish were.

It is remarkable, although I have heard the Saudis have made attempts to create sustainable industries.
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something like 90% of their economy is oil related. One rich princes there recently has made headlines by telling the royals publicly that USA fracking revolution poses an existential threat to them.

The problem with oil is that it is so expensive that it has become vulnerable to competing technologies.

I don’t think that USA oil fracking poses a threat to world oil prices because worldwide demand is rising fast and production is declining in many old fields or just barely keeping up. While Iran may add a million or two barrels @ day Iraq’s growing civil war is likely to subtract an equal amount.

For the next couple years, most net production increases will come from the USA and canada

It will be five years at the earliest before any other country gets any volume oil production from fracking oil to the market.

Natural gas however is another matter. there’s a big switch over of trucks and busses in the USA to natural gas. but its coming off a low base and the price of natural gas is rising steadily as demand heats up. And there is a tidal wave of demand for natural gas coming.

I think what will kill the price of oil will be further out in the future. It will take time for it to appear as significant as it is. It will be a combination of natural gas trucks and buses and electric cars. Both are seeing a pretty rapid uptake in the last couple years. But they’re coming off a low base.

Combined with that will be that the price of electricity from alternate sources is falling rapidly.

The saudis may luck out in that if solar keeps falling at current rates in 10-15 years they’ll be able to deslinize entirely with solar power at cheaper rates.

The true safe harbor for the saudis, the gulf arabs and the rest of the middle east and north africa won’t happen until desalination becomes cheap enough for agriculture at competitive world prices.

That’s actually inevitable given current trends. For example you can’t really live on the deserts of the moon and mars until you’ve mastered living off the deserts of the earth. But that’s not the way people are thinking about it. They’re thinking in terms of developing the technologies to live on the deserts of the moon and mars. As an after thought that will enable the world to seriously colonize the world’s deserts. In 30-40 years desalination will be cheap enough for desert farming. But it will come as an after thought.

It could come sooner. But only if desalination became a major world wide priority like green fuels. Currently that’s not the case.
(If the saudis were smart, they would hold something like a worldwide contest where any company that reduced the cost of desalination by $100@acre foot from three desal plants on three oceans would get 1 billion dollars. When the cost of desal had got down to $100@acre foot, they’d hold one last contest to bring the cost of desalination on three oceans to $50@acre foot. The best desal plants do the job for about %700@ acre foot so the total costs of the contests would be about 7 billion. Throw in heavy advertising on 4 continents for 15 years and you might raise costs by another 3 billion. But the result would be well worth the costs. )

In the green fuels category, probably the category killer that rings out the oil age will be some 4th or 5th generation nuclear reactor.

You never know. Stuff comes in from left field.

The last five years have seen two major technological revolutions: one in the oil patch and one in hand held telephones/computers. And dozens of minor ones in all sorts of fields.

There’s no sign that the next 5-10 years won’t have another 2-4 major technological revolutions and a hundred or so minor ones. The obvious one is 3d printing. And maybe advanced robotics. Which will entirely shift the model for manufacturing around the world.

The pace of innovation is picking up.