The debt, excess and exploitation is not Dubai's alone. We've all been at it

The glitzy Gulf state is a modern parable for a world living on tick. How much better the wealth could have been spent

A Good Comment

Jonathan Freedland
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 1 December 2009

"....We cannot condescend to Dubai because its flaws are ours – even if they are lit in outlandishly vivid colours.

That's why the money men are already asking themselves who will be next.....

In this sense, the Sheikh who wanted the Burj al-Arab to be the world's only seven-star hotel is not that different from the Florida couple who moved out of the trailer park and into a condo. They both bought something they couldn't afford with money that wasn't theirs. Dubai was simply a sub-prime statelet in a sub-prime world.....

Today's regime of near-zero interest rates means that we're trying to get ourselves out of the current hole by the very means that got us into it: spending cash that was borrowed on the cheap.....

Nevertheless, something else sticks in our craw about Dubai. It's that the eye-popping luxury was built on the backs of foreign workers, toiling in a form of modern bondage. Over a million men and women from India, Bangladesh, Nepal and across Asia have turned Dubai from a sleepy village of pearl-divers and fishermen into a shimmering Arabian Las Vegas.....

We are right to find that morally repugnant. But we should beware the mote in our own eye. For if the west enjoyed economic boom times for the 15 years that preceded 2008, it did so thanks to low inflation. How did inflation stay so low? Because labour costs were kept down, thanks to millions of Chinese workers prepared to sweat for wages we would consider close to slavery.....

....But our own consumption of fossil fuels hardly makes us blameless. In this, as in so much else, Dubai is just like us – only more so.....

For Dubai, like the rest of the emirates and the other Gulf states, did not use its enormous wealth to develop its own people, let alone the peoples of the wider Arab region. Instead, as Durham University's Christopher Davidson puts it, "they just imported what they needed ready-made"......

There is another route open, one that would dream not of hotels shaped like sails, fake archipelagos and parties fit for Paris Hilton, but of a region packed with universities and seats of learning to rival the great scholarship of the Islamic golden age. Imagine that, a Gulf region that might serve as an inspiration for the whole Arab world, rather than a playground for its richest kids...."