The problem on the peninsula is a complete lack of work ethic

Oil slump prompts Gulf states to take shine off cushy government jobs

​More below.

"Ahmed, a Qatari civil servant, used to arrive at his office at a government ministry in Doha late in the morning and leave for home after lunch, collecting a monthly salary of 40,000 rial ($11,000) and a generous housing and travel allowance.

But last month a government official made a surprise spot check on the ministry's offices and found dozens of employees absent.

"Punctuality is a duty," said a letter Ahmed received from the minister's office. "Qatar expects the best of its citizens."

For a country whose tiny population is the world's wealthiest per capita and which sits upon its largest natural gas reserves, increasing the productivity of its 90,000 public employees might seem like a needless task.

But it is part of a trend across the Gulf as economies there try to lessen the burden of costly public sectors.

Gulf states have for decades used their energy wealth to provide millions of citizens with cushy government jobs, part of a social contract by rulers that rewards political acquiescence and educational attainment with employment for life.

But high-paying public sector jobs that demand little of workers have led to bureaucratic inertia and an absenteeism culture that governments turned a blind eye to during the Gulf's boom years.

In 2011 a Kuwait government report found that half the country's state employees were absent from work between January and March, costing the country's treasury more than 10.5 million dinars ($35 million)."

Oof dah! That'll leave a mark. And this is only the big end of the problem. The small end is nearly all of these countries also require that businesses hire some percentage of nationals and pay them ludicrously high wages. These "employees" are only cost centers, and few return anything to the companies at all. To make matters worse, even the private businesses in these nations are mostly fictitious, since they are populated at the top by the owner and his family, but run by foreign professional managers, and operated by foreign workers. It is rare to find a national in any of these countries who has ever actually worked, outside of the historic jobs, and those are swiftly declining. 

As we have seen in Saudi Arabia, these nations rely on an oil economy to survive, with the kingdom paying what amounts to welfare to support the people. Back in the 1970s before the welfare happened, cutting oil production was easy for the House of Saud, since it had only a minor effect on the Saudi people, or the royals. Over time these kingdoms began to view the oil revenue as a mechanism to control a restive population, and so began transferring ever more of the revenue from energy exploration, and development to welfare. This allowed a pseudo-modernization of these nations. When the oil price spiked over the past many years, the royals actually believed that the price would remain high and so ramped up these welfare payments to create and build new modern cities, and nations. 

This infrastructural boom resulted in a boom of employment both public and private, nearly all reliant on the oil profits. 

As always, hubris if followed by Nemisis. Nemisis here is low oil prices, with economic, technological, and other indicators showing that those prices are too high if anything. The people of the peninsula long ago became comfortable with easy, short hour jobs, which paid them enough to live a comfortable life in a comfortable setting, all without actually having to work.

Good work if you can get it, but the axiom, "There are no free lunches" is real, and always in effect. And the effect is that the high welfare payments whether in the form of rent, gasoline, energy, wage or other subsidies will have to be modified. Most of these Gulf nations need oil prices nearer $100 per bbl to make their budgets work, while actual prices are nearer $50 per bbl. 

Oh Jesus, The House of Saud just became Riyadh on the Chicago River!

After all the House of Saud is not running the place for the locals

​The House of Saud brought to earth . . . 

The Saudis don't work, have no experience with work, and have no work ethic.

Saudi Arabia will not create a new vibrant economy

And financially, the Gulf kingdoms are in trouble, with the House of Saud leading the pack.

Oil: The House of Saud is in serious trouble financially

These nations have created a cargo cult like world where everything looks like a civilized nation, with a prosperous economy, but it's all fake. The jobs are fake, the businesses are fake, it is simply oil money spread to create an appearence. But the appearence is not the reality. This is going to blow up somehow, sometime, and the results are likely to be spectacular, if you are not at the epicenter. 

The kingdoms are all banking on staving off reality with a return to high oil prices, yet the world economy, the oil supply glut, The American oil producers, and pretty much everything else are not complying. The speed at which this will happen is likely to increase if we act appropriately, and allow the Islamic reformation, the religious war between the Sunni (the House of Saud and the Gulf kingdoms), and the Shia (Iran) to play out. We cannot be overtly involved, but we will likely need to continually kick the players back into play until this is sussed out. 

The first thing to do is treat the House of Saud like the enemy it is, and treat Iran as a potential ally, who is not yet in the fold. This is a complete switch from the relations we have had with these countries for the past many decades. 

The potential for religious freedom exists in Shia, we must ensure it infects, Sunni, and takes root quickly
​
"Islamic Awakening : An ancient faith encounters modernity (Daniel Philpott, February 29, 2016, America)

Should Westerners, then, avoid altogether looking for lessons for Muslims in their own history? No; the history of the West contains a different experience that may prove a more promising model for Islam: that of the Catholic Church. The church came around to religious freedom quite late in history upon the Second Vatican Council's promulgation of its "Declaration on Religious Freedom" in 1965--three centuries after a pocket of Protestant theologians began to argue for religious freedom and two centuries after the Enlightenment did so. This latter-day awakening, though, is part of what makes the Catholic Church's road to its declaration exemplary. It shows how a religion whose authority refrained from teaching religious freedom for centuries succeeded in finding a basis for the teaching in its own tradition rather than in modern secular ideologies.

To be sure, the Catholic Church's pathway to religious freedom is not applicable to Islam in every particular. Islam lacks a single leader, like the pope, whose embrace of a doctrine would be authoritative for all believers. Still, the parallels are strong. Catholicism, like Islam, existed long before modernity. In order to arrive at the "Declaration on Religious Liberty," the church had to leave behind the ideal of medieval Christendom, where church and state worked in close partnership to uphold a thoroughly Christian social order. Heresy, in that milieu, was not merely a sin but also an act of sedition. St. Thomas Aquinas compared heresy to counterfeit money, implying that just as the king or prince could use his authority to protect the economy, so, too, he could muzzle spiritual miscreants to safeguard the spiritual ecology.

In Islam's early centuries, a doctrine of "Islamdom" came to prevail. Here, too, apostasy and blasphemy were tantamount to rebellion and merited death. Non-Muslims living under Islamic law were in many places allowed to practice their religion but were restricted in expressing it publicly and spreading it to others--something well short of religious freedom in full. While the Catholic Church eventually left Christendom behind, though, Islamdom still predominates among the world's Muslim thinkers. Its most extreme version is found in the Islamic State, Boko Haram and Al Qaeda.

Catholicism and Islam are also similar in having been treated as an enemy by the movements that have claimed to carry freedom into the modern world. When a few Protestant theologians warmed up to religious freedom in the 17th century, they continued to denounce the Catholic Church. The Protestant philosopher John Locke, for instance, relegated Catholics along with atheists to the category of people to whom religious freedom could not be extended in his "A Letter Concerning Toleration." In the minds of most Enlightenment philosophers, the church was the architect of the Inquisition, the silencer of Galileo and the foe of free thought. In the 19th and 20th centuries, political parties based on Enlightenment ideals in Europe and Latin America sought to eradicate the church's social influence. Anticlerical forces in the French Third Republic, for instance, exiled priests, shut down religious orders and closed the vast majority of Catholic schools in the name of a doctrine of laïcité that called for secularizing public life and privatizing religion. It was on account of the Enlightenment's hostility to the church as well as its religious skepticism that 19th-century popes denounced religious freedom as "absurd" and "erroneous."

Muslims have found the messengers of modernity to be no less hostile."

To keep this shorter than it otherwise would be, I have written on this subject often, if you are interested further, either send me an email, comment below, or search the Lair archives.