The land of excess

But the caviar tray - that sounds like a turnaround. Many European and American expats, after all, were originally drawn to Dubai because of its wild exuberance, its carnival of excess. The place was fun, it was exciting, and it was gratifyingly weird. But there was always more to the story than this. Dubai’s rulers lured foreign talent to the emirate with tales of gold-plated mobile phones and indoor ski slopes, but the idea at the core of this enterprise was far from frivolous. In its own way, Dubai was promising to make the world a better place.

You don’t have to travel too far from the glistening towers of Sheikh Zayed Road to get a sense of how ambitious the Dubai Experiment was. The highway leading from Jeddah to the Petro Rabigh petrochemical plant, in neighboring Saudi Arabia, provides a depressingly lucid vision of where things have gone wrong in the Middle East. There is an enormous concentration of wealth there, but the outskirts of Jeddah are a wasteland of sand and scrub, interspersed with dirty townships and the odd terrifying cafeteria.

No matter how you spin it, oil money hasn’t done much to improve the lives of ordinary people. In many ways, it has had the opposite effect: The oil economy has left the entire Gulf region in thrall to the endless fluctuations of the market, lending a kind of manic-depressive quality to regional economies. And in this part of the world, as we know, grassroots poverty and socioeconomic instability are an explosive mix. Which leads us to the promise of Dubai.