Wakanda versus the curse of resources

Most of the film Black Panther is set in Wakanda, a fictional sub-Saharan African state. Extremely isolationist, disguised as a very poor agricultural, subsistence economy to the wider world, it is by far the most technologically and, supposedly, economically advanced nation in the planet thanks to its monopoly on the fictional metal vibranium.

Like Bhutan: an ancient, traditional, isolationist kingdom with a badass creature on its flag (source)

It has alternately been described as a message of hope for sub-Saharan Africa otherwise mostly thought as poor, dysfunctional states, a rallying cry for populations of African origin tired of bad Hollywood stereotypes, or even used for racist arguments about "look how far they would be if they weren't so <random racist stereotype>" - conveniently forgetting that a few of those states actually pulling it off, most notably (though not only) South Africa, despite the immense challenges it has and is still facing.

Not your average petro-state

However, one of the recurring themes when talking about Wakanda is the tragedy of the curse of resources. Its source of wealth, what has given it its technological edge, and allowed it so far to ignore the wider world, escape invasions, colonialism or even Cold War machinations, is vibranium, a metal found nowhere else, and whose mountain-sized deposit has been brought to Earth by a giant meteorite about five thousand years ago. Said metal, not unlike another ubiquitous resource, has wildly varied applications for materials and energy applications. And the most striking examples of the curse of resources are often petro-states.

Vibranium doesn't sound quite as good as Adamantium, but at least it is not Unobtanium (source)

Side-note about the meteorite: A meteorite of such size should have wiped out the entire region, created a giant crater, and probably scattered itself on a much larger area. Instead, the crater seems rather small and vibranium is concentrated on the impact point. This may be attributed to some of the many strange properties of vibranium, notably its ability to absorb and store kinetic energy. This allowed the meteorite to absorb the energy of impact, and possibly some of the heat, instead of releasing it all in megaton blasts in the atmosphere and on the ground.

Amusingly enough, the meteorite arrived 2.5 million years ago, not so long before humans started evolve sapience in more or less the same geographical spot. One may wonder if there is a causal link.

As for the curse of resources, this video gives a good overview of it and its causes, as well as why so many rulers seem to be evil, incompetent tyrants.

Now, it would be easy to dismiss Wakanda as unrealistic, but this would be a mistake. To begin with, the curse of resources can only exist when said resources can be sold on the market in exchange of wealth for the rulers. This cannot happen here, as it is isolationist and living in autarcie.

As such, it has to mine and process vibranium entirely on its own, and whatever wealth and luxuries its rulers and denizens have access to are locally produced. So, by nature, the economy of Wakanda has to be highly diversified.

Vibranium and autarcie

It is interesting to note that the vibranium mine itself seems to be highly automated, with very few workers visible at any time, if any. In fact, the on-site research and development laboratory may well hire more people than the ore extraction process itself.

This makes sense as, contrary to the wider world's global economy, Wakanda has access to only a few million workers at best, with which it has to cover all areas from industry to service to management and research. As such, there is a big incentive to automate everything that can be. We see a similar phenomenon in Japan, due to its free-falling demographics and reluctance to rely on immigration for low-qualification jobs. We can expect Wakanda to develop, say, the same automated restaurant chefs. Similarly, its supermarkets probably have automated cash registers only, if they haven't already been replaced by Internet-based shopping and delivery services. Construction workers would be drone operators and maintenance specialists.

Similarly, their city transports seem to be automated, and the apparent absence of cars in their city may be both to avoid further strain on their industry and because they rely more on teleworking to optimise daily productivity.

Also, car-less cities are just nicer (source)

One would expect unemployment to be inexistent. And with the absence or near-absence of low-qualification jobs, considerable effort must be put on education, that one can expect to be free, high-quality and mandatory from crèche (required when both parents are working full-time) to university.

In addition to vibranium, they have another major advantage to other, ill-fated autarcies of the wider world: their excellent foreign intelligence service. Great powers are known, and have been known for a long time, to massively use their intelligence services for industrial espionage. There is no reason to think Wakanda would do otherwise, particularly as they are not distracted by things like rival nuclear powers to spy on, terrorist groups to infiltrate, freedom fighters to arm, client states to bully or coups to organize. This also helps them achieving their goals with comparatively few agents, both so they can be directly managed by the monarch and because, again, of general manpower shortage.

Wakandan intelligence services can also count on their technological edge and their targets ignoring their existence. And, of course, they can gather all the public data in fundamental and applied research or from patents they don't have to abide by.

This allows them to focus all their R&D efforts in applications of vibranium instead of, for example, inventing the processor again.

This is not without consequence, though, as we can see from the minuscule size of their army: a few hundred infantry and cavalry soldiers, and a handful of flying aircrafts, with no fixed defences beyond the city forcefield and camouflage system protecting the nation. Even with their reliance on secrecy and advanced technology, and even for such a tiny nation, one would expect them to have a larger army as a safety measure. But they may simply not have the available manpower.

What economic model?

There doesn't seem to be any indication of what economic model Wakanda is using internally. However, we can speculate with what we do see.

Politically, Wakanda is extremely conservative. In five thousand years, they have kept the same federal monarchic government, and have never fallen for the lure of conquest and imperialism. This is literally unheard of anywhere else, by a far margin. Vibranium allowed them to withstand any external threat, be it natural or human, but only an exceptionally conservative and cautious mindset could have allowed them such a feat, adapting their ways only when absolutely necessary - but also with enough pragmatism to avoid ideological pitfalls or reluctance to change even when necessary. While not impossible, this is a very thin line to walk, and implies institutions with exceptionally strong and well-balanced traditions, enough to bind the occasional ruler not doing their job correctly, despite nominally being an absolute monarch.

On this note, modern Wakanda seem to be extremely good at gender equality, even compared to today's champions. While the original tribes may have been this way, it is also possible that this is a later evolution, when the manpower shortages drove them to let women work on more jobs, until gender biases completely disappeared. This has been punctually seen, for example during world wars, when men sent to the front had to be replaced and women started to do jobs they weren't allowed to before - even if, in those cases, after the wars ended, the status quo antebellum often came back.

So the transition from subsistence tribal economy to its modern, highly developed form must have happened slowly, with no abrupt transition, with pragmatism and only when dictated by necessity. This means that the often brutal transitions to mercantilisme, capitalism or modern planned economy didn't happen, and the evolution of Wakanda's economic policies have followed a very different path. While it is impossible to divine its current form, we can still take an educated guess.

When we think of command economy, it generally bring the grand, ill-fated political experiment of the Eastern Block and its variants in mind. However, ancient history has another example: many polities of the ancient world were command economies, run by a monarchic administration. While recent Marxist planned economies pretty much all ended in ruin one way or another, those ancient planned economies lasted centuries, some falling only to apocalyptic disasters.

While there is no concluding evidence to be found either way, and historians should always be wary of advancing hypotheses with no historical evidence, we are here to search for explanations making sense and can afford a bit more freedom in our speculations.

As such, it makes sense to imagine an early Wakanda developing such an ancient planned economy. The rulers being those originally taking all decisions and as such, were the de facto economic planners, and started to rely on advisers on those matters as complexity grew, which became in time specialised administrations.

With no major disruption and being able to resist external influences and threats, Wakanda would be free to slowly evolve and refine its planned economy, until it became the highly efficient system that works so well in its modern incarnation. We may see traces of it with the vibranium mines apparently still under direct control of the royal family.

Conclusion

By nature, Wakanda cannot fall to the curse of resources, as it can only exist if the rulers can be wealthy with a country that is only producing raw resources. As an autarcie, this is impossible and forces Wakanda to have a diversified economy. In fact, the economic challenge of Wakanda is the opposite, making such an economy work with so little manpower. As such, it is closer to Japan than Nigeria.

Unfortunately, this means that, contrary to what we may read in some places, using Wakanda as an example or a model of successful resource-rich African country is counter-productive: whatever lessons may be learned by studying it will be inapplicable to resource-rich nations in general. We are better studying nations like Botswana that seem to actually succeed at this particular challenge.

Even worse, it may be inapplicable to the modern world in general, as it required a stable nation evolving over the centuries, which won't help nations with problems now and attempting to solve them over human time-frames, in some cases because there may otherwise not be a nation anymore otherwise.

But not being applicable right now to nations facing immediate challenges doesn't make it worthless to study, far from it. In fact, the thought experiment of an ancient monarchic command economy surviving to this day, and what forms would its modern forms take, may yield valuable insight. Especially as the varied forms of capitalism have been increasingly criticised for more than a century, and its only serious contender has been experimentally proven unsustainable.