Google “oil” and “curse” and you get about 25 million hits, which is pretty good considering “michael lynch petroleum idiot” only gets a quarter of a million. (To which my daughter once said, “Dad, if all those people think you’re an idiot, well,…”) The notion of mineral resources being detrimental to an economy and/or society is a long-standing one. Presumably, some ancient Greeks complained that if only they hadn’t found silver, they wouldn’t have built a large navy, become a major power, and ended up losing it all in a war to Sparta.
