David Commins: prediction

Transcript context

…You said yourself, it’s never been the case before. Right. I think it’s very deep. I really do believe that the country has turned away from that puritanical religious legacy. I do believe. One of the things I try to do in my book is I try to show that the, what I call the modernist or cosmopolitan current in Saudi Arabia, is not recent. It goes back 100 years, to the annexation of the holy cities and Jeddah. That the very logic of state-building nurtured that tendency. I’m sure that you have a lot of Saudis, particularly in the older generation, who are furious with the new social reality, but I don’t see them regaining power ever again. Now, when it comes to their economic future, and will they be able to transition to a post-petroleum economy, that’s an open question. I have no idea, because, to my mind, the future of the global economy is so up in the air because of technological changes and political changes. How oil-producing states will manage that, will they become big data centers, because they have all this energy? I have no idea. Yes, is my answer. I think they will.…

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