I'm kind of a fan of Nauru news. The place has always seemed to me to be the embodiment of the theories of Julian Simon -- substitutability made real, or rather made abstract.
"Phosphates" weren't just the country's main industry -- they were the country's landscape. One report I read described the island as a dinner plate with a silver stripe near the rim -- the habitable part of the island being the stripe.
They basically converted their entire homeland into cash. It's now a moonscape. They import water from Australia.
During the boom years, Nauru always showed up in those UN reports among the top 20 in per capita income. But nowadays the country's main "natural" resource is its investment income -- which it has supplemented with offshore banking schemes -- and its stocks haven't been doing well.
Now they're housing some of Australia's barbaric refugee prisons as part of the attempt to stave off the day when they become ecological refugees themselves -- winding up in some stockade in Woomera.
Crazy place.
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