Psychological studies show that attractive women are generally considered nicer, smarter and more honest than those who are not. But though life often seems easier for good-looking females, experience inclines one to the view that beauty can be a curse as well as a blessing. Pretty young girls who are constantly indulged can become willfully self-centered. They may not be inherently stupider than those less favoured, but most girls used to getting by on flirtatious smiles never fully develop their minds. (A cynical aphorism says beauty times brains is a constant.). Many businessmen reckon that pretty girls in general make poor employees as they tend to be spoilt and lazy. Attractiveness often means attitude.

.Not all good-looking women are feckless. Many realize that beauty is but an ephemeral gift of chance which helps to open doors, and that character is only created by testing oneself. But other sweet young things get no education and develop no inner resources. As time’s winged chariot hurries on and fades those youthful hues, life for them increasingly becomes a resented routine of subservience and sour memories.

As it is with women, so it is with nations. There is little correlation between physical endowment and economic success. True the USA has both natural resources and wealth. But Russia is perhaps even better endowed and yet is a financial basket case. Japan is the world’s second largest economy despite having almost no natural assets.

A World Bank book entitled “Five Small Open Economies” makes this point quite clearly. This study compared Hong Kong, Singapore, Jamaica, Mauritius and Malta from 1960 to 1985. It found that the ‘barren rocks’ of Singapore, Hong Kong, and even Malta have done better than the well endowed islands of Mauritius and Jamaica. In1965 Jamaica’s per capita GDP was over 50% higher than Mauritius’s and slightly higher than Singapore’s. In 1997 it was nearly 60% lower than Mauritius’s and less than 5% of Singapore’s.

Natural resource rents divert resources from the tradable to the non-traded sector, and are often used to subsidize inefficient import substitution. Most importantly, resource rents allow a society to avoid the hard policy choices integral to truly viable growth strategies. Boom period rent revenues make it easy to launch social programs, which usually prove impossible to maintain and difficult to shrink. Rent revenues may also be used to support untenably high  wage and currency rates, and to assuage nationalist concerns by keeping foreigners out. Many examples of these tendencies were found in the experiences of Mauritius, Malta and most egregiously, Jamaica.

Jamaica’s ‘miracle economy’ GDP growth rate of 6.3% between 1952 and 1972 was almost entirely fuelled by bauxite and tourism. In 1972 for example bauxite and alumina composed 62.7% of domestic exports. But Jamaica did not use this natural resource windfall to educate its populace and expand export-oriented activities. When the boom ended, it found itself short of human and physical capital. But the island is blessed with incomparable natural beauty and tourism took up much of the slack. Yet once more the hard choices were avoided, and Jamaica kept falling further behind countries forced to depend primarily on human productivity.

So naturally blessed is Jamaica that our capricious behaviour is often overlooked. Though one of the world’s most strike prone countries, our rich reserves meant that even the 1975 levy caused no fall in bauxite earnings. Similarly our beaches and landscape are so outstanding that tourists keep coming despite widespread violence and harassment.

But a time of reckoning is at hand. No one seems sure how many reserves are left, but Jamaica’s bauxite resources are finite. In any event commodity prices have collapsed. And while Jamaica remains uncommonly beautiful, carelessness is destroying this loveliness. Our rate of deforestation is the highest in the world. Pumping raw sewage into the sea has killed 95% of our coral reefs. Negril has lost over 10 feet of beach frontage in 2 years. How long before we have no more beaches at all, and therefore no tourists? Jamaicans who think environmentalists are all alarmists should remember that Haiti was once a lovely country.

Will we as a nation take action before it is too late? Will we summon the national will to save our landscapes and beaches? Will we begin to collectively focus our energies on improving our human skills? Will we come to realize that the world does not owe us a living and be more welcoming to investors and visitors? Or will Jamaica, like a faded femme fatale, keep trying to exist on expired charms while bitterly remembering the sweet bird of youth?

Beauty, alas, has no past tense.