Issue (WIWE) status: Submitted, Unpublished

Weak Signal's progress: Advanced

This Weak Signal came from: 
Interviews

The source of this Weak Signal: 
Fred Young Phillips, "IC2 Institute of the University of Texas at Austin", interviewed by "MIOIR".

Weak Signal's description: 

According to Fred Young Philips: "There was a report I read that compared the per capita GDP of countries to a host of variables and it turns out and I am quoting here from my paper, ‘a 24/7 Wall Street Report based on IMF data shows the countries with highest per capital GDP have not necessarily the most universities nor the most credentialed knowledge work forces but the most mineral resources’. A lot of this is driven by China’s hunger for raw materials and we don’t really hear much about the Chinese colonization of Africa but that is a very big thing and that will affect world culture and the development of Africa and the emphasis on mining. I go to Peru a lot and that is a big mining country and the country’s economy is doing very well but it is because of exports to China and no country can survive for the long term on extracting and exporting non renewable resources. I am just concerned that every engineering school in the developing world will be devoted exclusively to mining engineering. I am exaggerating but that is not a bad ‘sleeper/weak signal’. They are making money on resource extraction and that rather depresses the motivation for innovation in other spheres of life."