Also, to summarize one of my points about what gives Dubai such a feeling of freedom:
"For several years, I haven’t needed to show a passport at Dubai airport: facial recognition identifies me and the gate opens automatically. It’s efficient—but it also shows how easily governments can track people. In Dubai, cameras are everywhere and actively used by police; finding a stolen car is trivial. If you can track cars, you can track individuals.
The UAE clearly offers fewer political freedoms than Western democracies, so yes—mass surveillance bothers me. But, paradoxically, less than it would in my home country.
Why? Two reasons. First, the balance of power is different. There’s a distinct implicit contract between someone born into a country and someone who chooses a country in a competitive market of jurisdictions. The mono-country person is constrained by inertia—language, ties, habits—and feels the state’s weight acutely. The nomad arrives as a customer. If the value deteriorates or surveillance becomes too heavy, he can—and should—leave.
That possibility fundamentally rebalances power. I can choose where to live and contribute, and states must compete to keep me. So I know that if Dubai no longer suits me, I’ll leave. Accepting slightly more state power is the trade-off for having strong exit power. In practice, voting with your feet balances power better than voting at the ballot box—an essential insight when choosing your first expatriate country."
I normally love your analyses, but this one made me physically ill.
Dubai is built on modern slavery. Exploitation and extraction levied against foreign workers with virtually no rights to begin with, and no ability to assert them.
Dubai, like Singapore, is simply a modern conservative society - law enforcing a social order.
Any system that creates different sets of rights for employers and employed is wrong. Your article is a gross apology for a system that is essentially corrupt.
I don’t care about whether people can drink or wear bikinis. Different cultures, different rules. I do’t care if 2% or 80% of there revenue is from oil. Casting the withholding of passports as some combination of collateral or paternalism is gross and shameful. By your logic, organ sales would be reasonable provided the donor was paid and made money that could be sent home.
It is not a lie that Dubai, like Singapore, is a class system. It is not a lie that there are different sets of rules for the rulers, the rules, and the exploited. It is encoded into statute for all to see. It is not a lie that passports are withheld, restricting escape, and wages are also withheld, without equal access to the law. Defending exploitation by claiming “You should see how shitty it is for them in Pakistan” doesn’t change that it is exploitation.
That Dubai, for its wealth, provides zero care is grotesque. They benefit massively from immigration but pride themselves on providing no support.
I get it, you are a Milton Friedman/Randian. That is where the grotesqueness comes from.
Tell me you've never talked to a taxi driver in Dubai without telling me.
Seriously, where does your confidence come from that your opinion is correct? Have you really studied the subject? How much time have you spent in Dubai? How much time have you spent talking to the “oppressed” people?
Or are you just repeating things you've seen on the Internet, without taking the time to check them out for yourself?
Do yourself a favor : next time you are in Dubai, talk with all the taxi drivers you can. And to the waiters, workers, immigrants you see everywhere.
Ask them if they chose to come to Dubai voluntary, if people confiscated their passport, and why they are here.
Peggy Noonan, Michael Barone, Victor Davis Hanson, Salena Zito, Rod Liddle, Allister Heath, Melanie Phillips, James Delingpole, Tucker Carlson, Dennis Prager, Douglas Murray, Dinesh D’Souza, Mark Steyn, Theodore Dalrymple, Toby Young, Charles Moore, Daniel Hannan
All of them. It is the cheapest trick in the book. Economics is a system, as is politics. Systems of humans behave in predictable ways.
When you create a class system with differential outcomes based on class, you always get exploitation. Always.
I get it. You are Randian. But the Dubai system has multiple sets of rules, and such systems can reliably create “clean” and “safe” cities by consuming a underclass. It is not new.
I have traveled to about half of the countries of the world, studied political science, philosophy, and computer science, and have run companies and been on the boards of significant nonprofits.
I read actual books. With paper. Lots and lots of them.
Lose the taxi driver tripe. It is hackneyed and mildly embarrassing. Read Manuel Delanda.
"While Western media is filled with stories of intolerant, aggressive, backward-looking Islam, Dubai shows that this narrative doesn’t need to prevail. A Muslim monarchy can be tolerant, welcoming, rich, dynamic, and cosmopolitan."
Very interesting, thanks (if a tad too rose tinted glasses).
I do find the land reclamation projects hilariously wasteful, though, as Dubai has plentiful flat, stable land immediately inland for development with no environmental concerns whatsoever (even if the Emiratis cared).
This reads in parts like a paid advert for Dubai, which it may well be.
Part of your conclusion stood out to me, and it almost read like irony.
"A Muslim monarchy can be tolerant, welcoming, rich, dynamic, and cosmopolitan."
Dubai may be welcoming, rich, dynamic, and cosmopolitan, but tolerant it is not. It's actually famously authoritarian, and has zero tolerance for political dissent or criticism of the government, criminalises LGBTQ+ relationships, strictly censors media and speech, and systemically exploits migrant workers, among other intolerant policies and norms.
Tomas - Very insightful piece on Dubai's history and regulatory evolution as a trading hub (especially the early quasi-SEZ policy leading to certain institutional and cultural attitudes preventing the trap of the rentier state - quintessential example of historical path dependence).
But in all honesty, I think a big blind spot here is your article not grappling with the UAE's external political economy. The same trade and financial infrastructure that enabled Dubai's rise is deployed to bankroll and shield actors that destabilize the region while reinforcing the UAE's positioning in trade flows. You can't have a conversation about Dubai or the UAE without considering their support for the RSF in Sudan (orchestrating the world's largest humanitarian catastrophe) and Haftar's campaign in Libya.
Dubai's isn't some neat and neutral "anti-petrostate" success story. It's part of a broader Emirati model combining hyper-efficient internal order with outsourced genocide and chaos abroad. Sure, we can admire the internal governance mechanics but still need to ask whether this is sustainable after taking into account the externalities.
I would also be extremely hesitant to characterize Dubai as a symbol of "modern Islam". Most Muslims of cosmopolitan sensibilities around the world see little overlap between Quranic ideals of industrious austerity or consensus-based bottoms-up governance (with nothing holy except God) vs Dubai's opulent hyper-consumption and top-down heavy-handedness - treating its state apparatus as divine itself.
I’m surprised there is no mention at all about Dubai’s - well known - reputation as a money‑laundering hub, especially in relation to its real‑estate market and free‑trade zones.
The very mechanisms that facilitate massive foreign investment (tax‑free policies, free zones, luxury real‑estate, etc) have also attracted the money‑laundering which for a large part is fueling Dubai’s construction boom.
And not to speak even of the UAE’s - to put it mildly - dubious role in the genocide in Sudan and the gold it imports from there.
Transparency International : Dubai is a “money‑laundering paradise,” the emirate’s open economy and lax oversight make it attractive to corrupt and criminal actors from around the world.
Investigations by NGOs (e.g., OCF Report, AMlNetwork) point to systematic weaknesses in anti‑money‑laundering (AML) controls, especially in property transactions where opaque ownership structures allow large sums of illicit cash to be integrated into the economy.
Just a note on your comment about what "a Muslim monarchy" can be. Vague recollections from the Arab Spring period of commentaries that the monarchies were far more stable and/or tolerant than the republics (Egypt/Syria/Iraq/Iran/Yemen/Libya). The monarchs weathered the 2010s far better than the non-monarchs.
Dubai: "the UAE is not known for freedom. Criticism of rulers, state institutions, religion, or “social harmony” can lead to detention. Online speech, including social media posts, is closely monitored. ... Public morality laws affect dress, alcohol, relationships."
US: "(M)y speech was not much more free in (San Francisco), as I always had to be very conscious of what I said and how it would land with people, for fear of making a faux pas or hurting sensitivities."
These aren't even *remotely* equivocable.
I'd rather live somewhere like the U.S. or Western Europe, where I am free to hurt someone's sensitive feelings or make a mild faux pas, and then walk away (or maybe get called a name)... than somewhere like Dubai or Russia or Thailand, where I accidentally say something offhand and wind up being detained in prison for not falling in line with the Monarch or Tyrant.
Plus, regardless of how "smart" its leaders were, ultimately, what does Dubai have? Dubai has...money. The flimsiest of non-physical, volatile resources. It is a city-sized combination of the worst of Las Vegas and Zürich, with zero actual real resources or natural wealth. And all of its construction and outward sign of monetary wealth is currently built on the backs of imported slave labor.
Dubai is a playground for the rich, and holds little else for anyone lower than the upper 10-20%. (3)(4)
And unlike the U.S., the Gilded Age in Dubai has nowhere to exhale. The U.S. suffered through a Gild-smashing Great Depression, but used its wealth of natural resources to manufacture its way out of the hole.
One major global downturn, one Great Depression, and Dubai is toast.
However, the U.S., as you mentioned in a previous article (1), has a glut of natural resources to rely on for wealth, and though it has major labor inequalities, the vast majority of construction is not performed by essentially slave laborers, but by paid employees with actual labor laws.
One major global downturn, one Great Depression, and the U.S. is...badly injured, but recoverable.
Sadly, rather than explaining any deep-seated virtues of Dubai, and why it is misunderstood by xenophobes and jingoists, this article read as a Libertarian's dream pamphlet, created by the Dubai "Ministry of Truth" for those who's sole goal in life is to worship the accumulation of money, regardless of its impact on other humans.
To be blunt: After reading your article, I find Dubai to be even more reprehensible against the decency of humanity, that I did *before* reading it.
My only question is if "on a bright cold day in April", the diamond-encrusted clocks "strike thirteen" ...? (2)
It's not likely oil demand will dry up much even if global demand for petroleum-based energetic fuels were to significantly decrease. Oil is also the most impotent feedstock (or source of reaction-driving agents) for basically the entire organic (i.e., not metals) chemical industry, and for which there is no economical substitute that is remotely competitive with it. Indeed, technological progress has tended to increase this gap, not narrow it, giving even greater advantage to weigh in favor of the use of petroleum.
Enjoyed that. Nice demonstration of the resource paradox - the general assumption would be that the adjacent oil rich cities would do better but extractive industries often breed complacency. Those that have to create often end up generating far more value.
There's clearly lessons for other states too - most notably that under the radar, focused improvement combined with broadly free economics is a strong recipe for prosperity.
Interesting. Business runs on stability and reliability. Much of the Muslim world is opposed to the apparent openness of Dubai. Given the generally accepted tenets of Islam, how is the current stability sustainable? What events / forces would end the party?
Well done, Tomas. It's rare to see such a nuanced article about Dubai, especially from someone who hasn't lived there.
You've perfectly understood Dubai's (very clever) positioning in this new world.
May I suggest my article "Why I Feel Freer in a Monarchy Than in My Democratic Home Country -
Reflections on Dubai and the freedom granted by digital nomadism" https://disruptive-horizons.com/p/why-i-feel-freer-in-a-monarchy as a supplement? I lived in Dubai for seven years and know the city very well.
Also, to summarize one of my points about what gives Dubai such a feeling of freedom:
"For several years, I haven’t needed to show a passport at Dubai airport: facial recognition identifies me and the gate opens automatically. It’s efficient—but it also shows how easily governments can track people. In Dubai, cameras are everywhere and actively used by police; finding a stolen car is trivial. If you can track cars, you can track individuals.
The UAE clearly offers fewer political freedoms than Western democracies, so yes—mass surveillance bothers me. But, paradoxically, less than it would in my home country.
Why? Two reasons. First, the balance of power is different. There’s a distinct implicit contract between someone born into a country and someone who chooses a country in a competitive market of jurisdictions. The mono-country person is constrained by inertia—language, ties, habits—and feels the state’s weight acutely. The nomad arrives as a customer. If the value deteriorates or surveillance becomes too heavy, he can—and should—leave.
That possibility fundamentally rebalances power. I can choose where to live and contribute, and states must compete to keep me. So I know that if Dubai no longer suits me, I’ll leave. Accepting slightly more state power is the trade-off for having strong exit power. In practice, voting with your feet balances power better than voting at the ballot box—an essential insight when choosing your first expatriate country."
(I share the 2nd reason in the above article)
So we agree on this point.
Thank you. Yes, great add.
And I’m dumb I should have asked you to look at the article before publishing 😅
I normally love your analyses, but this one made me physically ill.
Dubai is built on modern slavery. Exploitation and extraction levied against foreign workers with virtually no rights to begin with, and no ability to assert them.
Dubai, like Singapore, is simply a modern conservative society - law enforcing a social order.
That is why millionaires like it.
For shame.
Tell me you never really studied Dubai and you're just sharing your intuitions, without telling me https://disruptive-horizons.com/p/the-9-lies-about-dubai
Amazingly, your article is even worse.
Any system that creates different sets of rights for employers and employed is wrong. Your article is a gross apology for a system that is essentially corrupt.
I don’t care about whether people can drink or wear bikinis. Different cultures, different rules. I do’t care if 2% or 80% of there revenue is from oil. Casting the withholding of passports as some combination of collateral or paternalism is gross and shameful. By your logic, organ sales would be reasonable provided the donor was paid and made money that could be sent home.
It is not a lie that Dubai, like Singapore, is a class system. It is not a lie that there are different sets of rules for the rulers, the rules, and the exploited. It is encoded into statute for all to see. It is not a lie that passports are withheld, restricting escape, and wages are also withheld, without equal access to the law. Defending exploitation by claiming “You should see how shitty it is for them in Pakistan” doesn’t change that it is exploitation.
That Dubai, for its wealth, provides zero care is grotesque. They benefit massively from immigration but pride themselves on providing no support.
I get it, you are a Milton Friedman/Randian. That is where the grotesqueness comes from.
Tell me you've never talked to a taxi driver in Dubai without telling me.
Seriously, where does your confidence come from that your opinion is correct? Have you really studied the subject? How much time have you spent in Dubai? How much time have you spent talking to the “oppressed” people?
Or are you just repeating things you've seen on the Internet, without taking the time to check them out for yourself?
Do yourself a favor : next time you are in Dubai, talk with all the taxi drivers you can. And to the waiters, workers, immigrants you see everywhere.
Ask them if they chose to come to Dubai voluntary, if people confiscated their passport, and why they are here.
Conservatives always use the taxi-driver trope:
Peggy Noonan, Michael Barone, Victor Davis Hanson, Salena Zito, Rod Liddle, Allister Heath, Melanie Phillips, James Delingpole, Tucker Carlson, Dennis Prager, Douglas Murray, Dinesh D’Souza, Mark Steyn, Theodore Dalrymple, Toby Young, Charles Moore, Daniel Hannan
All of them. It is the cheapest trick in the book. Economics is a system, as is politics. Systems of humans behave in predictable ways.
When you create a class system with differential outcomes based on class, you always get exploitation. Always.
I get it. You are Randian. But the Dubai system has multiple sets of rules, and such systems can reliably create “clean” and “safe” cities by consuming a underclass. It is not new.
I have traveled to about half of the countries of the world, studied political science, philosophy, and computer science, and have run companies and been on the boards of significant nonprofits.
I read actual books. With paper. Lots and lots of them.
Lose the taxi driver tripe. It is hackneyed and mildly embarrassing. Read Manuel Delanda.
Yeah. Your approach is far too top-down. You need to complement it with a little bottom-up. Just talk to the people.
I think you missed the point. I wasn’t lauding those writers.
As an aside, you do realize that you started both of your comments with the same structure, one miming Internet speak?
Just an observation.
"While Western media is filled with stories of intolerant, aggressive, backward-looking Islam, Dubai shows that this narrative doesn’t need to prevail. A Muslim monarchy can be tolerant, welcoming, rich, dynamic, and cosmopolitan."
As long as you don't happen to be LGBT+, anyway.
Very interesting, thanks (if a tad too rose tinted glasses).
I do find the land reclamation projects hilariously wasteful, though, as Dubai has plentiful flat, stable land immediately inland for development with no environmental concerns whatsoever (even if the Emiratis cared).
This reads in parts like a paid advert for Dubai, which it may well be.
Part of your conclusion stood out to me, and it almost read like irony.
"A Muslim monarchy can be tolerant, welcoming, rich, dynamic, and cosmopolitan."
Dubai may be welcoming, rich, dynamic, and cosmopolitan, but tolerant it is not. It's actually famously authoritarian, and has zero tolerance for political dissent or criticism of the government, criminalises LGBTQ+ relationships, strictly censors media and speech, and systemically exploits migrant workers, among other intolerant policies and norms.
Tomas - Very insightful piece on Dubai's history and regulatory evolution as a trading hub (especially the early quasi-SEZ policy leading to certain institutional and cultural attitudes preventing the trap of the rentier state - quintessential example of historical path dependence).
But in all honesty, I think a big blind spot here is your article not grappling with the UAE's external political economy. The same trade and financial infrastructure that enabled Dubai's rise is deployed to bankroll and shield actors that destabilize the region while reinforcing the UAE's positioning in trade flows. You can't have a conversation about Dubai or the UAE without considering their support for the RSF in Sudan (orchestrating the world's largest humanitarian catastrophe) and Haftar's campaign in Libya.
Dubai's isn't some neat and neutral "anti-petrostate" success story. It's part of a broader Emirati model combining hyper-efficient internal order with outsourced genocide and chaos abroad. Sure, we can admire the internal governance mechanics but still need to ask whether this is sustainable after taking into account the externalities.
I would also be extremely hesitant to characterize Dubai as a symbol of "modern Islam". Most Muslims of cosmopolitan sensibilities around the world see little overlap between Quranic ideals of industrious austerity or consensus-based bottoms-up governance (with nothing holy except God) vs Dubai's opulent hyper-consumption and top-down heavy-handedness - treating its state apparatus as divine itself.
I’m surprised there is no mention at all about Dubai’s - well known - reputation as a money‑laundering hub, especially in relation to its real‑estate market and free‑trade zones.
The very mechanisms that facilitate massive foreign investment (tax‑free policies, free zones, luxury real‑estate, etc) have also attracted the money‑laundering which for a large part is fueling Dubai’s construction boom.
And not to speak even of the UAE’s - to put it mildly - dubious role in the genocide in Sudan and the gold it imports from there.
Transparency International : Dubai is a “money‑laundering paradise,” the emirate’s open economy and lax oversight make it attractive to corrupt and criminal actors from around the world.
Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/dominicdudley/2019/01/29/dubai-has-become-a-money-laundering-paradise-says-anti-corruption-group/
Investigations by NGOs (e.g., OCF Report, AMlNetwork) point to systematic weaknesses in anti‑money‑laundering (AML) controls, especially in property transactions where opaque ownership structures allow large sums of illicit cash to be integrated into the economy.
AML Network: https://amlnetwork.org/high-risk-sectors/dubai-real-estate-hub-for-money-laundering-and-aml-failures/
Transparency International: https://www.transparency.org/en/news/money-laundering-list-exit-uae-much-to-prove
How much fossil fuels per day/year are needed to run, maintain and further build the city?
I believe they have massively invested in solar.
Except for shipping trade and airline planes obviously
Just a note on your comment about what "a Muslim monarchy" can be. Vague recollections from the Arab Spring period of commentaries that the monarchies were far more stable and/or tolerant than the republics (Egypt/Syria/Iraq/Iran/Yemen/Libya). The monarchs weathered the 2010s far better than the non-monarchs.
Dubai: "the UAE is not known for freedom. Criticism of rulers, state institutions, religion, or “social harmony” can lead to detention. Online speech, including social media posts, is closely monitored. ... Public morality laws affect dress, alcohol, relationships."
US: "(M)y speech was not much more free in (San Francisco), as I always had to be very conscious of what I said and how it would land with people, for fear of making a faux pas or hurting sensitivities."
These aren't even *remotely* equivocable.
I'd rather live somewhere like the U.S. or Western Europe, where I am free to hurt someone's sensitive feelings or make a mild faux pas, and then walk away (or maybe get called a name)... than somewhere like Dubai or Russia or Thailand, where I accidentally say something offhand and wind up being detained in prison for not falling in line with the Monarch or Tyrant.
Plus, regardless of how "smart" its leaders were, ultimately, what does Dubai have? Dubai has...money. The flimsiest of non-physical, volatile resources. It is a city-sized combination of the worst of Las Vegas and Zürich, with zero actual real resources or natural wealth. And all of its construction and outward sign of monetary wealth is currently built on the backs of imported slave labor.
Dubai is a playground for the rich, and holds little else for anyone lower than the upper 10-20%. (3)(4)
And unlike the U.S., the Gilded Age in Dubai has nowhere to exhale. The U.S. suffered through a Gild-smashing Great Depression, but used its wealth of natural resources to manufacture its way out of the hole.
One major global downturn, one Great Depression, and Dubai is toast.
However, the U.S., as you mentioned in a previous article (1), has a glut of natural resources to rely on for wealth, and though it has major labor inequalities, the vast majority of construction is not performed by essentially slave laborers, but by paid employees with actual labor laws.
One major global downturn, one Great Depression, and the U.S. is...badly injured, but recoverable.
Sadly, rather than explaining any deep-seated virtues of Dubai, and why it is misunderstood by xenophobes and jingoists, this article read as a Libertarian's dream pamphlet, created by the Dubai "Ministry of Truth" for those who's sole goal in life is to worship the accumulation of money, regardless of its impact on other humans.
To be blunt: After reading your article, I find Dubai to be even more reprehensible against the decency of humanity, that I did *before* reading it.
My only question is if "on a bright cold day in April", the diamond-encrusted clocks "strike thirteen" ...? (2)
(1) https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/never-bet-against-america
(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four
(3) https://spheresofinfluence.ca/dubai-migrant-workers-expats/
(4) https://medium.com/@crystalcoopercollard/dubais-class-divide-2b8bc93c5274
It's not likely oil demand will dry up much even if global demand for petroleum-based energetic fuels were to significantly decrease. Oil is also the most impotent feedstock (or source of reaction-driving agents) for basically the entire organic (i.e., not metals) chemical industry, and for which there is no economical substitute that is remotely competitive with it. Indeed, technological progress has tended to increase this gap, not narrow it, giving even greater advantage to weigh in favor of the use of petroleum.
Huh, oil was a smaller part of the Dubai story than I thought. It seems like this might be a major blind spot about Dubai for almost everybody.
Enjoyed that. Nice demonstration of the resource paradox - the general assumption would be that the adjacent oil rich cities would do better but extractive industries often breed complacency. Those that have to create often end up generating far more value.
There's clearly lessons for other states too - most notably that under the radar, focused improvement combined with broadly free economics is a strong recipe for prosperity.
Interesting. Business runs on stability and reliability. Much of the Muslim world is opposed to the apparent openness of Dubai. Given the generally accepted tenets of Islam, how is the current stability sustainable? What events / forces would end the party?