The Dubai model: what model?

"But some of its “get rich quick” ideas were about as sound as something out of Gulliver’s Travels — the attempts of the state of Lagado to extract sunbeams from cucumbers, for instance. Into this category one might put the attempt to conjure a financial centre out of the desert, or to build luxury housing on sandbanks in the Arabian Gulf. Or, indeed, the attempt to create a sovereign wealth fund, Istithmar, without having any surpluses to inject into it in the first place. Outsiders have long marvelled at this “build it and they will come” approach. Now its shortcomings are becoming clear. Much of Dubai is half-built and they probably won’t come."