I'm not going to try to summarize his 832 pages of argument here, although I profoundly hope he's right and that those trends continue.

In the book, however, I came across an interesting statement that hit a little closer to home: " ... neither wealth nor peace comes from having valuable stuff in the ground."

Alas, that thesis is easier to believe and document than his idea that violence is declining. Pinker notes that many poor and war-torn countries are overflowing with gold, diamonds, oil, metals, and other minerals, while other societies short on extractive industries are peaceful and prosperous.

There's hard data to back up that claim. In 1995, economists Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Warner looked at the economic performance of 95 countries over a 20-year period. They observed that "One of the surprising features of economic life is that resource-poor economies often vastly outperform resource-rich economics in economic growth."

This tendency is sometimes referred to as the resource curse. As Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote in a recent editorial, "On average, resource-rich countries have done even more poorly than countries without resources. They have grown more slowly, and with greater inequality -- just the opposite of what one would expect."

Economies based on extraction tend have booms and busts and a lack of economic diversity. The fates of local communities are often controlled by distantly headquartered corporations. By nature, the natural resources that drive such economies are nonrenewable, and so are any benefits they provide. Even if they are taxed, when the resources are gone, so is the revenue.

West Virginians know a thing or two about the resource curse. The late great Sen. Robert C. Byrd summed it up well when he described West Virginia as "a state whose rich resources have been largely owned and exploited by outside interests. Absentee owners, while living outside the state, wrested from the West Virginia earth the wealth that made them rich -- rich from the toil and sweat and blood and tears of the people in the hill country who worked out their lives, all too often, for a pittance."

There are several factors behind the resource curse, but here's one of the major ones identified by Stiglitz: " ... resource-rich countries often do not pursue sustainable growth strategies. They fail to recognize that if they do not reinvest their resource wealth into productive investments above ground, they are actually becoming poorer."

That is especially true when the extractive industries decline. In West Virginia, for example, many communities that have relied most heavily on extraction have experienced lower than average growth in personal income, population and employment and have higher poverty rates, lower median incomes and worse health outcomes.

Stiglitz argues that turning a resource curse into a resource blessing, is possible but it won't happen on its own and it won't happen easily. To make it happen, resource-rich places need to do more to ensure that their citizens get the full value of the resources and that the money gained from these resources is used to promote development.

In West Virginia, an idea seems to be gaining traction that just might help our state's rich natural resources into the blessing they should be. The idea is pretty simple: Take a portion of the severance taxes from resource extraction and create a permanent mineral trust fund, sometimes called a Future Fund.

The money set aside for this purpose should be prudently invested and the principal should be inviolate. Once such a fund has accumulated, the interest from it could be a permanent source of funding for West Virginia, one that could be used to promote economic development via investments in infrastructure, workforce development, early childhood education or other means.

This isn't a new and untried idea. It's something that a number of other resource-rich states have done, including Alaska, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, Utah and Wyoming. Our legislature will be studying this issue during interim sessions. With luck-and a lot of public support, study may lead to actual legislation.

The Marcellus Shale natural gas boom now taking place in northern West Virginia provides us with a golden opportunity to set aside a portion of the growing share of gas severance taxes. If we act soon, we can convert nonrenewable resource revenue into an enduring stream of wealth for generations to come -- and ensure that our mistakes in the 20th century don't become our fate in the 21st.

West Virginia could use a blessing.

Wilson, director of the American Friends Service Committee's West Virginia Economic Justice Project, is a Gazette contributing columnist.