In a very real economic sense, petroleum was not terribly important back in 1860. It was chemical engineers who converted petroleum into a very important economic resource. It became obvious that petroleum was an extremely valuable intermediate input into a whole range of products produced by polymer chemists, like nylon. So, which resources have economic value is the result of human ingenuity, systematically applied to certain kinds of problems. My next book is going to be on universities as economic institutions.
American universities are highly decentralized and highly competitive.
For the most part, it is much more difficult in Europe for talented, ambitious people to distinguish themselves. Our system is much more open-ended, much more competitive. That's serious competition. One of the most important ways in which universities compete is by introducing a person's research material to the teaching curriculum. That results in the creation of entirely new disciplines like chemical engineering and computer science.