That’s really good Memmel, a big help to me. Yes at heart Gaussian because of a) geology, b) nevertheless a sort of constancy in discovery, production, etc. etc. and c) Gaussian-like is often what you get or see when you sum huge amounts of data and don’t really know where you are at. So it is Gaussian in theory ..only.

But if one thinks about the upslope, and sees it in terms of processes that create growth (here, roughly, rate/efficiency of extraction), rather than the static compilation of measurement y of element x, it becomes an upsweep and one indeed then expects a shark fin curve. Its really neat, because well known shark fins include the pop/territory of empires. (see link, it is just one paper off the top of google..) Think of the territory of the British Empire: steep and straight up and then down the same way. Businesses are often shark fins as well. And the oil industry has many similarities to both those.

Extrapolating wildly, or being very fanciful, one might say that the US, through its imperial actions - soft control, culture, ideology, influence, manipulation, control thru superiority /threat (plus finance), has acted to avoid the pitfalls of Britain and say Rome, the shark fin curve, and has failed thru its reliance on resources and that *in fine* the result is the same.

(I’m not forgetting the Vietnam war, all this is just as viewed from one angle..)

The Afgh and Iraq invasions would then represent a return to an older model, incongruent and clumsy for the US - they can’t hold the territory and never really wished to (democracy, new leaders, the free market, domino effect and all that jazz..) because the supreme importance of ‘oil’ has made it into a ‘commodity’ divorced from just about everything else.

http://www.irows.ucr.edu/papers/irows22/irows22.htm