A letter from Hamed to Saber · Originally published on 1 November 2025
My good friend Saber wrote me a humorous letter, so I wrote back in the same spirit.
Greetings to the one and only economist of Iran’s oil industry,
If you are asking how I am, there is plenty to be gloomy about, and being away from our friends makes it worse. Actually, forget that polished opening. Since coming here, both my English and my Persian have become considerably worse. I mostly speak the local dialect. They speak English in a local dialect too, of course. In the end, we guess some of what is being said and get through the rest with gestures.
To be honest, there are no Australians here. Seeing an Australian in Sydney is rather like seeing a sparrow in Tehran: I hear they used to exist, but gradually migrated to other cities.
Nobody here knows anything about oil and gas. All they know is that petrol and diesel are expensive. Nobody knows what an IPC—an Iranian Petroleum Contract—is, or what a concession contract means. So they have simply handed over their oil and gas and let it go. Perhaps if they could draw up better contracts, they could make a few extra dollars per barrel and stop taxing people so much.
Apparently some priest told them, in a rhyme that works better in our local dialect, “With Christ’s love in your heart, what do you need oil and gas revenue for?” And they agreed that oil was a dirty, pointless business.
Unfortunately, the government here has very poor financial literacy. Instead of taking twenty or thirty per cent in tax, it could engineer thirty per cent inflation and take only ten per cent in tax. Everyone would be much happier that way.
You would have enjoyed it: I went to an energy conference, and all the big energy companies and government people were there. The more we talked about oil and gas, the more they talked about clean energy and the energy transition. By the end, everyone was chanting the equivalent of “Down with carbon! We will bring it down to zero!”
People from Queensland, apparently, were less impressed by all this soft-hearted nonsense. “We will get to net zero,” they said, “but by 2050.” It sounded rather like one of our own twenty-year development visions. A few engineers privately told me that all this environmental rubbish had brought the country to its knees.
If you are asking about prices, everything is expensive. But people can stay alive by working a few hours a week, and if they work more, they can buy a house and a car. Nobody seems in any hurry, though. They generally have no ambition to become somebody.
Nobody studies here. There is no reason to. They go somewhere like our technical and vocational colleges, and after a while they start doing straightforward jobs. Electricians and plumbers are treated with enormous respect. They earn good money and get on with their lives.
Everything here has to be scientific. For every claim you need a fact or a paper. There is none of the trust we enjoy in Iranian academic life. In Iran you can present a thousand personal anecdotes as facts, and nobody will challenge you.
All year you are writing something or reading something. Yet most of the problems in our industry could be understood in the first semester. Here they want to reach Six Sigma and drive errors down to some absurd fraction of a percentage. Back home, we wrap things up at Sigma Two or Three and receive a national award for outstanding production.
As for the university, it really is a university. We have parrots, forest, a swimming pool, a rugby pitch, and a thousand other things. They even call people with doctorates by their first names. Whether you are a doctor or not is worth precisely nothing to anyone.
Last month I was at a conference where you could look down onto a school. It was about the size of Allameh Tabataba’i University. Everything here is big: the schools, the houses, even the people.
I miss wearing a proper shirt and a suit. Sometimes people here do not even bother with sandals. They go out in a shirt and shorts. Life is healthy, and everyone runs. I do not mean “running around” as a metaphor for the daily struggle. They literally run. At six in the morning, you can barely move in the parks.
They say a person gradually becomes accustomed to disgrace. Between us, I went out running a few nights when nobody was around.
Honestly, the hardest question in the world is “What is the weather like there?” On Saturday it is sunny and above forty degrees. On Sunday it clouds over. On Monday it rains. By Tuesday it is so cold that you are digging out your winter clothes. By Wednesday it is above forty again. And so it goes.
Everything here is back to front. You freeze during the Iranian summer, and at Christmas Father Christmas greets you in a singlet. I have discovered that Yalda Night becomes Yalda Day here.
To tell the truth, I have learnt something bitter. Much of what we have in Iran resembles a cargo cult. We imagine that possessing the outward shape of something will automatically give us its function. All those management consultants and elaborate oil contracts are like building an aeroplane out of straw: it looks like an aeroplane, and that is all. I think we have even lost the habit of scientific thinking.
I do not like it here, because every day I discover how little I know and how far behind I am. I miss the kind of grand speech where you can say absolutely anything without producing a single scientific fact.
I do not like Six Sigma. I do not want to hear about Toyota’s management system. Here they keep saying there is no silver bullet and everything is complicated.
Bring me back to Iran, where everything has a simple solution, where a single paper and a change of contract can save the oil industry.
Saber, they even use statistical models to make decisions here. They say you need independent data for everything.
Bring me back to Iran, where a manager simply decides, where a decision does not have to be data-driven. Where there is no model for decision-making, and whatever the manager decides must be good. Where inflation and a rising dollar turn a loss-making project into a profitable one. Where a manager remains a manager forever: never dismissed, merely moved from one organisation to another.
Saber, these foreigners frighten me. They are taller, they know far too much, and even if you have a doctorate, they still call you by your first name. Your word alone counts as proof of nothing.
Yours,
Hamed
Cafés are expensive here. Have a few extra drags for me.
Translator’s notes: This is a satirical letter; its sweeping claims about Australia, Iran, education and economics are part of the joke. Yalda marks the winter solstice in Iran, which falls during the Australian summer. The original’s numerical aside about Six Sigma has been rendered without reproducing its inaccurate precision.
Postscript: “Cargo cult” refers here to the belief that imitating the outward form of a system will reproduce its results. The original adds an account of Melanesian movements in which some communities built imitation airstrips and other structures in hopes of the return of imported goods. That brief account is a simplified historical analogy.
