“I PRAY to God that I will never know about economics,” President Ahmadinejad once said when questioned about apparent contradictions in his economic policy. The Lord appears to have answered his prayer. On his watch, the world oil price has soared from $62 a barrel when he was elected in June 2005 to $72 a barrel in recent weeks. Iran, which has a young, well-educated workforce, along with the world's second-largest reserves of both oil and gas, should be on a roll. Instead the economy is struggling. Is this a weakness the world can use to dissuade Iran from its nuclear ambitions?

Since almost all official economic statistics are suspect, measuring the performance of the economy is hard. But Afshin Molavi, an Iran-watcher at the New America Foundation in Washington, DC, calls slow economic decline “the untold story of the Iranian revolution”. The economy is showing respectable growth of about 5%. But it is recording high and rising unemployment and inflation. The government puts unemployment at around 10% but private economists think it is twice as high—and that many of those with jobs have to take second ones to make ends meet. Mr Ahmadinejad's government claims to have reduced the rate of inflation. In fact it has almost certainly gone up: guesstimates by foreign embassies in Tehran put it as high as 25%. Meanwhile, foreign investment is puny—and falling...

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