> I'm just puzzled that this wishful thinking that economic prosperity is necessarily connected to political freedoms still persists.
That's because it's true in ~188 out of 190 on-going instances where oil isn't involved. It's fair to say it's true 99% of the time.
US, Canada, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Ireland, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, Netherlands, Austria, Belgium, Israel (this list keeps going)
Versus what?
China... and? Maybe Singapore, a tiny island nation.
Denmark has nearly three times the GDP per capita of Saudi Arabia. Czech has four times the GDP per capita of Iran. That isn't going to change, if anything the disparity will increase between the liberal order and the authoritarian order. China is more of a historical one-off than anything.
The US has at least 10x the GDP per capita of Cuba, and six times that of Russia. South Korea has ~15 times the GDP per capita of North Korea. Australia has 40 times the GDP per capita of Myanmar.
The economic prosperity rankings are overwhelmingly dominated by nations that are more politically free than not. The least politically free nations tend to be hyper impoverished (again, with only a few exceptions for petro states). As such it's not wishful thinking, it's reality.