While Washington and Tel Aviv argue over battle damage assessments, consider a different metric entirely: somewhere in Tehran tonight, an Iranian engineer with a graduate degree is driving a rideshare to make ends meet. He is not alone. Together, millions of Iranians like him tell the story of one of the most consequential economic failures of the past half century — a failure entirely of the regime’s own making.
The numbers don’t get nearly enough attention. Iran’s economy, measured in purchasing power parity, totals about $1.8 trillion. For 85.8 million people. That works out to roughly $21,000 per person. But in real terms, the average Iranian is poorer today than they were at the time of the 1979 revolution. Had Iran simply continued its pre-revolution growth trajectory, it would be vastly richer today.
The human cost shows up in the labor data. Only about four in 10 working-age Iranians are employed. For women, the figure is barely one in eight. The educated leave when they can. That’s why that engineer is driving a rideshare instead of building a company.
Now consider what that same population could produce with genuinely free markets and sound institutions. America’s per capita output of roughly $85,000 is exceptional even among wealthy nations. That’s not the relevant comparison. Iran should, at least, match its neighbors.
In 2000, Iran’s economy was larger than the UAE’s. Today the UAE has surpassed Iran by a wide margin. The difference is not oil. It is institutions and economic freedom. South Korea, with no oil at all, produces nearly three times Iran’s per capita output. That gap reflects nearly five decades of economic policy designed less to create prosperity than to ensure the regime’s survival.
The Heritage Foundation’s 2026 Index of Economic Freedom, released earlier this month, puts Iran in its “repressed” category, the bottom of the barrel, and it has been getting worse since 2019. The IMF and World Bank tell the same story.
The IMF projects Iran’s GDP growth at 0.6% in 2025, with inflation running at 43%. Sanctions have compounded the damage, but the institutional rot predates them and would outlast their removal.
“State interference under the clerical dictatorship undermines every pillar of economic freedom measured in the Index,” the Heritage report concludes. Corruption hollows out the legal framework. The government dictates production while surviving largely on oil revenue. The private sector suffocates. The labor market stagnates. The currency is a fiction.
The details are even worse than the summary. Iran fails on rule of law, regulatory freedom, and open markets across the board. There is one category where Iran actually outscores the United States: taxes and spending. Before you’re impressed, the regime prefers to extract wealth directly from oil rather than tax its citizens. It is the fiscal equivalent of a landlord who doesn’t charge rent because he’s already stolen the furniture.
So what would winning actually look like for ordinary Iranians? Not a particular flag or a particular government. It looks like a woman who starts a business and gets to keep it. A retiree whose life savings haven’t been quietly confiscated by inflation engineered to finance a government that answers to no one. A judge who can’t be called by a cleric and told how to rule. A currency worth holding: the Iranian rial has lost more than 99% of its value against the dollar since the revolution.
These aren’t radical demands. They are the baseline conditions that the developed world takes for granted.
The concern is that Iran has a long history of revolutionary promise curdling into something worse. The 1979 revolution was genuinely popular: secular liberals, leftists, students, the merchant class, and the pious took to the streets together, united against the Shah but divided in their visions for what came next. Most of them thought they were getting a pluralist democracy. What they got was Khomeini, who wasted little time disposing of his former allies. The people who made the revolution were purged, imprisoned, or shot by the people who won it.
That history is worth remembering.
The Revolutionary Guard didn’t invent the tools of repression and control. It inherited them, refined them, and institutionalized them. Whoever holds power when the dust settles will find those tools waiting. Institutions built for control don’t dismantle themselves.
The question worth asking isn’t whether the regime falls. It’s whether the machinery of control and repression falls with it.
When the dust settles, the foreign ministers will declare victory. Ignore them. The only scorecard that matters is whether an Iranian entrepreneur can build something, own it, and trust a court to protect it. Whether that engineer behind the wheel can find work worthy of his education.
That bar is low. It is embarrassingly low. And Iran has been failing to clear it for nearly five decades.
James Carter served as Deputy Under Secretary for International Affairs at the U.S. Department of Labor (2006-07) and as the Director of the America First Policy Institute’s Center for American Prosperity (2021-23).
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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