That guy A.A. Gill is known for his controversial essays, designed to provoke the above reactions, but apart from some generalization he pretty much nails it!
"Dubai suffers from gigantism—a national inferiority complex that has to make everything bigger and biggest"
"The Gulf is the proof of Carnegie’s warning about wealth: “There is no class so pitiably wretched as that which possesses money and nothing else.”
"Dubai is the parable of what money makes when it has no purpose but its own multiplication and grandeur. When the culture that holds it is too frail to contain it. Dubai is a place that doesn’t just know the price of everything and the value of nothing but makes everything worthless. The answer to everything in Dubai is money. "