The Champagne Glass distribution of wealth
 

Here's something that should intuitively be obvious, but we don't really think much about it. This is the distribution of wealth among nations, and we can see the wealthier nations are disproportionally way better than the rest of the world. http://thesocietypages.org/graphicso...stribution.png

This is a fact, and if we consider that, then there really are only three options regarding development:

a) either the wealth of the first world shrinks and in some future the world has a straighter width between nations.
b) or the third world's wealth explodes while the first world remains stagnant comparatively to the third.
c) or things just remain the same.

Now, virtually all, even the most right wing ideologues will argue that their ideology is the best of all possible options to bring people up from terrible living conditions. Thus there are very few who will argue the third option is one they actively champion.

With this knowledge, what exactly is your opinion or even more, what do you think other people - politicians, pundits, government figures, philosophers, whatever - are really trying to accomplish in the long run regarding the economic development in the world with this unequal distribution in mind?
It seems one way or another the first world has to lose for the world to win.

If the money flows out of one nation and into another, the glass may not change shape, merely the nations who compose the respective layers change.

And even if the shape may be approximately contoured into equal width for each layer, I suspect that the layers must all narrow (the volume remains the same). I see this has already been happening for some time.

For the past couple of decades money has flowed from the U.S. into China and elsewhere, and so have the job opportunities, including high tech jobs.

More than half of the papers published in the physics, optics, laser and biomedical fields that I monitor have been published by Chinese scientists.

As the glass becomes more of a champagne flute than a glass the rest of the world will benefit, but it won't be given away, nations must compete by providing quality education for their populations so as to offer an attractive, highly skilled labor force. The U.S. education system is on the decline in this area and so will feel negative impact for decades to come as a result.

I am not stating this with a pro-American bias, but merely trying to suggest that the because the champagne glass has its shape doesn't mean it is always Western nations at the top, and that the world is becoming more of a level playing field, with only backwards cultural obstacles slowing it down.

Backwards cultural obsticals? What are backwards cultural obsticals?

You know, I'm perfectly fine with the idea with the glass being turned into a barrel. Not sure if I care too much as to how that happens.

For example, trying to educate women in Afghanistan. Very difficult because of the (male) culture opposing educating women.
As a result, Afghanistan will remain at the bottom of the glass.
As Alan quotes Mao:
"Women hold up half of the sky"
or something like that.

That's why Saudi Arabia is doing so shitty, right?

I'm not an expert in economics, but this feels really problematic.

I actually agree with HumanePain, but if we're going to talk about backwards cultural obstacles, we can't base them on our cultural morals, but rather talk about cultural economic norms that just don't work in today's world. For instance, capitalism developing in a society where usury is still a sin. You can still treat women like shit and be ruthless in the market, and that's 'civilized' if we're going to talk about what degrees of civilization work in today's economy.
I don't think Americanization is a real issue, or if it is, it's a lesser issue than people make it. The United States isn't exporting its culture to the rest of the world, but rather it was one of the first nations to experience what is the standardized culture of late capitalism.

But a lot of the inequalities can't be solved by education or even necessarily unscrupulous business practice. A lot of the wealthy countries depend on the poor countries to be poor, for example rich countries with huge populations and little farm land shouldn't have food security, but since they're buying up massive amounts of farm land for export in Africa, when famine hits African farmers will still have to sell the food they could grow to make the rent. Its the Irish Potato Famine all over again. Western countries cannot allow poorer countries to own their own land or turn away from agriculture and "develop", or if they do turn to manufacturing, it needs to be sweatshops to keep our cost of living low. Egalitarian capitalism is impossible.

Yeah. It's not like a people's economic "development" is the sole domain of their own self-determination. When their is such inequality on the larger scale, having valuable resources and the ability or inability to resist exploitation looks like it has a much larger impact then any cultural differences.

Speaking of cultural differences in Afghanistan, that's not male opposition to educating women. That was recently a Taliban idea. That being said most of the people are illiterate, including men.

How much of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post%E2...omic_expansion can be explained by off-shored exploitation?

It looks like a fairly solid refutation that economic growth in one part of the world necessarily requires exploitation in another.