Opponents of The Concept
Opponents of the concept often invoke market efficiency to argue that free trade and capitalism will make everybody wealthy eventually. Proponents counter that the ongoing process of multinational corporations channeling wealth from poorer countries to richer ones dictates that the gap will not diminish.
Available data indicates convergence of income for many developing countries.
In his book The Ultimate Resource Julian Simon offers view that scarcity of physical resources can be overcome by human mind. For example the argument of scarcity of oil could be overcome by some of energy development strategies, such as use of synthetic fuels.
Concerning exploitation of the former colonies Gregory Clark notes "Yet generations of research by economic historians - David Landes, Deirdre McCloskey, and Joel Mokyr, among others - show that the wealth of the West was homegrown, the result of a stream of Western technological advances since the Industrial Revolution").
Read more about this topic: Golden Billion
Famous quotes containing the words opponents and/or concept:
“It is in this impossibility of attaining to a synthesis of the inner life and the outward that the inferiority of the biographer to the novelist lies. The biographer quite clearly sees Peel, say, seated on his bench while his opponents overwhelm him with perhaps undeserved censure. He sees him motionless, miserable, his head bent on his breast. He asks himself: “What is he thinking?” and he knows nothing.”
—Andre Maurois (1885–1967)
“The concept is interesting: to see, as though reflected
In streaming windowpanes, the look of others through
Their own eyes.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)