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:
“Practically speaking, the opponents to a reform in Massachusetts are not a hundred thousand politicians at the South, but a hundred thousand merchants and farmers here, who are more interested in commerce and agriculture than they are in humanity, and are not prepared to do justice to the slave and to Mexico, cost what it may. I quarrel not with far-off foes, but with those who, near at home, coöperate with, and do the bidding of, those far away, and without whom the latter would be harmless.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Every new concept first comes to the mind in a judgment.”
—Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)