Actually this is not a fact, it's a fear.Ringmaster wrote: Fact is (as someone already mentioned somewhere) is that for 3rd world countries to increase their standard of living, 1st world countries have to decrease theirs.
Wealth in human societies isn't a closed system; it hasn't had a line drawn over it ever in human history. (i mean duhh, that's pretty obvious, there's more well-off people right now than ever before, and by well-off I mean clean water, good food and electricity, schooling and transport, not bloody Toyota Landcruisers and plasma TV sets.) Indeed, wealth is incredibly elastic, and almost always, in both real time and in economic modellings, competitive pressures between economies result in an increase in wealth for both. There's a whole branch of economics that deals with this interesting subject.
What causes the money clusters at the top ends of developed economies is the have's fear of the have-nots. It causes the haves to build in all sorts of systems to protect their sand piles from newcomers. Ironically this slows the overall growth of wealth. It's one of the reasons why enlightened filthy rich people (a lot more of these in America than here btw) have made a practice of giving away a lot of their fortunes later in life.
The same goes for human global movements which is one reason why Australia's been thriving for a long time now, we've had a fantastic and varied post-immigrant base. It's the biggest argument against all the "haves" who seem so terrified of the "have-nots" on Boat People World -- you hide from the rest of the world at your peril. Economic monocultures don't work well, and neither do social monocultures.
) pessimists
