Political correctness requires that we separate the world into two categories when talking about development - the developed and the developing nations, with one billion people living in the first set, and the other five making up the rest. These categories are insufficient, says Paul Collier, because there are some countries that are not developing, but actually moving backwards. Lumping them in with developing countries is to miss the much more serious problems facing them. The world’s billions should be divided 1-4-1, with a billion who have reached prosperity, four billion dispersed across a range of countries, some richer, some poorer, but all moving in the right direction. Then there’s the bottom billion, a “ghetto of misery and discontent”, who are getting poorer every year. “Picture this,” he writes, “as a billion people stuck in a train that is slowly rolling backwards downhill.”
Source: Make Wealth History
