Stardate 20021010.1418

(On Screen): Steven writes to point me to this article which reports the release of three studies by the UN and the Institute for International Studies on the economic state of the world.

They conclude that the human race is, in fact, in the best condition it's ever been in.

World poverty is down. Income gaps are narrowing. And the reasons for all of this are, to the protesters’ chagrin, none other than capitalism, globalization and free trade.

There's an aphorism to the effect of "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." What the report discovered is that (surprise!) capitalism is unexcelled at creating wealth, and that globalization is spreading it around. Capitalism and globalization are "teaching to fish", and it's working.

In fact, it's working really well, but it isn't working well everywhere and where it is succeeding and where it is failing is quite revealing.

A study from the Institute for International Studies boasts even more good news. The author of that study, Surjit S. Bhalla, employed accounting statistics based on individual incomes instead of national incomes, which allowed him to more accurately measure wealth and poverty rates. Bhalla concludes that the world poverty rate has declined even more dramatically than the U.N. reports, from 44 percent in 1980 to just 13 percent in 2000. Bhalla attributes the decline to progress in China and India, the two most populous nations in the world, and two nations that have made significant moves toward more economic freedom in the last 20 years.

But not all the news is good. Huge swaths of humanity still fester in abject poverty. Not surprisingly, the regions witnessing the most poverty also happen to house those cultures and regimes most averse to markets and capitalism -- sub-Saharan Africa and the Arab world.

Twenty countries in sub-Saharan Africa are poorer now than they were in 1990. Another 23 are, astoundingly, poorer than they were in 1975. Three hundred million people in the region now live in extreme poverty. Sub-Saharan Africa also scores lower on the "freedom index" than any region on the planet.

Which leads to an interesting supposition: maybe in this case the victims really are largely responsible for their own fate. There is a strong correlation, well beyond any possibility of coincidence, between the extent to which a government opens up its society, grants freedom to its people, gives them access to information, and doesn't try to rule their lives, between all that and their productivity. Over the last fifty years, everywhere that liberal reforms have truly been implemented, poverty has drastically declined, and the more sincerely the reforms were embraced, the more poverty has declined. And the reason this has worked is because of globalization and increasing movement towards free trade, which opens up the opportunity for all those people to actually participate in the world economy.

Which, as the article points out, is a truly pernicious finding for the antiglobalization movement and many other leftists. (Prediction: they'll ignore it, continue to repeat their dogmatic claims about rising poverty and the evils of globalization, and turn up the volume.)

It's hardly news that sub-Saharan Africa is the world's worst disaster area. More interesting is that these reports come out and frankly state that the Arab nations collectively are little better off. They're not facing outright famine and plague yet, but they are not competitive and there is strong evidence that they are failures.

For my purposes, the third of the reports is the most important. I wrote an extensive article and contended that the true "root cause" of the war was not misbegotten American foreign policy, but rather the near-total failure of traditional Arab culture and most Arab nations to compete in the modern world. Their failure, combined with a traditional honor/shame culture, has caused some of them to lash out, and the US being the most successful nation is the primary target of their wrath and resentment.

It's obvious that if this were shown to be false, my entire argument would collapse, and so various opponents have seized on it and contended that I was wrong. The primary form of counter-argument has been that the Arabs have different standards than I do, and though I myself consider the Arabs to be failures, they consider themselves to be successful, and my opinion is just my own provincial point of view.

But the third report was prepared by Arab scholars, working inside the Arab world, to try to honestly appraise the current status and prospects of Arabs in the 21st century. (And it's important to note that this report analyzes Arabs, not Muslims.) The study was financed in part with Arab money. And they conclude that the Arab nations are failing, and that the only way this can change is if the Arabs implement massive reforms approaching the level of a cultural cataclysm.

In fact, they advocate exactly the reforms I do: opening Arab society, liberating the people there, giving them freedom to think and say what they want, liberating Arab women, and implementing governments which a