[marron]

Sustainable development is code for giving low-tech economies low-tech solutions to problems.

It is ok so far as it goes, but coming from the UN, it still is based on the assumption that wealth can be administered into existence by some all-wise central authority who will decide what kind of development we will allow someone to have.

What I have observed is that third world people are often quite capable of handling leading edge technologies, and use them to leap frog their way into the modern world.

What keeps poor countries poor is not access to unapproved technology but rather the lack of liberty, and the absence of clear legal protection for private initiatives.

Stated more clearly, prosperity requires that individuals have liberty to act in their own interest, and honest courts to protect them as they do so.

It is not an accident that poor countries almost without exception have state controlled economies, normally run by an elite for the benefit of that elite.

[toddst]

What keeps poor countries poor is not access to unapproved technology but rather the lack of liberty, and the absence of clear legal protection for private initiatives.

Stated more clearly, prosperity requires that individuals have liberty to act in their own interest, and honest courts to protect them as they do so.

It is not an accident that poor countries almost without exception have state controlled economies, normally run by an elite for the benefit of that elite.

You are exactly correct IMHO. These points are being glossed over by the very socalist governments (and their liberal media supporters) that do hold their own people down while attacking our free-market system as "not sustainable."

Poverty would disappear rapidly if socialist and/or repressive governments would get out of the way of their own people.