To the original post on free markets, poverty, I liked the book The Mystery of Capital - maybe because it deals with property rights and what "capital" really is. There is an excellent and irreverent economic history in The Creature From Jekyll Island. A great book on the 20s is Only Yesterday by Frederick Lewis Allen. Funny how a lot of what we fight over here in ET - socialism, corporate misconduct, regulation, free markets, role of public policy has been argued for generations. Europeans and probably everyone else fights about it too:
http://www.cer.org.uk/articles/43_barysch.html
(I read, but do not comprehend, her stuff above because the author is gorgeous.)
Globalism is the subject of this huge site which looks small at first glance:
http://www.theglobalist.com/
The more I read or listen to about all these problems, the more elusive or complicated the answers seem. Some of what appealed to me about the movie, set in Africa, I mentioned above was the repeated use of phrases like "nothing will change it" or "they will die anyway" to which the heroes responded, in so many words, "I can change this one case." How the hell else can one person begin if you don't start somewhere and let some kind of ethical or moral compass steer you? I'd like to see America admired a little more for real solutions and doing the right thing instead of being the whipping boy for the cause of all the troubles.
That Jekyll Island book was real good on poor nations, debt, and the big lending banks. It's obviously what Bono and Paul O'Neill were looking at on the debt relief issue.
Geo.