So, it's still bad when somebody dies of famine...
I really can't see a father who says: "I don't care that my kids have nothing to eat second day in a row - we're following the best religion/political philosofy/first family in the world". In the hierarchy of needs, life sustaining and physical security come first. I can't see hungry people as being satisfied with their situation. It may be a religious or political failure, but failure nonethless.

I'm not arguing anything close to that, for or against. You seem to think I'm opposing food and politics. Not at all. I'm opposing food and economics. They are not the same thing. This has nothing to do with Maslow; it's an orthogonal discussion. At least *my* point was. Yours may not be.

Yes, it's still bad. The bloody point was that the article took a particularly economic point of view, assuming an economics which is disembedded from politics, family, and religion. There is no such entity in the Third World.

From the article:

In non-poor countries, people tend to have greater personal liberty, property rights are protected, contracts are enforced, there's rule of law and there's a market-oriented economic system rather than a socialistic one.

In [most] poor countries, there is no such concept as personal liberty (70 to 80% of the world's population live in collectivist cultures, where personal needs and even beliefs are subservient to group needs and beliefs), property rights are aggressively dominated by family and political groups, contracts are personal, not legal (think about it), and again, economics does not exist.

A "market-oriented economic system" is redundant. A "socialistic economic system" is an oxymoron at best, an ethnocentrism at worst.

The biggest Third World Poverty myth is that economics means anything to most of the world. Food, yes. Survival, yes. Fame, yes. Rise of the ingroup, yes. Economics, no. Rise of the individual, no. Collectivist cultures are, as the writer points out, usually combative to the outgroup and devoted to cultural norms to the exclusion of innovation ("they drive away talent"). That the U.S. was anything more than lucky in 1) being the most individualistic society in history and 2) focusing on economics to the exclusion of family, religion, and politics, is an untenable position. Walter Williams, esteemed economics prof, can't see past his own cultural blinders, where econ is God, State, and Father.