Bill Gates told the audience at Davos that the world needed a kinder
capitalism. He mistakenly thinks that there is a way that the 'poor" of
the world can become part of the world of global commerce if the right
people, the right minds and the right amount of money can be applied to
the issue. I call it an issue, he calls it a problem.
Bill has no idea that he is the victim of his social world...rich kids in Seattle who made gazillions of dollars in business in America and are invested in the American can-do, money can fix anything ethos. Sorry Bill, that is sentimental nonsense.
First
,your reasoning by analogy is wrong. You reason that the third world
was able to absorb and incorporate medicine and improve their health.
What they incorporated was sanitation, without the germ theory.
Sanitation is the reason for the drastic changes in survival and life
span that created the global population explosion. But since the eco-nuts
have claimed the wrong reason for the end of the population (they blame
urbanization) Bill gets his basic facts wrong. The expansion and final
limits of sanitation are what created and ended the population
explosion.
Sanitation is easy to accept and absorb because it changes very little in the way of social structure. That is not true for commerce or technology.
Commerce thrives on five elements: meritocracy, diversity, honesty, open markets and love of technology. Commerce does less well as each of those elements is missing.
Bill, let me let you in on a secret: the third world is mostly tribal. Most tribal values place these five pro-commerce values very low on their list of values. Family is usually at the top of their list, so is loyalty to family and locale, so is saving face and so is social stability. Commerce has hardly a chance.
Poverty, as you see and define it Bill, will be with us for centuries.