when the lights go off you will understand Today I'm holed up in my room doing background research for another of my term papers. This one is for my "Global Political Economy" class and the assigned topic is "Can developing countries catch up to developed countries? Explain."

This is one class where the more I read, the more fascinating I find the subject area. I've never been terribly interested in economic matters, but approaching it from a more macro level, and recognizing how things in one area of the world affect things in another, I like that. To get some background on this topic I'm reading ahead in my textbook to the chapter called "The Two Faces of Development" which addresses the roots of inequality in the area of the global economy, and then the recognition of the problem by the more developed nations, followed by the efforts made to rectify things. Obviously we're nowhere near balancing out the unfairness in the world, but it's refreshing to read that efforts have been made and we're continuing to learn and trying to fix things.

I still don't know what side I'm going to take in this issue - I always have this idealistic side that believes that, duh, obviously the less developed nations have to catch up, it's only fair, but on the other hand, the mechanisms that keep the wealth concentrated in the hands of the richer nations are pretty sophisticated and hard to break through for these less developed economies. And how many rich nations are really willing to make it easy for them anyway..? Hmm. Back to my reading...  | ¶ 4:48 p.m.