Buy this book!
Dateline: Highlands Forum XXVI, Antrium 1844, near Taneytown MD, 2 May 2005
Saw brilliant presentation from C.K. Prahalad, author of The Power at the Bottom of the Pyramid, all about how you shrink the Gap and kill poverty through profits.
This presentation/book is full of stunning analysis of how globalization really spreads on a very ground-floor level.
His basic point: most big U.S. companies were built by selling to the poor, not the rich. Singer, for example, built it's whole company on lower classes buying their sewing machines (rich people had seamstresses and tailors), and they did this by pioneering buying on credit (e.g., $5 per month for 20 months).
People being poor isn't the problem, creating the economic connectivity to allow them to buy and sell is.
I bought the book on Amazon five minutes into his brief. Stunning, really. Can't wait to read it.
Critt: add the link.