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Unfortunately while students protest against the current school system, the majority of us don't even realize what is going on in the third world countries. More than a billion human beings survive in conditions of absolute poverty. Every year, millions of people die from malnutrition and many of them are children. This situation will go on until the "evolved" countries continue to consume more than 80 percent of the available resources. Furthermore, technologically advanced nations assume the right to impose their own economic model on other people. It is a cruel deceit to let developing countries place their trust in western-like growth. Unfortunately many of them model their economy on European, Northern American or other schemes of civilized countries. Consequently by the year 2000 some of the third world nations will have built a massive industrial infrastructure and they will find they cannot assure the necessary quantity of energy, the spare parts and the specialists able to make the new economic machine run. Generally when the western kind of progress arrives in a third world nation, there is an instantaneous increase in poverty and an immediate rise in the cost of living. The main reason for this is that western-like industrialization encourages settling more in cities than in rural areas, and besides, strongly automated and centralized production certainly doesn't increase human labor. At the same time, excessive mechanization even in agriculture marginalizes the work of farmers who, besides depriving themselves of contact with nature, are forced to move into cities to look for jobs. As a consequence, on the one hand urbanization grows, even if owning a house in town has become unaffordable for many people and living costs are high; on the other hand the reduction of cultivated land diminishes agricultural production. It is clear that the third world nations need to find forms of development that differ from those in use in the industrialized west. They should abhor high energy consuming centralized technology in favor of an intermediary technology that makes possible an intensive use of hand labor to move toward a "coherent development". In this way massive emigration of rural communities into squalid and overpopulated cities would be avoided. (23:1) According to Baha'u'llah writings, "The fundamental basis of the community is agriculture" [8] and only when this occupies its proper place in society, world affairs can improve. In fact: "the peasant class and the agricultural class exceed other classes in the importance of their service" [9], because it is mainly through agriculture that we get basic consumer goods, but nations are far from modifying their economic politics and continue to promote agreements to draw on resources as fast as possible in order to achieve more and more progress. In over 50 glorious years of the neocapitalistic "bell epoque", roughly from the 50's until now, big economic variables (growth, production, productivity, salaries) increased more or less constantly and proportionally. More growth in production meant more productivity, but also more work, higher salaries and more consumption. And of course it meant more available income to redistribute through the tax system for market activities and for social uses. Consequently more space emerged for the welfare state.
(23:2)
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