The competitive nation-state system, with all its capacity for good and evil, is spreading in the Third World and is transforming that world.

The world economy diffuses rather than concentrates wealth.

The opposing tendencies of concentration and spread are of little consequence in the liberal model of political economy.

The parallel existence and mutual interaction of "state" and "market" in the modern world create "political economy"; without both state and market there could be no political economy.

In the abstract world of American economists, equations run both ways; they believe that by changing the sign of a variable from plus to minus or from minus to plus or the price and quantity of x or y, the direction of historical movement can be reversed.

Liberal economists conceive of societies as black boxes connected by exchange rates; as long as exchange rates are correct, what goes on inside the black box is regarded as not very important.

The clustering of technological innovation in time and space helps explain both the uneven growth among nations and the rise and decline of hegemonic powers.