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

Among the many factors that make a return to halcyon days of the first decades of the postwar era virtually impossible is the decline of clearly defined political leadership.

In many societies the domestic social costs of adjustment to changing patterns of comparative advantage are believed to outweigh the advantages of further trade liberalization.

The core of the Marxist critique of capitalism is that although the individual capitalist is rational (as liberals assume), the capitalist system itself is irrational.

The dreams of "leaving it up to the market" or of returning to a politically neutral gold standard cannot succeed because the nature of the monetary system has a profound impact on the interests of powerful groups and states. Affected groups and states will always try to intervene in the operation of the system to make it serve their interests.

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.

A prolonged and massive increase in aggregate wealth per capita has taken place over several centuries.