Large companies are very good at solving extremely complex problems in a globally optimal way.

It seems far-fetched, even preposterous, to blame the global economic order for the persistence of severe poverty in countries that are ruled by obvious thugs and crooks.

The World Bank is the monopoly provider of poverty data and, partly due to a leadership change there, the World Bank's reporting has been heavily on the rosy side since about 2000. The Bank's cultivation of an upbeat picture affords a very interesting lesson in statistics and how you can, depending on which numbers you present and how you present them, create a more positive or more negative impression of the evolution of poverty.

The extremely low respect Congress enjoys among the population indicates that the citizens understand broadly what's going on. But the lack of a realistic political reform path leads to apathy and the kind of mindless frustration that manifests itself in the Tea Party-style hatred of any and all government.

By using general consumption PPPs, the World Bank is, in effect, saying to the poor: "Sure, you cannot buy as much food as the dollar value we attribute to your income would buy in the United States. But then you can buy much more by way of services than you could buy with this PPP equivalent in the United States." But what consolation is this? The poor do not buy services - they are services, on their luckier days.

We have the ability now to arrange global economic institutions so that poverty declines to a fraction of what it is now.

The collective income of all these people - the bottom half - is less than three percent of global household income, and so there is a grotesque maldistribution of income and wealth.