Industrialization is spreading everywhere, but at varying rates of rapidity and with disparate consequences. As in the past, societies are developing in widely different directions.

To understand today's globalization requires that one renounce the idea that the poor are stunted or exploited by globalization. The poor of the world are not so much exploited as neglected and forgotten. At the same time the press and television are drenching them with images of the riches they lack. For the poor, globalization is not an accomplished fact but a condition that remains to be achieved. The irony of the current phase of globalization is that it universalizes the demand for a better life without providing the means to satisfy it.