Explaining Third World poverty and its roots

Almost a year ago, I wrote a short post called “Killing poor people by keeping them poor,” about poverty’s role in massively lethal natural disasters. I expressed my contempt for the “activists” who campaign to keep Third World peasants in a Rousseau-like state of nature. For some reason, most people think these activists are selfless, but they are pursuing a prideful, secular vision of Paradise and causing human misery. As I said then,

…The anti-globalizers on the Left want to ensure that these disasters happen from now until the end of time. Who cares about mothers wailing for their children, or thousands of homes wiped out in a few minutes of screaming, suffocating chaos? All these things must be offered up to the god of environmental primitivism.
What do I mean by “environmental primitivism”? The anti-globalizers think that poor non-Western people are cute, so they don’t want them to change their charmingly backward ways, which are (they imagine) the way people lived before the nasty Industrial Revolution with its so-called “abundant food,” “long lifespans,” and “housing codes.” They love that poor people don’t consume much energy or natural resources, and they use “organic” methods of agriculture — which aren’t very helpful for crop yields, but they don’t use evil pesticides or fertilizers. And harvesting by hand — so darn cute!

The “Diplomad,” an American diplomat, confirmed this thesis:

Having served and visited extensively in Central and South American countries with large “indigenous” populations, I can freely state that the region’s “indigenous” cultures largely ceased to exist hundreds of years ago; “indigenous” culture today means rural poverty. As the saying goes, “I was born at night, but not last night,” so even I understand, therefore, that calling to protect “indigenous culture” really means seeking to preserve rural poverty; to keep people poor, sick, illiterate, and isolated from the great and small wonders of our age. It means helping condemn them to half lives consumed with superstition, disease, and of watching their puny children struggle to live past the age of five. It’s a call to keep certain people as either an ethnic curio on the shelf for the enjoyment of European and North American anthropologists or, equally vile, as exploitable pawns for the use of political activists.

This jibes with my trip to rural Nicaragua a few years ago, where it occured to me that they could use a little globalization in Juigalpa province. (It wasn’t all misery, though; I’d go back in a heartbeat.)
Now with the tsunami-created disasters, we see this effect play out once again. I am certainly not blaming the victims for dying — they had nothing to do with it. And neither did anyone else, really. So instead of trying to explain that submarine tectonic movements are a result of global warming, why not try to figure out how these poor people can gain enough wealth to build more durable homes?