The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It by Paul Collier is an interesting book that I recently finished for my Politics of Developing Nations class. Collier explains that of the 6 billion people in the world, there is 1 billion, "The Bottom Billion", that lives in a state of utter chaos and poverty. His book outlines four traps, or reasons, why those countries are failing, and he then gives instruments for the developed world to use in order to aid those countries. Although his book is extremely well organized and presents some compelling ideas, I'm not so sure many of them are as relevant with the current state of not only the U.S.'s economy, but the global economy. The book was published in 2007, and none of his ideas seem to contemplate over the issue that the economy was slowing down already at that point. Collier also doesn't present the idea of how the poorest nations will feel about Western ideals being forced upon them. Therefore,
The Bottom Billion is a great first half of the entire story that is out there.
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