One thing that each of us should have learned from the events of the past few weeks as we have watched television coverage not only of the war in Iraq but also of life in Iraq is that the wealth of the world is distributed with dramatic unfairness. The Iraqi villagers that we have seen on television are in general far poorer than any people that an American will ever meet. Even the homeless people that some of us are familiar with are probably better off - because they can seek free medical care in county facilities, and at least some of them will be helped by shelters and charities and local governments. But the people of Iraq have far fewer safety nets than do Americans - and there are certainly nations that are far poorer than Iraq.
There is nothing unique about the situation in Iraq in terms of the distribution of income and wealth and the resulting high levels of poverty in most parts of the population. The wealthy in the world - and this is certainly true in the Pacific and Asian regions - have vastly more than their fair share of wealth. Wealthy nations exploit poorer nations, and within each country the wealthy of that nation exploiting the poor among them. This stratification of power and wealth has been carefully studied by sociologists and other scholars, who have created a number of models to explain the effects of such stratification both within a given society and on the "world system" of all societies, as Danaher and Burbach (2000) argue.
The world is "stratified", which is simply another way of saying that the world is divided into layers, with the countries that have the most wealth also have the most cultural and political power - in part because of that greater wealth, but also in part due to more intangible factors. This has most likely always been true. It may even predate humans altogether: Perhaps the reason that humans survived while Cro Magnon did not is that Homo sapiens were in possession of greater we...