The idealism seems sincere, but the political probability is ten digits remote.

The route from a tribal-familial social organization, to an affiliation of functioning nation-states based on a common status of poverty, is not a road that will ever be built.

The West’s recent in-your-face exposure to the tribal reality in the Middle East should clarify some of the main obstacles.

Tribally-organized areas, even the ones with great oil wealth, haven’t gotten beyond the entropy of their political tradition, where kinship= social structure, to create stable, enduring, functional national superstructures.

Next problem: The “bottom billion” are even more isolated from their geographically distant poor counterparts than they are from whatever upward mobility may exist in their current country.

Land is primary. Affiliations where economic status trumps adjacency have no precedent, and more importantly, no practicality. There’s just no practical sense to the idea that stable affiliations–at a meta-level, no less–can be forged and maintained based on economic status.

And finally: Pooristan is held out as an economic Utopia. But, the fact that things begin to get better for some will instantly work to de-stabilize Pooristan, should such an entity ever get one gram of traction in the first place.

The idealism seems sincere, but the political probability is ten digits remote.

The route from a tribal-familial social organization, to an affiliation of functioning nation-states based on a common status of poverty, is not a road that will ever be built.

The West’s recent in-your-face exposure to the tribal reality in the Middle East should clarify some of the main obstacles.

Tribally-organized areas, even the ones with great oil wealth, haven’t gotten beyond the entropy of their political tradition, where kinship= social structure, to create stable, enduring, functional national superstructures.

Next problem: The “bottom billion” are even more isolated from their geographically distant poor counterparts than they are from whatever upward mobility may exist in their current country.

Land is primary. Affiliations where economic status trumps adjacency have no precedent, and more importantly, no practicality. There’s just no practical sense to the idea that stable affiliations–at a meta-level, no less–can be forged and maintained based on economic status.

And finally: Pooristan is held out as an economic Utopia. But, the fact that things begin to get better for some will instantly work to de-stabilize Pooristan, should such an entity ever get one gram of traction in the first place.