Paths to Progress

Drawing on experience in lands as diverse as the Ivory Coast Singapore the Punjab and China''s coastal rim the authors professors of sociology at City University of New York explore solutions to poverty and despotism in the Third World.They show how runaway population ignorance corruption and mismanagement offer opportunities to idealogues of the Islamic renaissance utopian socialism or classical capitalism. They then demonstrate a more viable and palatable solution which in some regions already has created a high rate of economic growth literacy and health while maintaining an open stable political system under the rule of law.Here are concrete examples in Latin America Southeast Asia India and the newly prosperous cities of Asia where advances in agriculture imaginative industrialism investment in human resources and a resort to dialogue rather than dictatorship have led to escape from poverty without yielding the ideologically rigid tyrannies.