Lords of Poverty and Servants of the Poor

According to British author Graham Hancock, one can get quite rich attending to the poor. His book, Lords of Poverty, * is a scathing indictment of official "overseas development assistance," that collection of efforts of bilateral and multilateral organizations allegedly about the business of transferring resources from the rich, industrialized North to the poor, underdeveloped South. Hancock's thesis is blunt: foreign aid is "rotten," he says, rotten to the core and "utterly beyond reform." It should be terminated because it almost never helps the poor and often is grossly detrimental to them.