“Cuba is a stagnant, low-income, egalitarian country with good social services. If the bottom billion emulated Cuba, would this solve their problems? I think that the vast majority of the people living in the bottom billion—and indeed in Cuba—would see it as continued failure. To my mind, development is about giving hope to ordinary people that their children will live in a society that has caught up with the rest of the world. Take that hope away and the smart people will use their energies not to develop their society but to escape from it—as have a million Cubans.”
Paul Collier, The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It p. 12.
So far, the book reads well, as I had anticipated from a First Things review by Richard John Neuhaus.