Mapping the wealth of nations? I like it! And a sly little allusion to Adam Smith? What's not to love.

However, I wonder: are we making a mistake in analyzing this on the national level? Are we overlooking the fact that most local economies contain people living in both first and third world conditions?

Access and infrastructure is certainly an issue in determining whether one lives among the haves or the have nots, but I would suggest that in our current society, access and infrustructure are no longer merely geographically determined.

In some of the richest cities in the world, we still find people with now access or infrastructure to allow them to prosper as their neighbors do. I can t...

Mapping the wealth of nations? I like it! And a sly little allusion to Adam Smith? What's not to love.

However, I wonder: are we making a mistake in analyzing this on the national level? Are we overlooking the fact that most local economies contain people living in both first and third world conditions?

Access and infrastructure is certainly an issue in determining whether one lives among the haves or the have nots, but I would suggest that in our current society, access and infrustructure are no longer merely geographically determined.

In some of the richest cities in the world, we still find people with now access or infrastructure to allow them to prosper as their neighbors do. I can think of no better example of this than New York City, or San Francisco. Both areas include some of America's richest communities right along side the poorest.

And this is not a problem unique to America. Consider development trends in China. Is China a first world country? By many standards I would say so, however, the majority of the population still lives in third world conditions. This is not because China is under-developed, it is because the development has maximized its ruthless efficiency. China has developed to meet national needs, and to satisfy the upper classes, and has been fairly successful in preventing that from seeping down into the lower classes. This is what has enabled the elite to live in the first world luxury of cities like Beijing or Shanghai, while the nation still has enough working poor to make it possible to produce the chair you're sitting on for about 35 cents.

In our modern context, defined by decentralization and digital communication, isn't it time to recognize that there is a bigger difference between neighbors than across national boundaries?