I try to steer clear of articles such as these but got fooled by the submission title. These attempts to paint the world in such broad strokes may seem to provide information in easily digestible forms but are useless, being just one step higher than black and white or good and evil.

No matter how appealing it may be to simplistically classify millions of people like that, the devil is in the details always. We can just begin to form some crude models with an in-depth study of the economies and sub-economies (and sub-sub) of the world (a humble attempt here: http://www.gapminder.org/ ), let alone their equally complex social and political data.

And despite the authors' beliefs, we are still evolving in all spheres - political, social and economic. Today's liberal views can yet be viewed as conservative in the future when better *cracies will form, very many of them from the so-called second and third worlds.