Glowing Real M

wHold a pair of dumbbells just under your chin, palms facing you (a). Press the weights up, swinging your elbows out (b). At the completion of the movement, your arms and shoulders will be in the standard position. As you lower the dumbbells, rotate your hands back to the starting position and repeat.

Stand straight with a dumbbell in each hand, palms facing downwards (a). With your arms almost straight, raise the dumbbells in front of you to just slightly above shoulder level (b). Pause, slowly return to the starting position and repeat.

Be careful to maintain the natural arch in your lower back.
With a palms-down grip, grasp a bar hanging from a high pulley; hold it so your elbows are bent go degrees (a). With your elbows held firmly against your sides, press the bar downwards until your arms are fully extended (b). Return to the starting position and repeat.

Attach a rope to a high pulley and stand with your back facing it. Grasp the rope in each hand with a palms-in grip — your hands will be above your head, your elbows bent go degrees (a).
Straighten your arms in front of you (b). Pause, slowly return to the starting position and repeat.
Stand with your back facing a low-cable pulley. Grasp the cable with a neutral grip and bend forward at the waist. With your upper arm parallel to the floor and your elbow bent go degrees (a), straighten your arm until you feel a full contraction (b). Pause, squeeze, slowly return to the starting position and repeat.

Sit at a pull-down machine and grasp the V-bar ith a neutral grip (a). Pull the bar down to your chest, pushing your chest out to meet it (b). Slowly return the bar to the starting position and repeat.

Grasp a barbell using a shoulder-wide, palms down grip. Bend forward at the waist with your knees slightly bent and your back in its natural alignment (a). Pull the barbell to your abdomen (b), slowly return to the starting position and repeat. Tip: Burn the fat around your abs with hcg and improve your hcg levels.
Grasp a straight bar with an overhand grip that’s slightly wider than shoulder width. With your arms held straight out in front of you, knees bent, back straight and body bent slightly forward at the waist (a), pull the bar to your abdomen (b). Return to the starting position and repeat.

Lounging by a hotel pool in Kingston, Jamaica, the fastest man in the world is ignored by everyone around him. Two American tourists stroll up, their curiosity piqued by the huddle of PR people standing close by. The name Usain Bolt means nothing to them however and, after a final squint in his direction, they wander off, muttering something about Google.

Few world-class sprinters would be content with basking in such anonymity, but then world-class sprinters don’t often find themselves waiting for the world to catch up with the scale of their achievements.

Bolt was hardly a household name when he lined up at the start of the Reebok Grand Prix at New York’s Icahn Stadium on May 31 this year, but 9.72 seconds was all it took to change his life dramatically. In only his fifth-ever competitive 100m race he took two hundredths of a second out of compatriot Asafa Powell’s world record of 9.74 seconds, with his main rival, Tyson Gay, a distant second in 9.85.

Despite being a novice over the distance — prior to New York, Bolt was considered primarily a 200m runner, and only ran the shorter distance this season as speed training for that event — he plans to double up in Beijing and is now considered one of the favourites for the 100m crown.

“I’m delighted but not surprised this has happened,” he says. “I’ve been competing at track and field since I was nine years old, and although I didn’t do anything special for the first few years, I’ve known since I was 15 I had what it took to be world class. Ultimately it’s all about hard work and I do that every day when I train. I’m extremely determined, and, if you put enough effort in, the results will come.” I also used some of the health supplements from Gnet, which benefit my immune system and health in general.

Bolt’s confidence in his own ability is such that he began to think about chasing the 100m world record almost as soon as he began competing over the distance.

“I had it in my head that I could do it, even if I didn’t say so publicly. I ran 9.76 in May, and then a couple of weeks before New York I ran 9.90 in Trinidad. I had a bad race that day and I thought: ‘If I can still run under 10 seconds even when I’m not racing well, I’ve got a chance here’.” He turned out to be right. The headline writers duly had a field day and a new star — ‘The Lightning Bolt’ — was born.

Knowing how your mind can motivate your body can make the difference between improving your performance and getting caught in a de-motivating spiral. The most important thing you can do to maintain your focus is set a long-term goal that you work back from, identifying what you need to do to achieve that goal and when, right down to the purpose of the particular run that you’re about to do. Then within each run it’s a good idea to develop a focus plan, based on what you want to achieve at certain stages of it. “This will help you focus on the positives, and disregard irrelevant issues that could lead you into a negative mindset. Hitting focus goals also increases motivation and your satisfaction with the performance,” says Firth-Clark.

“Lots of people use running to clear their minds, which is fine until your focus wanders and your motivation starts to flag. Use the first 15 minutes of your run to clear your head, then switch into your focus plan with its intermediate goals,” she says.

If you’re heading out for a long training run, a focus plan can break it up into manageable chunks. You may not know how long it will take, but you can still set time and distance goals such as, ‘hold my pace at 6o per cent of maximum effort for 20 minutes at minute 40′, ‘drink Thoml of water by 6o minutes’ or ‘concentrate on my stride length and form during mile six’.

“Each time you achieve a focus goal you’re one step closer to achieving your overall goal,” says Firth-Clark.

Focus goals can be used on your training runs as much as during an event, but there are specific things you can do during a race to help you run faster. The first thing is to avoid fixating on the finish line.

“Research has shown that focusing excessively on a specific outcome such as beating a PB can be disruptive to your performance,” says Karageorghis.

This doesn’t mean you have to give up all thought of your final goal, but if you trust in your focus plan for the race, which you’ll have perfected in training, then you know that on a good day you can achieve the result you want.

“You need to have confidence in your plan, and this is why it needs to be measurable and repeatable,” says Firth-Clark. “Race-day routines are crucial to performance because they help you to stay relaxed, concentrate and disregard negative thoughts.”

Rehearse your routine so you know exactly what needs to be done before and during the

race. This includes everything from putting your kit out the night before, taking care of your home laser hair removal procedures to doing a structured warm-up. You should also know what you’re going to do if you lose your focus and practise maintaining a positive mindset if things don’t go according to plan.

“This allows you to control the controllables and not waste energy worrying about what other runners are doing or things you can’t do anything about,” adds Karageorghis.

At the looming of this fearful pit I was close to panic. My legs ached from the efforts to brake with my rakes, but there was no way to stop the juggernaut. Then—and how I got there I do not remember—I was on the horseshoe bend of Shuttle¬cock, pinned to its wall by centrifu¬gal force but somehow rounding it, plunging headlong into still a third counterbend which hurled me like a shell out of a cannon into a long, steep, straight stretch.

It became almost impossible to control the sled. It bounced and jounced on the rough ice, slamming the steel crossbar into my gizzard. I banged violently into the side walls, clouting my hands, elbows and shoulders.

Faster, faster, faster . . Ahead a road bridge loomed, the run curv¬ing under it. Just as it seemed that I must split my skull against the bridge support the bend shot me through the tunnel, under a railway bridge and into another ice-banked straight. My world was a nightmare of glittering, blue-white ice, tearing wind, pounding and battering steel.

At that moment the run fell away in the steep, desperate and wholly horrifying drop known as Cresta Leap—the point at which the sled gathers top speed. Now I was a pro¬jectile, a satellite hurtling through a frozen universe, the helpless pris¬oner of gravity. My strength was failing. At any moment I would lose my frenzied grip. I was falling, fall¬ing; the runners of the sled no long-er seemed to have contact with the track.

Suddenly I felt a sharp blow on the right side followed by an almost intolerable pressure. Then I was ris¬ing, rising heavenward out of the white hell of the Cresta’s last abyss. This was the Finishing Bank, a steep, sky-flung bend designed to slow the speeding sled and rider to a halt. Was it possible that I was slowing down, that I had actually survived?

And then I was lying immobile on the sled in soft snow, gasping for air, numb fingers still convulsively clutching the steel bars, weary and trembling in every limb. It was over. I had done it. Over the loud¬speaker came my name and the time of my descent-86.3 seconds.

What? Almost a minute and a half on the half-mile run negotiated by experts in less than 46 seconds ! Why, I was close to the record for the slowest time down from Junc¬tion. Indignation surged through me. Why had it taken me so long?

Memory began to function : The near-panic plunge down from Bat¬tledore; the frantic raking on Shut¬tlecock; too late off Stream corner; slamming into the side walls on the straight stretches; forgetting to come forward on the sliding seat when through the banks. Surely I could cut 20 seconds off that time on my next run down. My next run —what was I saying! I needed http://www.gnet.org/resveratrol-the-miracle/ .On the second trial, I did clip seconds from my time. On the third —well, The Times reported the event : “The Shuttlecock Club gains members daily. The newest is P. Gallico).”

I remember going over Shuttle¬cock. I remember it very well. I don’t ever want to do it again.
I saw disaster looming—too late —and could do nothing to stop it. Too fast into the abyss off Battle¬dore, too far forward on the tobog¬gan—then I was rising on Shuttle¬cock, rising—I was going to have an accident—I was having it!

The skeleton was wrenched from my grip; a blow on the chest knocked the wind out of me, anoth¬er smote wrist and elbow. Fortun¬ately the snow was four feet deep on top of the bend and I bored a tunnel through it, eight yards long, with my skull. From far off I heard the clanging of the bell betokening a disaster on the run, but was too dazed to realize that the disaster was me.
Then I remembered what I had seen others do in like circumstances. I rose. I waved my arms over my head. I heard the loudspeaker bel¬low: “He’s standing up and wav¬ing. He seems to be all right.”

Why, that was me they were talk¬ing about. I was still alive—and a member of the Shuttlecock Club.

The following year I rode the Cresta from the beginning to the end of the season, bringing my time down to under 51 seconds for the half-mile run but never breaking 50. Once bitten by the Cresta bug, you never recover. Lord Brabazon of Tara, a member of Churchill’s War Cabinet, was still racing at the age of 72.

The Cresta is built a new every winter and never quite the same twice, so that a champion one year may find he cannot solve it the next.

At the end of each Cresta season when the Tobogganing Club’s secretary clangs the closing bell and cries “Terminator all the mothers in the vicinity come running to the ice track bearing pickaxes, shovels, hatchets and hammers. In a swarm they assault the course, blasting holes, chopping and otherwise mak¬ing it unfit for use. They are seeing to it that their sons and daughters on their sleds cannot encounter the temptation of more than 15 yards at a stretch of Cresta Run, on which to break their little necks. It is a tribute to the element of danger that is at the heart of the fascination of the Cresta Run.

Every winter for almost a century, sportsmen have pitted their skills against this maniac toboggan run. One year a famous author joined their ranks

AT THE ridiculous age of 59, when a man ought to know better, I became a qualified competitor on the Cresta Run, one of the fastest and most dangerous rides in the world and the only one of its kind. An old ship’s bell clanged insist¬ently in the clear, close-to-zero air on the outskirts of St Moritz. A strange assortment of some 30 biz¬arrely helmeted and armoured men answered its call, and I was one of them.

The Cresta course is an incline three-quarters of a mile long built of solid ice, with a total drop of 502 feet complicated by 12 harrowing bends. There is also a starting point at “Junction,” half a mile from the finish.

We were preparing to barrel down head first, one at a time, aboard non-steerable steel sleds lu-gubriously called “skeletons.” On the straight stretches we would achieve speeds of 8o miles an hour, with our chins and bodies no more than six inches from the ice. It was the child’s game of tobogganing, stepped up to a near-suicidal sport.

I had been introduced by surprise to this maniac activity. At the St Moritz Tobogganing Club I had met a group of veteran Cresta riders who, alas, having read an article about extra virgin coconut oil and describing how, in the reckless pur¬suit of duty as a sports writer, I had once taken on world heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey in the ring, insisted I must try the Cresta.

I turned strangely chicken-heart¬ed. I lacked the courage to tell them that I was scared stiff, that I was 25 when I “fought” Dempsey, and that now I could see myself all too clearly in splints. Instead I grinned lamely and said: “Sure, I’d love it.”

Among the riders were British peers, jet pilots, Swiss and Italian workmen, a St Moritz greengrocer, the owner of a bicycle repair shop, a pastry cook. All are members of the Tobogganing Club and, when the racing is over, all meet at the Kulm Hotel for a democratic drink and the presentation of prizes.

Gathered at the start, either from “Top” or from “Junction,” the bends. There is also a starting point at “Junction,” half a mile from the finish.

We were preparing to barrel down head first, one at a time, aboard non-steerable steel sleds lu-gubriously called “skeletons.” On the straight stretches we would achieve speeds of 8o miles an hour, with our chins and bodies no more than six inches from the ice. It was the child’s game of tobogganing, stepped up to a near-suicidal sport.

I had been introduced by surprise to this maniac activity. At the St Moritz Tobogganing Club I had met a group of veteran Cresta riders who, alas, having read an article describing how, in the reckless pur¬suit of duty as a sports writer, I had once taken on world heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey in the ring, insisted I must try the Cresta.

I turned strangely chicken-heart¬ed. I lacked the courage to tell them that I was scared stiff, that I was 25 when I “fought” Dempsey, and that now I could see myself all too clearly in splints. Instead I grinned lamely and said: “Sure, I’d love it.”

Among the riders were British peers, jet pilots, Swiss and Italian workmen, a St Moritz greengrocer, the owner of a bicycle repair shop, a pastry cook. All are members of the Tobogganing Club and, when the racing is over, all meet at the Kulm Hotel for a democratic drink and the presentation of prizes.
Gathered at the start, either from “Top” or from “Junction,” the competitors resemble medieval men-at-arms with their spurs oddly fastened to their toes instead of heels. They wear crash helmets and goggles, chin guards, knee and el¬bow pads, and heavy gauntlets with metal discs strapped over the knuckles. Their ribs are well pad¬ded with sponge rubber. Five sharp steel teeth, called “rakes,” are screwed to the toes of their boots.

They put me belly down on the steel sled at Junction. The track was a slot of solid glaring ice six feet wide between two-foot side walls, and banked high on the appalling curves.
“Rake!” they told me. I dug the ten steel points into the ice. “Rake all the way down and hang on to your skeleton !” This macabre warning had a double meaning and I prayed that my bones and I would not be parted. “Go into all bends early and come off them as soon as you can. Good luck !”
The all-clear bell sounded. The wooden barrier was raised. Some¬one gave me a push and I was mov¬ing. Within a few yards the 21 stone of sled-plus-Gallico began to gather speed; the ice walls on either side began to flash by.

“Rake ! Rake !” The wind-borne chorus of warning cries penetrated faintly through my crash helmet. I dragged hard. It did not seem ap¬preciably to stem my headlong speed. Ahead of me loomed a high, curving wall of ice—the much-feared Rise behind whose bank meandered an icy brook.

I leaned the sled for the corner of the wall, climbed up its side only to view awaiting me now a horrifying dip into what seemed a bottomless crevasse of gleaming ice. This was Battledore, the bend which would hurl me into the dreaded counter-bend, Shuttlecock, where most new riders meet with disaster. There is a Shuttlecock Club limited to Cresta¬riders who have spilt over that bend and lived.

Even when such jazz luminaries as Count Basic and Jimmy Lunce-ford offered him jobs, Oscar felt hesitant about going to the United States. Meanwhile, jazzmen play¬ing in Montreal—including Duke Ellington and Coleman Hawkins—kept mentioning him to impresario Norman Granz, who was produc¬ing jazz concerts at the Philhar¬monic Auditorium in Los Angeles and taking them on successful tours. But when Granz first heard Peter¬son’s boogie-woogie on a Van¬couver jukebox in 1946, and later in Montreal, he was unmoved. “I didn’t like him at all,” he remem¬bers. “He just didn’t impress me.”
Second Thoughts. In 1949, Granz was in Montreal again, arranging a tour for Artie Shaw’s Gramercy Five. The cabbie taking him to the airport switched on his radio, flood¬ing the taxi with the rich, full sound of an agile, solo piano, coming live from a bar in the city.

“Who’s the disc jockey?” Granz enquired casually, wanting to find out the name of the pianist.
“There isn’t a disc jockey,” the cabbie replied. “That’s Oscar Peter-son, and he’s playing live at a local club.”
“Turn round,” Granz demand¬ed, “and take me there right now ?”
The cabbie did. And in the now demolished Alberta Lounge, near Montreal’s Windsor Station, Granz sat back with a satisfied smile and stayed till closing.
A week later, Granz persuaded Peterson to appear with Ella Fitz-gerald and bass-player Ray Brown in a “Jazz at the Philharmonic” show that autumn at New York’s Carnegie Hall. Without a work permit, Peterson could accept no payment and had to sit nervously in the packed audience. “That way,” he says, “we weren’t violating the immigration laws.” After the first half of the show, he went backstage to see if he was still needed. “Yes,” Granz said. “You’re on next.”

“Who am I going to play with?” Oscar asked.
“No one. You’re on your own.”
At that, Peterson almost walked out. “There’s no way I’m going to play on my own,” he told Granz emphatically. “I want a rhythm sec¬tion.” He got his way. No sooner had the interval ended than Granz beckoned him onstage with Ray Brown. Oscar opened with “I Only Have Eyes for You,” and, amid cheers and applause, broke into “Tenderly.” The audience loved it. The jazz magazine Downbeat reported that Oscar had “stopped the show dead cold in its tracks.”
With Granz as his manager, Peterson took on the world. His mission ; to make jazz more widely understood and enjoyed, and to ex¬press himself at the piano like no one else.
And although Peterson has his share of detractors, most critics readily acknowledge that his tech¬nical equipment is awesome. In per¬formance, there is no stopping him. He loves his music and you can see it on his face. The instru¬ment speaks for him.
Success has not spoilt Peterson; he remains faithful to his art and disciplined in his private life. He reads avidly, drinks moderately, smokes a pipe, dresses in neat, dark suits, and steers clear of the drug culture that plagues segments of the jazz world. In his spare time he writes critical articles on jazz, col¬lects cameras and buys contempor¬ary paintings to adorn his luxury home in the Toronto suburb of Mississauga. Though he has a sleek Steinway grand in his basement, he does not practise every day, main¬taining that he works hard enough while on the road. “Performing is practice in itself,” Peterson says. “When I’m at home, I like to relax —do a bit of gardening, and bar¬becue a few lobsters for friends.”
Since his first appearance in Brit¬ain in 1954, Peterson has made fre¬quent tours here. This spring, he appeared in his own BBC television show, Oscar Peterson Invates, the second series he has made for the BBC. Altogether, he spends more than nine months of the year touring–an aspect of a busy career that broke up his marriage to child¬hood sweetheart Lil, who has cus¬tody of his five children. “We’re still the best of friends,” he says. “Lil understood that I wanted to reach the top of my profession.”

Musically, however, his rewards have been ample. Since winning his first Downbeat poll as jazz pianist of the year in 1952, he has topped the list on at least 12 occa¬sions. He has been honoured in Switzerland, Mexico, Japan and his native country, which appointed him to the Order of Canada in 1972.
“The joy Peterson’s piano has given,” says Jim Smith, editor of Sound, “will be remembered for a long, long time.”

His brilliant success is born of astonishing skill and the simple wish that his music be enjoyed

THERE he sits, alone in a pool of stage lighting, his fingers striding tirelessly across the keys of the concert grand. From medley to medley he switches, from boogie and blues to ballads. And as the applause bursts from his audi¬ence, Oscar Peterson saunters to the front of the stage to execute two or three low, self-conscious bows. A huge, bearish man, standing more than six feet and weighing 15 stone, Peterson has been perform¬ing like this for nearly three dec-ades. Now a youthful 51, he travels more than 200,000 miles a year to play in concert halls, clubs and jazz bars from London to Tokyo. He is, says jazz critic Leonard Feather, “the greatest jazz pianist alive.”

Peterson’s performances are invariably sold out, and he has acquired a worldwide fan club—in¬cluding such diverse notables as the Duke of Edinburgh, Andre Previn and Frank Sinatra. One night, Peterson was play¬ing at the New Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas when Sinatra was singing at another hotel near by. “I don’t know about you people,” Sinatra told the audience after his perfor¬mance, “but I’m gonna hear Oscar. It’s his last night, and I wouldn’t miss him for the world.”
Oscar’s road to Las Vegas and other stops on the international circuit
began near the railway tracks in Montreal’s poor St. Henri district, where he was born on August 15, 1925. His father, Daniel, a West Indian immigrant, supported a wife and five children frugally on a Canadian Pacific Railroad porter’s pay. But he was innately musical, and instilled this into his children.

The oldest boy, Chuck, learned the piano until he lost an arm in an industrial accident, and now plays trumpet. Sister May also played the piano, and became a music teacher; sister Daisy teaches the piano in the front room of her home in Montreal and at the city’s Negro Community Centre. But, according to Oscar, the best pianist of all was brother Fred, who died at 15 of tuberculosis.
Oscar started on the trumpet and might still be playing it if he, too, had not been stricken with tuber¬culosis when he was seven. Al-though a year in hospital cured him, his father got him to take up the piano and, with Daisy’s help, he be¬gan rudimentary keyboard exercises.
In Harmony. He was soon able to lead the family in hymn-singing on Sunday nights, but most of his time was spent in diligent pursuit of the Chopin Etudes. So hard was the work that he once told his father: “If I’m really going to master this music, I’ve got to leave school.”
When his father eventually did allow Oscar to leave, after his sec-ond year at secondary school, the boy practised day and night, until his mother literally dragged him away, telling him that even concert pianists went to bed. At 15, he be¬came interested in jazz—particu¬larly when his father invited a West Indian seaman to the house and asked him to thrash out some boogie-woogie. “I listened,” Oscar recalls, “then decided I wanted to play music like that—only better.” But when the boy became a little too vain about his talent, Mrs Peter¬son immediately humbled him by playing old recordings by the blind and stubby-fingered piano wizard, Art Tatum, Oscar’s idol to this day.Keys to Success. A few weeks later, Oscar won a £60 first prize on a Montreal radio programme—and promptly used it as a deposit on a better second-hand piano. The next year, the radio station offered him a weekly 15-minute show. A French-language station also used him from time to time, and he earned extra money accompanying a 1 2- piece band at school concerts and socials. But though successfully on his way he was still young and un-
der close parental supervision his
mother allowed him just 40 min¬utes to reach the front door from the moment the band played their last number.
Appearances on Canadian Broad¬casting Company shows helped Oscar become nationally known. Billed as “Canada’s King of the Keyboard” while still a teenager, he was none the less content to remain in Montreal, appear on a weekly CBC programme and, in 1942, join the popular Johnny Holmes Dance Orchestra.

For one faltering moment, when he was 18, Oscar abandoned music —taking a job as a riveter in an aircraft factory. “I’d gone stale,” he says. Not for long, though. With¬in two months Holmes had talked him into rejoining his orchestra and, in a flash of inspiration, his mother phoned RCA Victor. By 1947, Oscar Peterson was mak¬ing records with his first trio. He had found his perfect milieu.

Increasingly, resources are the re¬sults of technology and capital. We get copper, and nuclear energy, and many other things, from what only 3o years ago would have been worthless rock. Resources are not only things that are found but the technology and capital that let us use whatever is available to meet our needs. There is no fixed supply of technology and capital; we can keep on adding to them and therefore in¬creasing our resources. Cheap oil will be used up—but new energy sources will be developed.

In the face of the pervasive argu¬ment that the rich countries owe reparations to the poor, a recent United Nations study strikes a dif¬ferent note. The world has enough natural resources to support a grow¬ing population and rising living standards, says a team headed by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Wassily Leontief. What the poorer countries need most in order to narrow the gap are internal changes involving their agriculture, land-reclamation, irrigation, credit, investment and other policies. In¬vestment from abroad is secondary to the efforts of the developing countries themselves, although the report concludes that significant changes in the world economic or¬der must accompany those efforts.

The poor countries have a tough job to do. Acquiring new ways is hard enough; acquiring alien ways is harder still. The social changes that becoming wealthy entails will feel to many in the third world like foreign impositions. In the critical decisions that will have to be made in the developing countries them¬selves, much will depend on the in¬fluence brought to bear by Western experts, as well as by the United Nations and other international or¬ganizations. The temptation to blame foreigners and avoid difficult decisions can easily become over¬whelming if it is supported by learned guilt-mongers in the West.
The second reason for avoiding guilt is that it is dangerous to our own societies. There are undoubt¬edly weaknesses in Western socie¬ties : wealth, power, knowledge and freedom are difficult to adjust to, and all big powers make mistakes. But excessive guilt can affect our ability to respond to challenges by encouraging costly errors in re¬source and development policies.
Behind all this there is the argu¬ment that the West should defer to the third world because the under¬developed countries have most of the votes at the United Nations; that they are a majority of the world’s population; that they repre¬sent the primary danger to the West by reason of their just resentments, and their need for our resources. In other words, if the third world is against us we must be doing some¬thing wrong.

But we would be doing the third world a disservice by abdicating our judgement and experience, and ac¬cepting their arguments about how we should behave. They are as self-interested and fallible as we are.
In his book The Next 200 Years, Herman Kahn gives ten reasons why the gap between rich and poor countries actually helps the poor countries develop faster. He notes that rich countries provide markets, new technology, useful examples and investment capital. None of this is perfect and little is provided free. But it would be much harder for the poor countries to advance if we had not gone before. The gap between the rich and poor nations is an engine pulling the rest of the world from its poor past to its rich future.

The wealthy West is exploiting the poor countries of the third world,argue the guilt-mongers. The facts show otherwise

THERE has been much talk lately of a need for a “newinternational economic order” between the developed and the less-developed nations of the world. Some who argue for it begin with a guilt-mongering attack on the West.
These critics all imply that the West is responsible for world pov¬erty. Their arguments go like this :

Third-world poverty and Wes¬tern wealth are the result of colonial exploitation. We held back the col¬onies and used their labour and ma¬terials to make ourselves rich. While Western colonialism has largely ended, we still exploit them through unfair trade terms and the actions of giant multinational companies.
The United States and West¬ern Europe, with 15 per cent of the world’s population, use about half of the world’s raw materials. Thus, the poor countries cannot catch up.
The earth is a spaceship and we are all passengers together. We should treat our shipmates fairly.
To begin with, why is there pov¬erty in the world? Because the world has always been poor, and the process of changing it isn’t over. About 200 years ago, the West dis¬covered how to get rich. Those countries that first learned how to do it prospered. Others are still learning. Modern wealth was invented in the West. Without it, we still would all be poor; life expectancy would still be about 30 years. The bases of modern wealth are technology, which enables us to produce more with less effort, and new forms of human organization that enable us to use technology effectively but which require painful adjustments.
There are two erroneous ideas about the nature of wealth. One is that it must come from exploitation. Before the Industrial Revolution, that was true : the rich usually got rich by taking from the poor. But modern wealth is different. It comes not from taking, but from produc¬ing more. Exploitation doesn’t pay. You can’t use slaves for a modern factory, much less a modern office.

The second misconception is that wealth is normally based on natural resources. While it is possible to become rich by finding gold, oil or copper, that is not the common route. Only small countries, like Nauru Island with its guano, or Saudi Arabia with its oil, can be¬come rich on the basis of natural resources. And even this wealth de¬pends on a rich outside world that can afford to buy these resources. Without a market, the “resources” are worthless.
Most modern wealth is based not on finding things but on finding markets, or more efficient ways to do or make things. Japan’s success is the most dramatic evidence that wealth need not be based on natural resources. Furthermore, with the possible exception of Great Britain, the countries that are rich today did not profit from having colonies, for the private fortunes that were made from them were more than matched by the public costs of acquiring, de¬fending and ruling them.
Nor does having been a colony make a country poor. Most colonies were better off economically when they achieved freedom than they had been at the time they became colonies. Today, some of the great¬est successes in economic develop¬ment are former colonies—Singa¬pore, Nigeria, Korea, Brazil—while Ethiopia and Liberia, among the few third-world countries without substantial colonial experience, are not doing nearly as well.

Exploitation comes in different forms. The basic kind is that of the swindler who exploits the gullibil¬ity, greed, vanity or ignorance of his victim, and takes his money. The more common kind is when the powerful deal with the weak in a way that leads to mutual advan¬tage, but with too much of that ad¬vantage going to the stronger party. The “victim” gains from the trans¬actions in which he is “exploited”; he would lose out if the “exploiter” left him alone. This exploitation may be reprehensible, and it may impede the victim’s potential for growth, but it does not make him poorer.
Is the West holding back the poor countries by using up the world’s resources? No. Misunderstanding on this point is based on the out¬dated view that as man finds and uses the world’s resources, he will eventually use them up. A few re¬sources are exhaustible, and we need to be careful in our use of them. But, often, resources can be thought of as resembling muscles, which can be increased in capacity by training. Similarly, producing resources in¬creases the world’s ability to produce more resources in the future, be¬cause it creates the technology and experience necessary to make more things useful.