There's nothing pure about poverty.(The Third World Economist)

KOLHAPUR, INDIA -- The dirt road came to an end, and my uncle stopped the car. We would have to walk the rest of the way to reach the farm. My uncle was excited to show me his friend Patti's sugar farm in a rural area on the west coast of India. We walked along a narrow path for half a mile amidst tall sugar cane stalks. Eagerly awaiting us was Patil, a well-dressed man in a cowboy hat. Learning that I was visiting from America, he proudly removed his hat and explained that it was from Texas.

After showing us around, Patti led us to a group of four young men cutting sugar cane with long knives. He explained that the workers were following methods his family had perfected over many generations. After cutting the cane by hand, the men put small pieces into a giant frying pan which hung over a large brick oven. The fire underneath was fueled by leftover cane stalks and husks. In the intense heat, the pieces of sugar cane melted, leaving a sugary liquid in the pan which another man stirred in an exact, continuous motion.

Once the pan was full of syrup, five men working together would tip it upside down, allowing the liquid sugar to pour into a rectangular hole in the ground. The cooled liquid would then be ladled into small buckets and shipped to town. The cycle continued non-stop without a tidbit of sugarcane wasted. The entire system was as efficient as human sweat and cottage ingenuity could make it.

Nonetheless, Patti was mired in an interminable cycle of debt. As I listened to him describe the process, I realized that his sugar production involved no machinery, no electricity, no automated power, no fossil fuels. The entire farm lacked any such technology. It functioned by processes passed from generation to generation, and had I visited 50 or 100 years ago, very little would have been different.

Then I remembered my history lecture at Brown University shortly before vacation, in which my professor had condemned technology, capitalism, and industrialization for their corrupting ...