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In the early 19th century, the United States was an economic backwater with relatively little influence on the rest of the world. There were certainly plenty of natural resources and there were agricultural crops such as cotton and tobacco that were valuable, but the economic centers of the world were in Europe. What happened over the next 150 years that transformed this country and created the highest standard of living in the world?

Things didn’t change because kindly Europeans sent poverty aid to help poor Americans. It changed because Americans took advantage of the opportunity to build businesses and produce valuable goods in ways that were unheard of until the Industrial Revolution. Americans harnessed the market — which was free to a great extent — in order to start up an economic engine that would become the envy of the world.

When we look at places in the world where poverty is crushing and the economy is crippled, why aren’t those people taking the same path that Americans took starting in the 19th century? And for those of us who have serious concerns about global poverty — both the human cost and the violence it brings — what can we do to change things?

Zachary Caceres is a researcher at the Free Cities Institute who’s traveled to poverty-stricken countries to study what factors are holding poor people back. I asked him what he sees and why the help that many westerners are trying to provide isn’t making a long term difference.

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Nobody really noticed when a 9-year-old girl in Scotland started blogging in April about her school lunches. A couple of months later, she’s forced changes in her school’s lunch, embarrassed her local government and made the local politicians look like fools. It’s not a bad start.

Martha Payne had a simple idea. She wanted to take a picture of her school lunch each day and evaluate it, based on how she liked it and how healthy she thought it was. So NeverSeconds was born. Her mother is a physician and her father is a farmer, so it’s natural for her to think about food and health, because she’s grown up hearing about both.

As people started hearing about her blog and reading about it, school officials took notice. They even made some changes. By May 18, the school was allowing students to get unlimited salads, fruit and bread, which had always been the policy, but nobody had ever told the lunchroom workers.

So things were going well for Martha, who was posting anonymously as “Veg.” She was having a great time writing about her lunches. She was receiving pictures of other kids’ lunches from around the world. She had even started raising money to build a kitchen for a school in India. Then newspapers in Great Britain started writing about her project, pointing to the deficiencies of the food. That’s when the problems started.

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Dorothy knew things were bad when the twister carried her away from Kansas, but she suddenly understood just how bad things really were when she realized what her traveling companions really were.

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