I grew up in the shadow of the Peace Corps ethic, the rather noble and idealistic idea that we could help the rest of the world by running around and sharing our knowledge. My parents were less starstruck - they regularly remarked how much more good Albert Schweitzer might have done if he'd stayed home and made lots of money to send there instead. Well, we now know many of our "experts" were naïve kids less skilled than their hosts, and the horror stories of how money in the 3rd world can just disappear like water into sand. And illusory celebrity benefits like Band Aid/Live Aid over-inflate their assistance while ignoring basic economics and technology. But we also seem to have transformed this whole concern of into a do-nothing approach that's strangely akin to Ronnie's trickle-down economics - the rest of the world will do alright, we need to get ours now.

Only belatedly have we noted here how environmental shutdowns of infrastructure projects conflicts with union concerns about good infrastructure jobs, pitting 2 key Democratic constituencies against each other. The bigger concept of how trade protection affects global poverty and worldwide jobs is a subject we conveniently avoid.

Currently the US ranks as #10 globally in GDP per capita at $56K/year. China, the successful offshore destination for the last 2 1/2 decades, has risen to #84 with a none-too-impressive $14K/year figure. There are 101 countries behind China. The bottom 30 starting at $630 per annum consist unsurprisingly of a slough of African nations along with Haiti, Afghanistan, a couple small island nations, up to Nepal with a whopping $2500 per year. Worse, Africa is the single sector of the globe that hasn't gotten its population growth under control, even though a majority of countries there have made significant progress.

Absent in our debates is any inkling of how we *help* the rest of the world, and at what cost. No discussion this "idealistic" year about strengthening the UN - Jesse Helms would be pleased. It seems our whole playbook is to either 1) engage or not engage in foreign wars, or 2) stop doing harm like global warming. Along with build up jobs at home and redistribute cash to our own needy.

We're the biggest open market in the world, undivided by language, full of VC cash and vibrantly flexible and experimental. "Creative destruction" and re-creation are staples of our business scape, and have been for decades. This of course is highly disruptive for US workers, especially in the age of Uber and other freelance-style contribution nets, as well as the "work from home" and "independent contractor" illusions. But still, less of an illusion than the rest of the world faces.

We concern ourselves with what future American jobs will look like, but do we have a clue what the rest of the world will do in 50 years, how they'll survive, what will be their value-add or ability to contribute and make a real living in an automated service-oriented economy, presumably dominated still by US innovators.

So what's our solution? Build a Trump-like Virtual Wall - keep those jobs from escaping, prevent those foreign goods from competing, let them eat oil revenues and UN handouts,  We know how to oppose TPP and other trade agreements, but aside from throwing a bit of heavily absconded World Bank cash at countries, we've lost sight of how we might help. Not having the evil Soviet empire to compete with, we've also taken a so-what attitude to Chinese inroads into sub-Sahara, writing off their main interest in raw materials as a ho-hum.

The Arab Spring could have been a vanguard moment for both EU & the US - if we'd been farsighted enough to have a Wilson-like 14 points plan or an EU mini-accession roadmap to encourage not just democracy but economic reform & participation. Sanders has made his campaign all about wage equality and using Wall Street cash to fund internal reforms, but apparently that stops at water's edge. #BLM has pointed out that racism is largely a separate issue from poverty despite the impacts, but we haven't even got to looking what this means for Africa. And of course there's poor Asian and Latin American countries to consider as well.

And how does the world of finance affect that? we saw Goldman Sachs helping Greece keep a double set of books to hide its debts from the EU, while in the global recovery in 2009, banks were considered the forefront of salvaging the system, even while taking advantage of the crisis and free handouts that were supposed to be distributed. But at the end of the day, the world runs on cash and oil, 2 "too big to fail" industries. Where's our global vision with this, aside from "chop them both down to size", whatever that means.

We concern ourselves with how Global Warming might one day impact the 3rd World, but ignore how they struggle every day under current circumstances. The vast reduction of war over the last couple decades has helped immensely - as war is the biggest driver of poverty. But again, is that all we got, just letting trends and natural happenstance improvements drive our "success"? They used to say at conferences "the absence of war is not peace". And the absence of a poverty and forward-looking global assistance program is not a policy. It's just neglect, of our responsibilities and of other people's needs. Can't blame this one on the GOP. It's a quintessential American problem. Where's our George C. Marshall or even George Soros (post-wall East Europe) when we need him?