I order a book today- "Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole" - by Benjamin R. Barber, author of Jihad vs. McWorld. I don't expect that I will like it very much. That's not judging a book by its cover, however. I like the cover. It's the book's central thesis, as recently expounded in very well-written but off-the-mark LA Times editorial entitled "Overselling Capitalism", that makes me say this. That's not to say the entire argument is wrong. Here are the parts Barber gets right:

Capitalism's core virtue is that it marries altruism and self-interest. In producing goods and services that answer real consumer needs, it secures a profit for producers. Doing good for others turns out to entail doing well for yourself.

Here's where the argument starts to go awry:

Capitalism's success, however, has meant that core wants in the developed world are now mostly met and that too many goods are now chasing too few needs. Yet capitalism requires us to "need" all that it produces in order to survive. So it busies itself manufacturing needs for the wealthy while ignoring the wants of the truly needy. Global inequality means that while the wealthy have too few needs, the needy have too little wealth.

Agreed. Free markets have enabled the developed world to meet our most "core" or material wants. And yes, the world is full of poor and needy people. The question is "why?" According to Barber, it's the developed world's promotion of infantile "consumerism" that's to blame for the crisis that he sees threatening capitalism and democracy:

The world teems with elemental wants and is peopled by billions who are needy. They do not need iPods, but they do need potable water, not colas but inexpensive medicines, not MTV but their ABCs. They need mortgages they can afford, not funny-money easy credit.To serve such needs, however, capitalism must once again learn to defer profits and empower the needy as customers. Entrepreneurs wanted! With micro-credit, villagers can construct hand pumps and water filters from the clay under their feet. Pharmaceutical companies ought to be thinking about how to sell inexpensive retro-virals to Africans with HIV instead of pushing Botox to the "forever young" customers they are trying to manufacture here. And parents can refuse to relinquish their gatekeeping roles and let marketers know they won't allow their kids to be targeted anymore.

This is where Barber has it wrong. The problem of the undeveloped world is not that too few n the developed world care. Nor is the problem that we are self-absorbed consumerists. Rather, it's because too much of the developed world doesn't provide the appropriate environment and precursory conditions that would allow for investment. The poorest and neediest people live in countries that do not have capitalistic-friendly institutions like respect for the rule of law, property rights, and individual liberty. Corruption and illiberal political systems are what keep people needy. Those who run their countries are the ones that need to change their ways. As soon as they do, their will be more business of the kind Barber wants to see, but not before.