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210 CHAPTER 7 Global Stratification
The “respectable” classes see these children as nothing but trouble. They hurt busi-
ness: Customers feel intimidated when they see begging children—especially teenaged
boys—clustered in front of stores. Some shoplift. Others break into stores. With no
effective social institutions to care for these children, one solution is to kill them. As
Huggins notes, murder sends a clear message—especially if it is accompanied by ritual
torture: gouging out the eyes, ripping open the chest, cutting off the genitals, raping the
girls, and burning the victim’s body.
Not all life is bad in the Industrializing Nations, but this is about as bad as it gets.
For Your Consideration
Do you think there is anything the Most Industrialized Nations can do about this
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situation? Or is it, though unfortunate, just an “internal” affair that is up to Brazil to
handle as it wishes?
Directed by the police, death squads in the Philippine slums also assassinate rapists and
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drug dealers (“You Can Die Anytime” 2009). What do you think about this? ■
The Least Industrialized Nations
In the Least Industrialized Nations, most people live on small farms or in villages, have
Watch on MySocLab
Video: Dubai Labor large families, and barely survive. These nations account for 68 percent of the world’s
people but only 49 percent of the Earth’s land.
Poverty plagues these nations to such an extent that some families actually live in city
dumps. This is hard to believe, but look at the photos on pages 212–213, which I took in
Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. Although wealthy nations have their pockets of pov-
erty, most people in the Least Industrialized nations are poor. Most of them have no running
water, indoor plumbing, or access to trained teachers or doctors. As we will review in Chap-
ter 14, most of the world’s population growth occurs in these nations, placing even greater
burdens on their limited resources and causing them to fall farther behind each year.
Modifying the Model
To classify countries into Most Industrialized, Industrializing, and Least Industrialized
is helpful in that it pinpoints significant similarities and differences among groups of
nations. But then there are the oil-rich nations of the Middle East, the ones that provide
much of the gasoline that fuels the machinery of the Most Indus-
TABLE 7.4 An Alternative Model trialized Nations. Although these nations are not industrialized,
some are immensely wealthy. To classify them simply as Least
of Global Stratification Industrialized would gloss over significant distinctions, such as
their modern hospitals, extensive prenatal care, desalinization
Four Worlds of Stratification plants, abundant food and shelter, high literacy, and computer-
1. Most Industrialized Nations ized banking. On the Social Map on pages 207–208, I classify
2. Industrializing Nations them separately. Table 7.4 also reflects this distinction.
Kuwait is an excellent example. Kuwait is so wealthy that almost
3. Least Industrialized Nations
none of its citizens work for a living. The government simply pays
4. Oil-rich, nonindustrialized nations them an annual salary just for being citizens. Everyday life in Kuwait
Source: By the author. still has its share of onerous chores, of course, but migrant workers
from the poor nations do most of this work. To run the specialized
systems that keep Kuwait’s economy going, Kuwait imports trained workers from the Most
Industrialized Nations.
Discuss how colonialism
7.7 How Did the World’s Nations
and world system theory explain
how the world’s nations became Become Stratified?
stratified.
How did the globe become stratified into such distinct worlds? The commonsense
answer is that the poorer nations have fewer resources than the richer nations. As with
