How does the present-day industrialized world compare with the rest of the world in poverty and lifestyle?
The industrialized world, including the West, Japan, and a rising China, enjoys a lifestyle of sumptuousness, while much of the rest of the world remains in abject poverty and disease. Even America's lower economic levels live like millionaires compared to the world's poverty-stricken, driven by advertising that creates wants.
Les explains that although many areas of the world still endure abject poverty and disease, much of the Western and industrialized world—now including Japan and China, which is fast rising—has a lifestyle of sumptuousness. He notes that in America even the lower level on the economic scale lives like millionaires compared with the poverty-stricken of the world. The world system's advertising convinces people they must have things whether they need them or can afford them, and the corporate/business mentality pursues profit, profit, profit, thinking there is no end and living deliciously.