Nobody wants to say that prosperity and poverty — free access to the wealth of goods produced in the world and exclusion from them — necessarily belong to our unbeatable economic system; that would be something like critique of capitalism, god forbid. The idea is that there is some match between money earned and job. As if one and the same yardstick showing thousands per month were applied to the different jobs, and one job ended at the second thousand while the other was only just starting at the twentieth or two hundredth. Differences in income aren’t all right just like that, they are all right because they are fair. Just as the double meaning of ‘to earn’ says: receiving income and being entitled to it belong together. The relation being, by common consent, that income depends on what a person deserves, not the other way round.

At least in principle. In the real working world, everybody, when it comes down to it, knows plenty of cases in which the equation between just deserts and financial remuneration doesn’t quite work out.

America’s call for an intensified “integration into the world market” is aimed at states that have done nothing other than participate in the world market and earn money with all their means. The dark continent with its 700 million potential market participants is involved in global business. In Africa, too, everything revolves around money: on the markets where the population does its business, as well as with the governments that arrange their activities in accordance with a proper budget. And the results of all that are summed up to a gross national product in accordance with all the rules of national accounting, converted into dollars, and divided by the size of the population, so that one knows where one stands with these countries, as far as economics is concerned.