Okay actually lets try and reel this in, this is how I see this conversation:
1) You claim that third world countries are an example of irrational collections of people, citing their poor economic performance as evidence 2) I point out that many third world countries have seen very good economic performance since gaining independence, and their low absolute wealth is more easily explained by their poor or negative performance under colonialism. 3) You point out that many third world and first world countries have performed well post-independence, and give one example of a country that did well under colonial rule as well. 4) I concede* that intra-Third World performance may be due to cultural/institutional factors, while reiterating that the First/Third world differences are a legacy of 19th century wars, both economic and military.
Can you see any failures of communication or understanding here? I don't see how your response at 3 backs up your point at 1, so one of us must have misread the other.
*I feel the need to point out that this is implicit in my response at (2) though I would hope the obvious wrongness of the converse would make this obvious.
Last Wednesday (2010 Dec 01), BBC Radio 4 broadcast a studio discussion on the question: "should we actively try to extend life itself?" The programme can be listened to from the BBC here for one week from broadcast, and is also being repeated tomorrow (Saturday Dec 04) at 22:15 BST. (ETA: not BST, GMT.)
All of the dreadful arguments for why death is good came out. For uninteresting reasons I missed a few minutes here and there, but in what I heard, not one of the speakers on any side of the question said anything like, "This is a no-brainer! Death is evil. Disease is evil. The less of both we have, the better. There is nothing good about death, at all, and all the arguments to the contrary are moral imbecility."
Instead, I heard people saying that work on life extension is disrespectful to the old, that to prolong life would be like prolonging an opera, which has a certain natural size and shape, that the old are wise, so if we make them physically young then old people won't be old, so they won't be wise. Whatever cockeyed argument you can construct by scattering into a Deeply Wise template the words "old", "young", "wise", "decrepit", "healthy", "natural", "unnatural", "boredom", "inevitable", "denial", I heard worse.
If I can bear to listen again to the whole thing just to check I didn't miss anything important, I may write something on their discussion board.