Actually, I noticed that you did a decent job of defending your theory in that thread. But I dislike applying the idea of wounds to the entire idea of helping countries that are only marginally bad first. You could say something like "Aid for a marginally bad country will bring more return on your dollar than aid in a really bad country. And improving marginally bad countries that are near really bad countries will provide them with a model for improvement. It's a little like a big wound heals: you start at the edges." I'm not going to become a proponent without doing research, but it would be more tolerable imho.

I'd be interested to see a mathematical model to support your theory because I have no idea what it would look like.