In his essay (and two recent books) Paul Collier lays out a detailed vision for how foreign aid and intervention might promote economic progress in the world’s poorest regions, areas populated by what he has called the “bottom billion.” The key problem, as Collier describes it here, is that:

A group of about 60 small, impoverished, post-colonial countries . . . . are structurally unable to provide the public goods . . . that are critical for decent quality of life and imperative for economic development. They have diverged from the rest of mankind.

This diagnosis leads him to the…