One reason for the sharply declining interest of the Western world in general problems of underdevelopment is the false belief, which I have discussed above, that conditions in the third world are already so catastrophic as to have passed the point of no return: the terrible famines in Ethiopia and Sudan are widely regarded as indicative of things shortly to come in many other African regions. Such attitudes are fostered by numerous academic and popular doom-mongers, marxists and non-marxists alike, whose amorphous despair, apparently compassionate but actually very denigratory of the third world, appeals to a wide public which has hardly any knowledge of Africa's geography. Before starting to write this book I asked a well-known Cambridge bookseller to identify the best-selling author on developing countries for first-year students and was unhesitatingly referred to Paul Harrison's Inside the Third World. On glancing at this work, by an author who is not an economist but who had undertaken five years' research and travel in Asia, Latin America and Africa, I at once realized that it is an example of doomsday economics par excellence, its approach being indicated by the citation from Tagore at the head of Chapter I: ‘We live under the tyranny of the tropics, paying heavy toll every moment for the barest right of existence.’