And even among the "successful" Asian economies, great pockets of poverty, illiteracy and misery remain.
Half-naked children bathing in sewage and cloaked in misery remain a relentless alarm clock on Pakistan's collective conscious.
One is that the violence in Italy has highlighted the Roma issue in a way that would never have happened if the misery had remained concentrated in the slums and ghettos of eastern Europe.
Never mind if that harmless wrong makes everyone miserable; never mind if coercing those who perpetuate it would take away the misery: the State must not coerce and the misery must remain.
Those who have now finally put him out of his misery will remain in office, no doubt convinced their own botched management of the captaincy is an unavoidable consequence of well-intentioned loyalty.
He acknowledges that recording grief, injury, death and distress is potentially a form of exploitation, but he makes it clear that the alternative -- allowing man-made misery to remain invisible beyond the reach of those whose consciences should be shocked by it -- is worse.
But there remained misery to follow – Cantona was sent off once the game was over, after honestly appraising the performance of a referee, who, five years later, was found guilty of accepting bribes and banned for life.
"God reached down and fixed them both, while all over the world people who didn't come to your church remained in misery, weeping".
Chairman Mao crisscrossed the countryside with tracks, partly for military use, but travel for ordinary people remained a misery of delayed, overcrowded trains nicknamed for the soot-stained color of the carriages: "green skins" were the slowest, "red skins" scarcely better.
In "Mein Kampf," from which he would make millions, he emphasized the hard struggle for existence of the "upstart" who had risen "by his own efforts from his previous position in life to a higher one," that "kills all pity" and destroys "feeling for the misery of those who have remained behind".
