Bauer's views are receiving more attention as the economic problems of the Third World become less deniable.
A pop-up third world shantytown less than two hours from two of the wealthiest European capitals, Paris and London.
If we can recover something of it alongside Martin Luther King's view that we only "civilise ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty", then becoming third world may be less a nightmare than an idea whose time has come.
When a rich American drug company voluntarily decides to charge impoverished Third World patients much less than it charges comparatively rich Americans, this is good all around.
(By the Second World War, less than one per cent of American soldier deaths were from disease).
The first race of the meet produced a world record in the women's 3,000 steeplechase, an event in which the International Amateur Athletic Federation recognized the first world record less than two years ago.
Even in 1918, at the height of the budget squeeze produced by the First World War, less than four and a half million Americans, of a total population of more than a hundred million, had to file income-tax returns at all.
In a month in which the Labour party he leads has polled the lowest share of a national vote since the first world war (less than 16% in the European elections), in which he has faced an attempted coup, mass resignations, a cabinet in turmoil, almost all the press turned against him, the prime minister is solicitous - "Tea? Coffee?
This second world has less perfect match with the actual world than the first world, but involves only one miracle.
Since Peter Townsend's ground-breaking research on relative poverty [23], there has been a latent assumption that "absolute poverty" is a matter for developing countries and the so-called "Third World", whereas industrialized contexts have less severe, less extreme forms of poverty, namely forms of social exclusion considered as relative poverty.
