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North/South divide that have clawed their way onto the list of the world’s five hundred largest industrial monoliths. 1
    Agriculture, the other subsector of the traditional resources category, also dominates the Third World in terms of labor investment (two-thirds of the labor force in many Third World nations work in agriculture), although not, unfortunately for such nations, in terms of production. For First World nations using advanced technology from the information/technology sector can produce goods efficiently while employing only a tiny fraction of their labor force. 2
    When we compare the percentage of GDP devoted to agriculture to the percentage devoted to goods and services in Third World nations, the First/Third World division is strongly reinforced. Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries devote on average only 2.8 percent of their GDP to farming, 33 percent to manufacturing, and a whopping 57.6 percent to services while the percentage for agriculture rises to 17.2 percent in Eastern Europe, to 21.8 percent in sub-Saharan Africa, and to 34 percent in south Asia, with a corresponding decline in the service sector to 38.5 percent for Eastern Europe, and to 18 percent for sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia. 3 A number of impoverished nations lack not just manufacturing capacity but elementary natural resources and agricultural potential, and are likely to belong in perpetuity to what realistically should be called not the Third World but the Terminal World. Others are “Third World” only on the way to being Second and First World—much in the manner of the United States compared to Britain a couple of centuries ago. 4 The bleak prospects of many sub-Saharan countries is epitomized by Ghana. Paul Kennedy has noted that at the beginning of the sixties, it shared a per capita income of a little over $200 with a number of Asian countries, including South Korea. Today, South Korea’s per capita income has increased twelvefold to over $3,000; Ghana’s remains where it was, in the low 200’s. 5
    Yet the most impressive new truth about natural resources in the era of McWorld is that even here debate about national interest or national independence is increasingly irrelevant. To be sure, economic self-sufficiency has been a dream of all peoples from the outset of their collective histories, especially those with democratic aspirations. Economic dependency meant political servitude internally as well as externally. In classical republican theory from Pericles to Machiavelli and Montesquieu, the free society was the society sufficient unto itself in food and resources. Democrats thus dreamed of utopias whose political autonomy rested firmly on economic independence, what they called autarky. It was not so much the free market but the independent market that would secure freedom for the city-state. However, the Athenians were not able to achieve autarky: human nature, it turns out,
is
dependency, perhaps because human needs and the escalating psychologies by which they are determined are by nature insatiable.
    The dream of autarky had a brief reign in nineteenth-century America as well, when the underpopulated, endlessly bountiful land, the cornucopia of natural resources, and the natural barriers of an island continent walled in by two great seas together created a magical interlude in which many could believe that America might actually become a world unto itself. This has imprinted the American mind with an illusory sense of self-sufficiency and has nurtured a spirit of isolationism that has periodically led to a withdrawal from world affairs. For nations, however, no island is ever really an island. And though it has been hard for Americans to accept the inevitability of interdependence, not even our continental cornucopia has been immune to depletion. Elsewhere, the maldistribution of arable soil and mineral resources on an unjustly created planet leaves even the wealthiest societies