Harry S Truman in Dialogues, by Jerry Brown

On Foreign Policy: 1949 Point Four Program: focus on under-developed world

GUEST: It was the 20th of January, 1949, in President Harry Truman's inaugural speech. Then, after the inaugural speech, he sketched out his so-called Point Four Program. In that program, which was directed towards what later became known as the Third World, Truman, for the 1st time in history, called half of the world an underdeveloped area. So there it was, the word underdeveloped, a word that has become so natural to us. So the development era for us began with Truman. He was the 1st one, at least from a prominent political stage, who looked at the planet and saw a few nations--the US and some other Western countries--running along a common race track and running way ahead, with many other nations lagging far behind. The big imperative then is to catch up. The image was there before Truman; colonialism had these kinds of notions.

On Free Trade: 1949: Announced "The Development Decade" for global economy

Development is a race, and the rules of the race are made by influential people as part of a system that dramatically expands the gap between the rich and the poor everywhere in the world. This logic of development is rarely--if ever--challenged by "The New York Times", the White House, the G-7 summit, at major party conventions, in the mass media, or even in the schools.