Just Because the World's Poor Benefitted Partly at the Expensive of the Middle Class, Doesn't Mean It Could Not Have Been Otherwise

Suppose a mob boss has his thugs go around and shake down a bunch of small business people. Imagine he then gives a portion of the haul to poor children. When the business people complain, the mobster then tells them they are being greedy, after all don't they care about the poor children?

This is esentially the argument that Tyler Cowen gives us in the NYT this morning. There is little doubt that hundreds of millions of people in developing countries like China and India have benefited from...