America's ignorance is a threat to humanity

"In the world's poorest regions, from the Andes to Central Asia, the U.S. government seems to operate almost blindly, facing challenges that it simply does not understand and therefore can't resolve.
This isn't a problem that started in this Bush administration, though the combination of ignorance and arrogance in President George W. Bush's foreign policy has proved especially lethal.
Since the early 1980s, American development programs have been gutted, to the point that there is little institutional understanding about societies seething because of mass unemployment, rapid population growth, pervasive disease and chronic hunger.
Whether I look at the National Security Council, the Treasury, the Council of Economic Advisers, the United States Agency for International Development, or the staffs of the relevant congressional committees, I see woefully few individuals with expertise about the low-income world.
This is too bad, because the low-income world (roughly, those who live and die on less than $2 per day) constitutes half of humanity - and most of the places where American troops have fought and died in recent decades."