In his new book, "Planet of Slums," the American urban historian Mike Davis paints a bleak picture of a world in which the poorest have become so marginalized that they have dropped off the economic radar. Over the past 20 years or so, globalization and the neoliberal policies of the International Monetary Fund have conspired to drive peasants subsisting off their land into cities that can't absorb them. The bottom line is something like a billion people living hand-to-mouth on a daily basis.

Davis makes his points through economic theory and lots of statistics. He avoids examples at the individual level where sentiment can overwhelm his argument, but usually the poor are presented to the not-poor in sentimental fashion. We see the runny-nosed children, the nursing teenage mother, the ruddy laborer in his coarse shack, and we're asked to help them by donating money or becoming a "foster parent" from afar. We do so and we feel better, but as Davis shows: The problem gets worse because it's a result of economic policies that we in the developed world directly or indirectly support.

Well-meaning media accounts of abject poverty often avoid source problems altogether. Fuji TV has been broadcasting an annual special for the past three years called "If the World Were a Village of 100 People," which is the title of a popular children's book that attempts to make the Earth's 6.2 billion people more comprehensible by reducing their various lifestyles to that of a village of 100 residents.