Many see the bowl as full, even overflowing. A kind of magical chalice from which new treasures will spring. This according to financial analysts studying the emerging markets, the so-called BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) and beyond, to Thailand, Philippines and Indonesia.
To the layman their analyses sound as esoteric as they do reliable. The Asian bowl seems to be a source of extraordinary wealth. It’s a shame that, in most cases, geopolitics is not taken into account, often passed off with a quick reference to the risk of instability and corruption. In a recent article entitled The Last Great Hope, The Economist warns that emerging markets may turn out to be the next economic bubble.
But they are not looking at the big picture. The anthropological view is entirely missing. “The image we have of China and of many other countries is that brought back by managing directors and politicians who fly to Shanghai and Beijing and don’t realise what the deeper reality is”, says professor Gordon Mathews of the department of anthropology at The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
The same cultural dystonia is also seen in political analysis. Take the upcoming Burmese elections, for example. According to Human Rights Watch researcher, David Mathieson, “In the EU there is a strange perception that elections are a real step towards democracy”. This has happened because
''EU bureaucrats prefer going to Rangoon to consult with urbane, emerging political elites, and then marginalise and ignore ethnic communities along the borders because it’s too uncomfortable, complex, and 'old hat'.''
This calls for a revolution on the scale of the indetermination principle and the incompleteness theorem, which destroyed our scientific certainties. In a certain sense this is what risk engineering Professor Nassim Nicholas Taleb has done in his book The Black Swan. According to Taleb, we act as if we were able to foresee events, we continue to concentrate on what is known. Instead, the world is dominated by the extreme, the unknown and the very unlikely: The Black Swan.
New global analyses, then, require a higher, more subtle vision that can encompass economic, political and philosophical models. A sort of meta-analysis. This idea was taken up a few years ago by Pietro Citati in his book Le scintille di Dio (The Sparks of God): “Once, wise politicians were accompanied by theology experts or were themselves theology experts. Now theology is despised or practised by no-hopers. For the good of the universe, it’s to be hoped it re-emerges as soon as possible”.
If that should happen, if metaphysics became an evaluation tool, we would realise that, more often than not, the bowl is empty.
It is for the billion or so people suffering from chronic hunger, two thirds of which are in Asia. This is stated in a report by the Asia Society in collaboration with the International Rice Research Institute: Never an Empty Bowl.
Other research presented by the Asia Society and carried out by Doctors Without Borders documents the plight of 195 million children suffering from malnutrition. The Terrifying Normalcy video made by documentary maker Ron Haviv presents their tragic circumstances in Bangladesh.

Of course, this is Bangladesh, a country that no analyst would dare to define as an emerging economy (at least not yet). But scenes of this kind, and often worse ones, are common throughout the region. If only you could venture out of that skyscraper in the financial district and go to the surrounding countryside and villages, or even the slums often found at the feet of these skyscrapers.
Sze Ma Chien, the Chinese historian from the 1st century BC, wrote: “The world rushes where money calls. The world flocks to where earnings are highest”.