I glanced through the first section of the America/Europe thing and I'm not impressed by the cherry-picked statistics and the fact that the author unflinchingly used the phrase "distribution of wealth" when addressing the disparity between the rich and the poor without addressing the standard of living of the poor (which he may well have gone on to do). I'll give it a more serious read later, but so far, as you predicted, I'm ah, disagreeing with the claims and assumptions that I've read so far.