Yale professor Douglas W. Rae opens this lecture from his course Capitalism: Success, Crisis and Reform by critiquing gross domestic product as a measure of societal wellbeing, noting that GDP ignores wealth inequality and can rise alongside socially undesirable conditions. He then introduces the poverty traps described in Paul Collier's book The Bottom Billion, which explains why the poorest developing countries stay stuck while other developing economies grow. Roughly half the session is given over to a recorded talk by Collier himself, who argues that the developed world should look to America's post-WWII reconstruction of Europe as a model for aid, and who discusses trade policy, democracy, and the resource curse that traps oil and mineral rich countries in poor governance. The lecture pairs Rae's economic framing with Collier's policy argument on what rich nations owe, and can do for, the world's poorest billion.