time in human history, a single economic system encircles the globe. Yet, as World Bank President Jim Wolfensohn pointed out in November 1997, more than three billion people live on less than two dollars a day. With population growing at 80 million a year, he warns that, unless we devise a more inclusive system, in thirty years we could see five billion people living on two dollars a day. The trends are ominous. The United Nations reported that, in 1996, the assets held by the world's 358 billionaires exceeded the combined incomes of countries with 45 percent of the world's people, leading U.N. development experts to draw a sobering conclusion: "Development that perpetuates today's inequalities is neither sustainable nor worth sustaining. "If this rich-poor divide is allowed to continue, they report, it will produce a world "gargantuan in its excesses and grotesque in its human and economic inequalities. " The multidimensional impact of