We read this in our college reading club several years ago. It's an excellent book to read along with Niall Ferguson's War of the World: Twentieth Century Conflict and Descent of the West and The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein. Chua's basic premise is that ethnic economic disparities that often arise in times of economic progress lead to ethnic strife during economic instability. Market dominant ethnic majorities become much richer even as ethnic majority poor get marginally better off. As an example, Chua cites the Chinese entrepreneurs in the Philippines who represent 1-2% of the population, yet own a vast majority of the businesses and wealth. She argues that for the United States to export free-market capitalism while promoting and exporting democracy is inherently destabilizing because the democratized poor majority will try to retake the wealth from the capitally dominant ethnic minority and this leads to disaster.
