Industrial, agricultural, and financial elites who gained through several decades of import-substitution policies now outgrew their training wheels and restraints. Reasonable growth and considerable accumulation by this class gave them the confidence to exert their own class interests over the needs of their population. Many of the most aggressive leaders of this class had been born toward the end of the era of full-blown imperialism. They had experienced neither colonialism nor anticolonialism. The structures that enabled them to flourish now seemed to be shackles. The intellectual leaders of this class spent time in international institutions (such as the IMF and the World Bank) . Here, these intellectuals experienced the change from a Keynesian development model (that the state should intervene to create demand by social welfare and social wage policies) to a monetarist accumulation one (that the state should withdraw to the simple function of managing the money supply and ensuring low levels of inflation). People such as India's Montek Ahluwalia and Manmohan Singh as well as Venezuela's Moises Nairn and Miguel Rodriquez are good examples of this tendency. In addition, migrants to the advanced industrial states who made good turned their capital and expertise to the homeland during the era of stagflation in their host countries; people such as India' s Sam Pitroda and Taiwan's Miin Wu brought their skills and worldview to bear on the development of the new information technology sector in their homelands. This infusion of skills and business philosophies enthused the emergent bourgeoisie in the darker nations, which saw the future through their eyes rather than the lens of the Third World agenda. This class was not motivated to become an economic proxy for the Atlantic powers. It believed in its capacity and wanted the opportunity to flourish.

The Third World agenda understood that the economic suffocation of the darker nations came not only from abstract economic principles but crucially because these principles had been set up through the political intervention of powerful actors. The rules of international trade, for instance, were not simply those of an a priori economic theory but were devised by the powerful to suit their interests. Because of this analysis, any reform had to be both about the politics of the economy (who writes the rules) and the economics of politics (who holds the economic muscle to allow themselves to write the rules) . The interrelationship between economics and politics defined the work of the Third World agenda.

challenged the new states to abjure the divisive techniques of colonial administrators as well as transform cultural differences from a liability to an asset