True altruism is hard to find.
Dr. Amron tries to solve problems from one point of view, but ultimately cannot reconcile that perspective with the facts that the islanders help him understand. It seems that the illusion of business enterprise and sustainable economy is really just a front for big world businesses to exploit the island of its resources.
Reconciling past evil is unlikely.
Instead of showing a world peace summit where everyone talks things over and shakes hands, we see a loud minority, the Bournehills communities, screaming about true evil and injustice. That is a radical image, so radical in fact that they celebrate Cuffee Ned almost like a religious figure, a figure that represents the reality of the past, the remembrance of cruel, abominable mistreatment, and an awareness that the same efforts are continuing under new, sneaky pretenses. All the while, Dr. Amron's eyes are opened to these things until finally he concludes that infrastructure or not, the real problem is the way world powers treat island nations as resources, as second-class civilizations. That problem is a problem of moral evil, and it's one that is so inextricably tied to political power that it will never change, Amron worries.
Thriving economies often depend on exploitation.
It's true in this novel, and it's often true in real life, that whenever someone is getting really rich, someone else is getting very, very poor. The novel shows this dynamic from colonial terms, showing how world interests are secretly trying to steal the nation's value through the guise of global trade, a new colonialism, so to speak.
