I wonder why people talk about wanting to go back to the rice paddies and huts smaller than their living rooms?

I admit living like that is interesting (I have done it), but that is until you get malaria and have to sell you children because the harvest failed.

All over the world, people who live a subsistence life style tend to do so because they are structurally marginalized by elites who control the wealth of the region and have a vested interest in keeping people in poverty because, if they weren't there, they wouldn't be too malnourished and too busy staying alive to organize a resistance against such oppression, which would leave the oppressors less rich and powerful than before.

Self determination is not as simple for most of the world as it was for us here in America. Our colonial overlords were an ocean away, overextended and had less resources than we did. Of course we won the revolutionary war. We knew the land better, had plenty of resources on hand, and were willing to brake the rules and fight an insurgency the likes of which the British empire was not able to deal with. Oh, and we had a lot of help from the French.

For just about everyone else, it is a lot more complicated. When you you work 18 hours everyday just to stay alive (with varying success), fighting off brutal regimes and non-state actors that know where you live and can deploy coercive power with good effect on target in a matter of hours gets a lot harder. This is why places like Burma, Laos, the DRC, Somalia, Sudan, North Korea...etc, don't have very high chances of winning a positive peace.

The question is how are we going to explain to our children that we let millions of people all over the world die because we didn't want to do get involved.
It's like passing a sexual assault in progress and pretending you didn't see anything. The only thing worse is assuming a life in poverty and oppression is somehow beautiful because it is closer to nature.