The golden billion () theory is a conspiracy theory that a cabal of global elites are pulling strings to amass wealth for the world's richest billion people at the expense of the rest of humanity. It is popular in the Russian-speaking world. The term was coined by Anatoly Tsikunov (writing as A. Kuzmich) in his 1990 book The Plot of World Government: Russia and the Golden Billion and used in his articles. The term was quickly popularized by Russian writer Sergey Kara-Murza and has become a staple of contemporary Russian conspiratorial thought. Details The idea of a world with finite resources is not new; the early Christian theologian Tertullian, who lived in 1st–2nd centuries AD wrote: "The strongest witness is the vast population of the earth to which we are a burden and she scarcely can provide for our needs; as our demands grow greater, our complaints against Nature's inadequacy are heard by all. The scourges of pestilence, famine, wars and earthquakes have come to be regarded as a blessing to overcrowded nations since they serve to prune away the luxuriant growth of the human race." Thomas Malthus took this idea further, predicting inevitable Malthusian catastrophes caused by exhaustion of natural resources that would collapse population growth. According to Kara-Murza, the golden billion (population of developed countries) consumes the lion's share of all resources on the planet. If at least half of the global population begins to consume resources to the same extent, these resources wouldn't be sufficient. This is partly based on the ideas of Malthus, in that emphasis is placed on the scarcity of natural resources. However, whereas Malthus was mostly concerned with finite global crop yields, anti-globalists that advocate the idea of a "golden billion" are mostly concerned with finite natural resources such as fossil fuels and metal. According to Kara-Murza, the developed countries, while preserving for their nationals a high level of consumption, endorse political, military and economic measures designed to keep the rest of the world in an industrially undeveloped state and as a raw-material appendage area for the dumping of hazardous waste and as a source of cheap labor. The theory, which holds that the wealth of the West, including that of the lower classes, is mostly based on exploitation of the former colonies in the third world, is not new in Russia, where it was first popularized by Vladimir Lenin, in Imperialism, the