The greatest economic boom ever?
money.cnn.com
money.cnn.com
Another part of it is the economic modernizing going on - 2 years ago when I was in Manila, Philippines, you needed to have cash when shopping or eating out, and houses/condos were sold for cash (you had 48 monthly payments at 0% interest at the end of which you owned the place).
When I was there a few months ago, you could get mortgages up to 20 years long and the bug bundle of cash I brought was irrelevant - every store except street vendors took credit cards.
Danger is that the increases in real estate worldwide could give us the mother of all asset bubbles, everywhere, simultaneously.
This is pretty obvious.
What isn't obvious is why the developing world grows so slowly in spite of the multitude of available improvements from the first world. The article mentions looking for 20% growth in some countries. Is that really a high number considering people in the US is 40X richer than Eritrea? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PPP...
Increasing freedom is important here, clearly. Increased ease of communication must be playing a roll.
One thing I've never understood is why it seems people don't try to make much money off of the poorest 5B people. If you tap that market, the growth potential is ginormous. This reminds me of an excellent article about design for the world's poor. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/29/science/29cheap.html?ex=11...
http://www.okananter.com/wordpress/?p=21
http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/140
As for marketing to the poor, I don't follow your reasoning. It strikes me as obvious that it's easier and a better ROI to make money from those who have some to spare than from those who don't. As currently underdeveloped countries get richer, more people will try and sell to them.
Are you talking about positioning now so you'll reap the rewards when these countries get richer? That's not making money on the poor; it's investing money on advertising to them so you can hopefully get it back when they get rich enough to be potential customers. I wonder how many of the people in the position to make such a decision will look that far into the future. They should be looking to maximize shareholder value, and who invests looking for a ROI event 50 years from now?
[Edit: Of course I see why serving this market would be motivating, and I'm not saying it can't be profitable.]
The second greatest economic boom started around 1910 with the coming widespread deployment of automobiles, airplanes, indoor plumbing, refrigeration, radio and telephones.
Fortunately they seem to occur at increasingly small intervals.
He has an interesting plot where he takes a number of opinions about the most important events ever (e.g. fire, farming, etc.), and plots them all on a logarithmic time plot. The line fit to the 20 or so opinions is very apparent.