[rogerbinns]

I'm glad he didn't take the doom and gloom approach. We do keep seeing the bad side (overpopulation, disease, environmental degradation, wars etc) but slowly and surely the opposite has been happening. Prosperity has been improving things for (virtually) everyone, not just a few westerners. And people do strange things once prosperous - they protect the environment, have more greenery (compare richer versus poorer neighbourhoods), buy organic, electric cars, contribute to charity etc. The question is can we continue to improve prosperity, and there is no reason to believe it won't keep happening. Matt Ridley of "The Rational Optimist" has a lot of material to substantiate that.

Here is a quick TED talk and a transcript of the opening to get you going.

http://www.ted.com/talks/matt_ridley_when_ideas_have_sex.htm...

"When I was a student here in Oxford in the 1970s, the future of the world was bleak. The population explosion was unstoppable. Global famine was inevitable. A cancer epidemic caused by chemicals in the environment was going to shorten our lives. The acid rain was falling on the forests. The desert was advancing by a mile or two a year. The oil was running out, and a nuclear winter would finish us off. None of those things happened, (Laughter) and astonishingly, if you look at what actually happened in my lifetime, the average per-capita income of the average person on the planet, in real terms, adjusted for inflation, has tripled. Lifespan is up by 30 percent in my lifetime. Child mortality is down by two-thirds. Per-capita food production is up by a third. And all this at a time when the population has doubled."