For the foreseeable future, India and China are going to dominate the world economy. (Get your India shirt here.)

Europe and Japan are tired. America is distracted.

It gives me no pleasure to note this. I'm an American after all. But those are the facts.

Yet there is a real, glowing bright side to them.

You see it when you do some math.

(This is a parody.)

The West, as presently understood (including Japan) contains maybe 700 million people. China and Japan, between them, contain roughly 2.3 billion people.

The world contains, by the most recent estimate, 6 billion people.

What this means is that, for the first time (to my knowledge), roughly half the people of the world have a real potential stake in the world economy. They can learn, they may find good jobs, they can even start businesses and succeed beyond the dreams of avarice.

Their stakes are small, their chances slim, but that's all most people really want, after all - a chance. That's what Americans always tell themselves, anyway.

Besides, it happens. It's happening right now in East Asia, and in South Asia, just as it has happened for years in Atlanta, and in Paris, and in Tokyo. People are getting rich, others are getting comfortable, for the first time in their lives. More may become so, and millions more see the chance of comfort before them.

The problems of the world are still massive, even overwhelming. But for the first time half of the world's people have a real, vital stake in solving them.

It's the most hopeful thought imaginable. It could be that our time, the early 21st century, will be the turning point on which the world's history pivots.