I recommend having a look at this.

 http://www.gapminder.org/videos/ted-talks/hans-rosling-ted-talk-2007-seemingly-impossible-is-possible/

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http://www.gapminder.org/videos/200-years-that-changed-the-world/

I’d like to see these stats juxtaposed against Natural Capital

To quote George Monbiot

“As we goggle at the fluttering financial figures, a different set of numbers passes us by. On Friday, Pavan Sukhdev, the Deutsche Bank economist leading a European study on ecosystems, reported that we are losing natural capital worth between $2 trillion and $5 trillion every year, as a result of deforestation alone(1). The losses incurred so far by the financial sector amount to between $1 trillion and $1.5 trillion. Sukhdev arrived at his figure by estimating the value of the services - such as locking up carbon and providing freshwater - that forests perform, and calculating the cost of either replacing them or living without them. The credit crunch is petty when compared to the nature crunch.”

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2008/10/14/this-is-what-denial-does/

And bear in mind that back in 1928, Gandhi warned about the unsustainability, on a global scale, of western patterns of consumption. "God forbid that India should ever take to industrialisation after the manner of the west," he said. "The economic imperialism of a single tiny island kingdom [UK] is today keeping the world in chains. If an entire nation of 300 million took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts."

Unfortunately, whilst I think what TED is doing is very important (and after all how long have I spent in developing nations like Africa? No time at all), I suspect that his ‘world is flattening’ view is seriously misguided.

Theodore Dalrymple has spent considerable time in such places, and he’d probably be of similar view to that of Ted.

However, this is what someone said on Amazon online.

Dalrymple is criticised for relying on "personal experience" with little data. This criticism is often made of Dalrymple by people who have no or little experience of anything, and therefore do not value experience. It is also made by people who seem to think that only pseudo-scientific sociologists wearing white coats and armed with meaningless charts and graphs, can offer an "objective" view of society. This is a deeply philosophically illiterate view. Presumably they think that Sebastian Haffner's memoir of the early years of Nazism, in which he described the mass yobbishness and dumbed down idiocy engulfing large sections of German society, is "scientifically" worthless because not backed up by "data" but is only based on "personal experience". Indeed, how did Shakespeare manage without "data"? Well, maybe he was just very intelligent...

Data can miss a lot, whilst Ted has considerable personal experience, I fear that he underestimates the so called moral hazard of Western style consumerism with reference to sustainable resources.