The world in which we live is changing faster and faster. It is particularly true in the realms of economic development and technology.

As recently as the 1960s, all developing countries looked almost the same: massive poverty, rampant disease, periodic extreme economic crises, high population growth, low levels of education and health care, low economic growth, absence of infrastructure, and so on. There seemed little basis for optimism. But in the next thirty-five years, the economic map changed dramatically. Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore joined the ranks of the developed countries. The economies of China, India, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam began growing very fast. In the past eighteen years, the poverty rate in Viet nam has fallen from 58 percent to 20 percent. Globalization, despite its shortcomings, is producing changes around the world that could not even be imagined a generation ago.

We can always make educated guesses about what the future holds for the nations of the developing world. But past experience shows that, when countries are ripe for change, they can improve far faster than our educated guesses suggest. In particular, dramatic changes in technology are driving today's ultra-rapid rate of change. In the past, it took entire generations for social and political changes to impact people's thinking. Now new ideas can spread across the globe not in years but in months, even days, even seconds.

This is good news and also bad news. Improvements in technology, advances in democracy, and new problem-solving techniques can spread faster than ever, bringing benefits to millions of people. But we can create disasters very fast, too. If we are lucky enough to have a great leader in a major country of the world, people around the globe can benefit from his leadership immediately. If we are unlucky and have a bad leader in a highly influential country, the whole world may suffer from turmoil, economic dislocation, and war. Soundness of governance, global as well as national, is more important in todays fast-moving, interconnected world than ever before.

Today's rapid pace of change makes it crucial that we, as individual citizens, have a clear idea as to where we want our world to go. If we hope to find and stay on the right course, we must agree on the basic features of the world we want to create. And we must think big, as big as we dare to imagine—lest we waste the unprecedented opportunities that the world is offering us. Let us dream the wildest possible dreams and then pursue them.