Increasing wealth in a wider world

Fareed Zakaria

is the editor of

Newsweek International

Just when you thought that oil couldn't get more expensive, the price is now passing $135 a barrel.

How did we get to this crazy place? It was just 10 years ago that oil was trading at $20 a barrel. In other words, prices have more than quintupled in a decade. Had we asked economists and forecasters what would happen in such a scenario, they would all have said two words: global recession.

That hasn't happened. And it is unlikely to happen just yet. Oil prices are high not because producers are choking off supply, but because consumers - in the United States, Europe, China, India - are increasing demand.

Expensive oil is one facet of the signature trend of our age: global growth. Last year 124 countries around the world grew at more than 4 percent. This year, despite the American slowdown, growth in most of those countries remains robust. While we debate the current financial panic and impending recession, our future is not likely to be shaped by crisis and collapse. The real problems we will face will be the consequence of what I call the "rise of the rest" - the rest of the world, that is.

Look around. It's not just oil that is soaring. Almost every commodity is at a 200-year high. Wheat and rice prices have doubled and then kept on rising over the last two years. In some cases, demand is so high we're actually running out of stuff. Helium, the gas used in balloons and MRI machines, is in short supply globally. And it is the second-most-abundant element in the universe!

The problems of growth are, of course, high-quality problems. But on this scale they are problems we have never really experienced before. We know how to handle a recession. But how do we handle the rise of the rest? That will be the real challenge of the next decade, long after this recession has turned to recovery.