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States. A Nebraskan sporting goods store can source from China, sell to Europe, and have its checkbooks balanced by accountants in Bangalore. Companies now use dozens of countries as parts of a chain that buys, manufactures, assembles, markets, and sells goods.
    Since the 1980s, these three forces—politics, economics, and technology—have pushed in the same direction to produce a more open, connected, exacting international environment. But they have also given countries everywhere fresh opportunities to start moving up the ladder of growth and prosperity.
    Consider the sea change in two representative (non-Asian) countries. Twenty years ago, Brazil and Turkey would have been considered typical “developing” countries, with sluggish growth, rampant inflation, spiraling debt, an anemic private sector, and a fragile political system. Today, both are well managed and boast historically low inflation, vigorous growth rates, falling debt levels, a thriving private sector, and increasingly stable democratic institutions. Brazil’s inflation rate is now, for the first time in history, in the same ballpark as that of the United States. Brazil and Turkey still have problems—what country doesn’t?—but they are serious nations on the rise.
    More generally, the story of the last quarter century has primarily been one of extraordinary growth. The size of the global economy doubled every ten years or so, going from $31 trillion in 1999 to $62 trillion in 2010, and inflation stayed surprisingly and persistently low. Economic growth reached new regions. While Western families moved into bigger homes and bought laptops and cell phones, subsistence farmers in Asia and Latin America found new jobs in rapidly growing cities. Even in Africa, people were able to tap into a global market to sell their goods. Everywhere, prices fell while wealth in the form of stocks, bonds, and real estate soared.
    The Problems of Plenty

    For the last two decades, we have spent much time, energy, and attention worrying about crises and breakdown in the global economy and terrorism, nuclear blackmail, and war in geopolitics. This is natural—preparing for the worst can help avert it. And we have indeed had bad news—from wars in the Balkans and Africa, to terrorism around the world, to economic crises in East Asia, Russia, and—most dramatically—the United States. But focusing on the breakdowns has also left us unprepared for many of the largest problems we face: which are the product not of failure but of success . The fact that we have experienced decades of synchronous global growth is good news, but it has also raised a series of complex and potentially lethal dilemmas.
    Consider oil prices. It’s only a dim memory now, but in 2008 the cost of a barrel climbed upward at a dizzying rate. After years of hovering in the $25–$50 range, oil hit nearly $150 in mid-2008, and a Goldman Sachs analyst predicted it would reach $200 the following year. The oil shock of the naughts was different from previous ones. In the past, prices rose because oil producers—OPEC—artificially restricted supply and thus forced up the cost of gasoline. By contrast, prices rose in 2008 because of demand from China, India, and other emerging markets, as well as the continuing, massive demand in the developed world. If prices are rising because economies are growing, it means that economies have the vigor and flexibility to handle increased costs by improving productivity (and, to a lesser extent, by passing them on to consumers). As a result, the price hikes of the naughts were far more easily digested than, say, those of the 1970s. Had we asked our fortune-teller in 2001 to assess the effect of a quadrupling in oil prices, he would have surely predicted a massive global recession.
    It wasn’t just oil that became more expensive. Commodity prices reached a 200-year high in 2008. Agricultural produce grew so expensive that developing countries faced a political problem