The Emerging-World Consumer Is King

Intelligence agencies seldom take a sunny view of the world. Yet the latest report from America’s National Intelligence Council (“Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds”) is rather cheerful. The council frets about threats ranging from cyber-sabotage to nuclear holocaust (in a brilliant piece of understatement it warns that “Russia could become a very troublesome country”). But it argues that the most important trend in the coming decades will be the growth of the global middle class.