■"Half Worldís People to Live in Cities by 2007," by Irwin Arieff, Reuters, 15 February 2005, pulled off web (Yahoo news).

World goes majority urban in 2007. U.S. did it around 1920 and a generation later, we had an entirely new political landscape. Same will be true for world.

As I explore in the PNM Blueprint for Action, shrinking the Gap is one big exercise in successfully bringing the population from rural to urban, connecting these people to larger opportunities in the process. This urbanization process is a huge tipping point moment. We are on the verge of shrinking the Gap because the Gap is on the verge of so many things that we need to help these nations achieve, with security obviously being at the top of the list.

Right now about 75% of the Old Core lives in cities, but far less than half do in the Gap. Where are the biggest cities of the future? Most are New Core giant metropolises found in places like China, India, Brazil, Mexico. This is an obvious tipping point process.

Shrinking the Gap means growing ìcoresî all over the place, and theyíre called successful cities that process all that ambition and connect it to something larger, and that something larger is the global economy, or the only thing capable of taking advantage of all that potential comparative advantage.