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"The meek shall inherit the earth" — that seems to be the latest message from the United Nations Development Program.

Their 2013 Human Development Report chronicles the recent, rapid expansion of the middle class in the developing world. It also predicts that over the next two decades growth in the so-called "Global South" will dramatically shift economic and political power away from Europe and North America.

The report projects that by 2020 the combined gross domestic products of Brazil, China and India will exceed the entire output of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Great Britain and the U.S. put together.

"Much of this expansion is being driven by new trade and technology partnerships within the South itself," according to the report.

And this is translating into more than just financial gains in the developing world. According to UNDP, every country surveyed — and just about every nation on earth was sampled — improved the health, education and income of its citizens over the last decade.

Bill Orme, a spokesman for UNDP, says the report finds that economic growth and human growth are inextricably linked. He says government investment in key social sectors is crucial in moving nations forward.

"Even if your only goal is to boost your economic output, what you need to do is invest in your people," ," Orme says. "You need to invest in education ... health ... governance structures that allow people to affect their lives on the community, local and national level. And if you do all those things right, economic progress will follow."

The other key factor for nations trying to get ahead in the 21st century is globalization.

"This report shows that engagement with the world economy is good for you," Orme says. "That is to say that countries that have the most interaction with global trade have better standards of living for their people."

Standards of living are improving not just in the big developing nations — Brazil, China, India for example — but also in smaller countries such as Bangladesh, Chile, Ghana, Mauritius, Tunisia and Rwanda.

The report projects that over the next two decades the size of the middle class will increase modestly in North America and it will actually go down in Europe. But it will boom in Asia from 525 million to 3.2 billion people.

"The meek shall inherit the earth" — that seems to be the latest message from the United Nations Development Program.

Their 2013 Human Development Report chronicles the recent, rapid expansion of the middle class in the developing world. It also predicts that over the next two decades growth in the so-called "Global South" will dramatically shift economic and political power away from Europe and North America.

The report projects that by 2020 the combined gross domestic products of Brazil, China and India will exceed the entire output of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Great Britain and the U.S. put together.

"Much of this expansion is being driven by new trade and technology partnerships within the South itself," according to the report.

And this is translating into more than just financial gains in the developing world. According to UNDP, every country surveyed — and just about every nation on earth was sampled — improved the health, education and income of its citizens over the last decade.

Bill Orme, a spokesman for UNDP, says the report finds that economic growth and human growth are inextricably linked. He says government investment in key social sectors is crucial in moving nations forward.

"Even if your only goal is to boost your economic output, what you need to do is invest in your people," ," Orme says. "You need to invest in education ... health ... governance structures that allow people to affect their lives on the community, local and national level. And if you do all those things right, economic progress will follow."

The other key factor for nations trying to get ahead in the 21st century is globalization.

"This report shows that engagement with the world economy is good for you," Orme says. "That is to say that countries that have the most interaction with global trade have better standards of living for their people."

Standards of living are improving not just in the big developing nations — Brazil, China, India for example — but also in smaller countries such as Bangladesh, Chile, Ghana, Mauritius, Tunisia and Rwanda.

The report projects that over the next two decades the size of the middle class will increase modestly in North America and it will actually go down in Europe. But it will boom in Asia from 525 million to 3.2 billion people.

The new boom in natural gas from shale has changed the energy economy of the United States. But there's another giant reservoir of natural gas that lies under the ocean floor that, theoretically, could dwarf the shale boom.

No one had tapped this gas from the seabed until this week, when Japanese engineers pulled some up through a well from under the Pacific. The gas at issue here is called methane hydrate. Methane is natural gas; hydrate means there's water in it. In this case, the molecules of gas are trapped inside a sort of cage of water molecules.

Few people have actually seen methane hydrates, but Ann Cook, a geophysicist at Ohio State University, is one of the few.

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"It manifests itself in these instruments because they allow the banks to use all kinds of tricks to borrow more and to hide all the risk in borrowing that happens. And so they can manipulate the regulation and they can actually be riskier than they appear, and all of this is just living on the edge and not being prepared enough, with your own money, indeed, to various eventualities, to what might happen."

On new regulations and banks' resistance to carrying more equity

"So the requirements now, which the regulators will tell you are so tough, actually still allow the banks to use borrowed money for 97 percent of their investment and have just 3 percent equity, so even if it's a little bit, just a little bit more of a buffer, it's still not a healthy place to be. ...

"If they find that they cannot live with much more equity, then we have to wonder about their business model and the viability of having such a banking system that possibly is quite bloated and is distorting the rest of the economy. If the only way they can live is on subsidized borrowing, then we have to be concerned about why that is."

On what would make the banking system more stable

“ The banks that cannot raise new equity are showing us a great weakness. ... The time to take care of that is now, and not in a crisis.