As far as I can see the report is from 2000... Which means that a similar report today might be less optimistic ;-) Granted much of it is still relevant, but it is quite tame. I find that Http://http://www.gapminder.org is much more relevant if you play around with all the possibilities you can see a lot of surprising trends there as well.

Im curious about a thing - Seeing that we Europeans does not get the full effect of the tripling in oil prices, due to the fact that oil is still traded in US"$" and that is almost halved in price over a similar time frame (if you factor in inflation). This means that the US population has in effect gotten a "virtual" tax on gas/petrol/oil just like we Europeans has had for a number of years - You just don't see it as a tax. Does this benefit anyone else than the oil companies ?