The Seoul G20 conference will presumably draw a veil of bland platitudes over the world’s ugly tensions. France, which guides the process for the next six months, will try to end the bickering over global imbalances. But it should not be forgotten that the discord stems from an underlying rebalancing that is almost wholly positive.

As recently as two decades ago, the world was sharply unbalanced: 20 per cent of the world’s population accounted for 60-80 per cent of the consumption of everything from steel to air transport. The rich-poor gap was narrowing only slowly. In the nine years ending in 2001, the 2.4 per cent annual growth rate of gross domestic product per person in poor countries was only a little faster than the 2.1 per cent in advanced nations, according to the International Monetary Fund.

That changed. The IMF’s World Economic Outlook shows that from 2002 to 2011, the growth rate for poor nations is set to have more than doubled to 5.9 per cent; the rich rate will have almost halved to 1.1 per cent. That shift has created a crude balance: the rich (about 1bn people) now consume a little less electricity, phones and so forth than the enriching (about 6bn).