This TED Talk features President of the World Bank, Jim Yong Kim, recorded live at TED-2017.

I just want to share with you what I have been experiencing over the last five years

and having the great privilege of traveling to many of the poorest countries in the world.

This scene is one I see all the time everywhere.

And these young children are looking at a smartphone,

and the smartphone is having a huge impact in even the poorest countries.

I said to my team, you know, what I see is a rise of aspirations all over the world.

In fact, it seems to me that there's a convergence of aspirations.

And I asked a team of economists to actually look into this.

You know, is this true?

Are our aspirations converging all around the world?

So they looked at things like Gallup polls about satisfaction in life.

And what they learned was that if you have access to the Internet, your satisfaction

goes up.

But another thing happens that's very important.

Your reference income, the income to which you compare your own,

also goes up.

Now, if the reference income of a nation, for example,

goes up 10% by comparing themselves to the outside,

then on average, people's own incomes have to go up

at least 5% to maintain the same level of

satisfaction. But when you get down into the lower percentiles of income, your income has to

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