Charles Kenny's book Getting Better was featured in a Guardian article by Madeleine Bunting.
From the Article
Despite some gaps in his argument, Charles Kenny's cheerful polemic counters the current development pessimism on aid.
After plenty of aid pessimism, here is a relentlessly cheerful polemic, Getting Better, which is delighting development experts in the US and the UK. Charles Kenny's book celebrates an era of unprecedented human development. Across the globe, millions are now enjoying lives that are markedly better than those of their parents. Not just in China but in Africa and Asia as well, children are not dying at the rate they used to, and they are getting an education when many of their parents did not.
While the critics have carped about the failure of aid and plenty of armchair experts have bemoaned the state of Africa, the true picture, Kenny argues, is of huge improvement. And people in Africa and Asia know it, because the proportion of populations in surveyed countries saying they are happy is steadily rising.
Even some of the poorest countries in the world such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti and Burma have infant mortality rates that are lower than any country achieved in 1900. It's been a century of spectacular progress largely due to women's education and public healthcare. Furthermore, this is not just about the spread of technology, says Kenny, but that "governments are doing a better job at delivering services", so that "the most corrupt and inefficient of countries in Africa are still providing services of a quality and extent far in advance of any country in the world prior to the industrial revolution".