Senior fellow Charles Kenny's book Getting Better was featured in the Huffington Post.
From the Article
"Over the last one hundred years, the physical well being of the world's population has improved far more than in all of the previous natural history of humankind."
Charles Kenny's recent book Getting Better is an antidote to the pessimism many of us feel about the state of the world. Those of us in international development are frustrated we have not been able to find a toolkit of approaches that reliably increases growth in poor countries. Kenny acknowledges this frustration, but shows that many indicators of wellbeing have improved rapidly even in the absence of consistent economic growth:
"Global average life expectancy increased from around thirty-one years in 1900 to sixty-six by 2000."
In terms of GDP, there is an increasing divergence among countries in the world, with many of the poorer falling further and further behind. But with respect to other indicators of wellbeing, there is a striking convergence. Infant mortality has plunged by over half in eighty percent of the world's poor countries in the last fifty years. Literacy rates in sub-Saharan Africa rose from 28 to 61 percent from 1970 to 2000. Some very poor countries such as Vietnam have achieved 95% literacy. Democratic ideas and practices are spreading rapidly (notwithstanding big setbacks and uneven progress), and violence is way down: global homicide levels, for example, are about one-third of what they were in England in the Middle Ages.