Getting Better
Why Global Development Is Succeeding and How We Can Improve the World Even More
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Summary
In a world often overshadowed by pessimism, Charles Kenny brings a beacon of hope with "Getting Better," a vibrant testament to humanity's triumphs. Amid the noise of failed economic theories, Kenny champions a narrative of global upliftment, where the humble vaccine and the whispered promise of political freedom ignite a revolution in well-being. This isn't a tale of utopia but a celebration of tangible advancements—where health, education, and liberty have found fertile ground across continents. Kenny's insights reveal a planet transformed, urging us to harness this momentum for even greater strides. A manifesto for optimists, this book challenges the cynics, proving that the arc of progress is not only possible but profoundly underway.
Introduction
Picture an African village at dawn in the 1960s versus today. Fifty years ago, nearly half the children born might not see their fifth birthday. Schools were scarce, clean water a luxury, and basic medical care often nonexistent. Fast forward to our current era, and witness a transformation that has quietly unfolded across the developing world. The same village likely now boasts primary schools filled with both boys and girls, vaccination programs that have virtually eliminated diseases like smallpox and polio, and access to mobile phones connecting remote communities to the global economy. This remarkable yet underreported story challenges one of our most persistent assumptions about global development. While economists and policymakers have long measured progress primarily through GDP growth and income statistics, a parallel revolution in human wellbeing has been taking place. Life expectancy has soared, literacy rates have climbed dramatically, and democratic institutions have spread to corners of the world once dominated by authoritarian rule. These improvements have occurred not just in rapidly growing economies, but even in countries that have seen minimal income growth. For anyone seeking to understand the real trajectory of human progress, this analysis offers both hope and practical wisdom. It reveals why traditional measures of development tell only part of the story, and how the spread of simple technologies and ideas has proven more transformative than grand economic theories predicted.
The Income Divergence Crisis: When Money Measures Failed Development
The tale of global development in the post-colonial era begins with a sobering mathematical reality. Since 1950, the gap between the world's richest and poorest countries has widened dramatically. While the Netherlands enjoyed a GDP per capita of around $2,400 in 1850, by 2008 it had reached nearly $25,000. Meanwhile, countries like Congo-Zaire recorded incomes of just $249 per capita, creating a wealth gap that has expanded from roughly 33-fold to over 127-fold between the richest and poorest nations. This divergence pattern extends beyond absolute numbers to reveal sticky economic realities. Nepal, the poorest country with available data in 1820, remains among the bottom three today. Nine of the fifteen richest countries from 1820 still occupy the top tier two centuries later. The persistence of these rankings suggests that small initial advantages compound over time in ways that traditional economic models struggle to explain. What makes this particularly puzzling is that the initial gap in 1820 was merely $1,441 between rich and poor countries, an amount that modern economies can generate in mere years of growth. Africa presents the most dramatic case of this income stagnation. Many African countries today record per capita incomes lower than Britain during Roman times, with average continental income resembling Western Europe in 1850. Between 1960 and 1999, sub-Saharan Africa's income grew from $477 to just $561 per person, while high-income countries surged from $13,000 to $31,000. This created a perception of comprehensive developmental failure that has dominated policy discussions for decades. Yet focusing exclusively on income statistics obscures a more complex reality. The mathematical precision of GDP figures masks significant measurement challenges, from purchasing power adjustments to the difficulty of comparing economies across different time periods and consumption patterns. More fundamentally, this narrow focus fails to capture whether people are actually living better lives, regardless of their monetary income.
Escaping Malthusian Traps: Technology and Ideas Transform Lives Globally
The specter of Thomas Malthus loomed large over development thinking for centuries, predicting that human populations would inevitably outstrip food production, creating cycles of famine and misery. Writing in 1798, Malthus envisioned populations exploding whenever resources became available, only to be checked by "gigantic inevitable famine" and disease. This grim scenario seemed to offer a scientific explanation for persistent global poverty and suggested limited hope for improvement. Yet the twentieth century witnessed humanity's definitive escape from this trap through technological revolution. Global food production tripled while population only doubled, creating unprecedented abundance. The Green Revolution introduced improved crop varieties that spread across continents, while advances in agricultural techniques freed economies from the constraint of limited arable land. Countries could now feed growing populations through trade and efficiency rather than territorial expansion alone. The transformation extended far beyond agriculture to encompass a broader technological revolution in health and survival. Simple innovations like vaccination, water purification, and basic sanitation spread globally with remarkable speed. These technologies required neither massive infrastructure investments nor high incomes to implement effectively. A village could dramatically reduce child mortality through hand washing, oral rehydration therapy, and insecticide-treated bed nets, regardless of its GDP per capita. Perhaps most significantly, the demographic patterns that Malthus observed began reversing worldwide. As child mortality declined, families voluntarily reduced birth rates, creating a demographic transition toward smaller, healthier families. This shift occurred not because of government mandates or economic incentives, but because parents adapted their behavior when they could reasonably expect their children to survive to adulthood. The result was a global escape from the population-resource trap that had constrained human societies for millennia, setting the stage for unprecedented improvements in living standards.
Quality of Life Convergence: Health, Education and Rights Revolution Since 1950
While income gaps between countries have widened, a remarkable convergence has occurred across virtually every other measure of human wellbeing. Life expectancy, once dramatically different between rich and poor nations, has seen the developing world rapidly catching up. Countries with the lowest life expectancy in 1950 achieved only half the lifespan of the highest performers, but by 1999 this ratio had improved to two-thirds, representing millions of saved lives and reduced suffering. The education revolution proved equally dramatic. In 1900, the least educated countries saw adults averaging less than two months of schooling, while the most educated averaged over seven years, a forty-fold difference. By 2000, this gap had narrowed to roughly four-to-one, as basic literacy evolved from an elite privilege to a near-universal expectation. Primary school enrollment climbed from under 50 percent globally in 1950 to nearly 90 percent by the century's end, with the fastest progress occurring in previously disadvantaged regions. Democratic governance and human rights experienced similar convergence patterns. The proportion of people living under highly autocratic regimes fell from 37 percent in 1820 to just 1 percent by 2000, while the percentage enjoying full democratic rights rose from zero to over 20 percent. This transformation reflected not just institutional changes but shifting global norms about acceptable governance, as ideas about individual rights and popular sovereignty spread across cultures and continents. These improvements shared several crucial characteristics that distinguished them from income growth. They followed similar timelines across countries regardless of economic performance, suggesting common underlying drivers. They proved remarkably resilient to economic downturns, continuing even during periods of income stagnation or decline. Most importantly, they demonstrated that dramatic improvements in human welfare could occur without waiting for broader economic transformation, offering hope for continued progress even in the world's poorest regions.
Building Better Futures: Policies for Sustainable Global Progress
The evidence of widespread progress in human wellbeing, even amid persistent income disparities, points toward a fundamentally different approach to development policy. Rather than focusing exclusively on GDP growth, governments and international organizations can achieve remarkable results by prioritizing the direct delivery of health, education, and rights protections. Simple interventions like vaccination campaigns, primary school construction, and legal reforms often prove more immediately effective than complex economic restructuring programs. The key insight lies in understanding how ideas and technologies spread differently than institutional changes. While the complex governance systems that drive economic growth resist easy transfer between countries, basic health knowledge and educational approaches can leap across borders with remarkable speed. A mother in rural Bangladesh can learn oral rehydration therapy as easily as one in urban Brazil, and both can apply this life-saving knowledge regardless of their country's economic policies or institutional capacity. This pattern suggests that development assistance achieves greatest impact when focused on proven, scalable interventions rather than ambitious institutional reforms. Conditional cash transfer programs that pay families to keep children in school have succeeded across diverse contexts from Mexico to Cambodia. Mass vaccination campaigns have eliminated diseases like smallpox globally and brought polio to the brink of eradication. Social marketing techniques that change behaviors around sanitation and health practices have reduced child mortality rates dramatically in communities worldwide. Looking forward, the greatest opportunities may lie in accelerating these proven approaches rather than searching for new development paradigms. The convergence in quality of life indicators suggests that continued progress is not only possible but likely, provided that policies focus on making basic services more accessible and affordable. The goal should be to ensure that the remarkable progress of the past half-century continues reaching the remaining pockets of deprivation, while preparing for new challenges like climate change that may threaten these hard-won gains.
Summary
The central paradox of modern development reveals itself in the contrast between economic stagnation and human flourishing. While monetary measures show growing gaps between rich and poor countries, virtually every other indicator of human wellbeing demonstrates remarkable convergence and improvement. This disconnect suggests that our traditional focus on GDP growth, while important, has obscured one of history's greatest success stories: the dramatic improvement in health, education, and rights for billions of people worldwide. The driving force behind this transformation has been the global spread of simple, low-cost technologies and ideas rather than complex economic systems. Vaccination programs, basic education, oral rehydration therapy, and democratic ideals have proven remarkably portable across cultures and economic systems. These innovations have allowed even the world's poorest communities to achieve living standards that would have been impossible for the wealthy just generations ago, fundamentally altering what constitutes a decent human life. This historical pattern offers profound lessons for contemporary policy. First, progress in human welfare need not wait for broader economic transformation, suggesting that targeted interventions can yield immediate benefits. Second, the most effective development strategies often involve scaling up proven, simple solutions rather than implementing complex institutional reforms. Finally, the convergence in quality of life indicators provides realistic grounds for optimism about continued global progress, even if income inequality persists. The challenge ahead lies not in discovering new development paradigms, but in ensuring that the remarkable advances of recent decades reach every corner of human society while building resilience against emerging global threats.
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By Charles Kenny
