
In "Getting Better," Charles Kenny reveals how global development is succeeding despite common pessimism. Bill Easterly and Duncan Green praise Kenny's optimistic, evidence-based approach showing dramatic improvements in health and education worldwide. Discover why infant mortality has halved since 1960 - it's not just economic growth.
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What if everything you believed about global poverty was wrong? Not slightly off, but fundamentally backwards? While we obsess over income gaps and economic failures, something extraordinary has been unfolding across the planet. Children in countries with stagnant economies are surviving diseases that would have killed them decades ago. Girls whose mothers never saw a classroom are graduating from school. People in nations we label "poor" are living longer, healthier lives than the wealthy did a century ago. This isn't wishful thinking or cherry-picked data-it's the most underreported story of our time. The paradox is striking: as the income gap between rich and poor nations has exploded to 127:1, the gap in what actually matters-health, education, freedom-has been quietly closing. The numbers seem damning at first glance. In 1850, the richest countries earned 4.5 times more than the poorest. Today? That ratio has ballooned to 127:1. Economists call it "Divergence, Big Time," and it's real. Both political extremes point to this chasm as proof of their worldviews-the right dismissing poor nations as hopeless, the left blaming Western exploitation. They're both missing what's happening beneath the surface.