Name: Getting Better
Author: Charles Kenny

What’s in it for me? Understand how the world – contrary to common belief – is becoming a better place.

People around the world are horrified by the extent of poverty and the growing gap between the rich and the poor. And it’s true: rich countries are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer.

However, it’s wrong to proclaim that things are bad and only getting worse with each successive generation. In fact, the average quality of life is at an historical high. People might not be equally wealthy in all parts of the world, but wealth might not be everything that matters.

In the following blinks, you’ll learn:

why our average quality of life is steadily getting higher and higher,
why there is no one method to help a country grow its wealth,
why pessimism is not the only possible answer to current global economic development, and
what we can do to make the world an even better place.

The income gap between rich and poor countries around the globe is nothing new.

Most people know that there is not only an income gap within economies but also across different countries. But do you know how large this gap actually is?

Here’s a fact that’ll shock you: around 1 billion people in the world live on less than a dollar a day.

But how is this possible when Western countries have developed so much over the past fifty years?

One reason is that there has been a forty-year stagnation in African incomes since the 1960s. For example, Senegal had an income per capita of $1,776 in 1960 and $1,407 in 2004. The gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in the United States, in contrast, was around seven times greater than in Senegal in 1960 and around twenty-six times larger in 2004. And while the average rural Zambian can expect to earn an approximate lifetime income of about $10,000, the average resident of New York City will earn $4.5 million.

Another reason why the gap is so large is that rich countries have always grown more rapidly than poor countries have.

In fact, the richest-poorest gap between countries grew from around thirty-three-fold in 1950 to around 127-fold today.

For example, in 1850, the Netherlands was the richest country in the world, with an income per capita of $2,371. In 2008, income per capita in the Netherlands was $24,695, while in that same year, in Congo-Zaire, income per capita was only $249. Or consider India in the 1990s: in 1993, India's bottom 40-percent had an income comparable to that of an English peasant in the 1400s!

Now that you know more about the actual gap between the richest and poorest countries in the world, you understand how lucky you are if you live in one of the richer countries.

There is no golden rule to help a country get on the path toward economic development.

Did you know that economists do not have a master plan for launching poor countries toward sustained economic growth?

This is because economic growth theories simply do not work. The main problem is that economic growth theories generally assume all countries work alike. But in fact, most theories do not accurately fit the evidence on the ground, and therefore don’t tell us much about the causes of economic growth.

We are globally experiencing a rapid and historically unprecedented progress in quality of life.

Have you ever considered that most of us today are living lives that our ancestors only a hundred years ago couldn’t have even imagined?

In fact, when we look at almost any measure of quality of life – except income – we observe rapid and massive worldwide progress.

Quality of life is more important than income development.

Most people think that income growth is the central factor when it comes to measuring development. But aren’t they forgetting about the development of quality of life?

In fact, income growth is not the best indicator of progress. This common misconception is due to the confusion of economic growth with “development.”

Key ideas in Getting Better

What is Getting Better about?

As pessimists talk of an economic development crisis, author Charles Kenny is optimistic in his assessment that in fact, all over the world, we’ve made enormous progress in overall quality of life. Getting Better shows that the spread of technology and ideas has fostered a revolution of happiness and standard of living unprecedented in human history. Kenny provides evidence to make us enthusiastic about the progress we’ve attained so far, and offers suggestions on what is to be done if we want to keep this progress alive.

About the Author

Formerly with the World Bank, American economist Charles Kenny is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development and the New America Foundation. He writes for the magazine Foreign Policy and has published many articles in various publications addressing the correlation of economic growth, health and happiness.