Narrator: Imagine a five-year-old girl named Grace, living in Uganda in the year 2000. She contracts malaria, a common and treatable illness. Her parents, trapped in poverty, first try local herbs. When she worsens, they borrow money for cheap medicine from a shop. It’s not enough. They sell chickens to get her to a hospital, only to be told she needs a blood transfusion that costs five dollars. They don't have it. They rush home to find the money, but by the time they return, it's too late. Grace is gone. Her story is a tragedy, but what if the greatest tragedy is the belief that stories like hers represent a world that is only getting worse? What if, despite the headlines and the very real suffering that exists, humanity has never been in better shape?

In his book Getting Better, author Charles Kenny confronts the pervasive pessimism surrounding global development. He argues that by focusing obsessively on income, we have missed the single most important story of our time: a dramatic and unprecedented global convergence in the quality of life.

Narrator: The conventional narrative of global development often reads like a story of failure, measured almost exclusively by one metric: income. We see headlines about the widening gap between rich and poor nations and conclude that the developing world is stagnating. But Charles Kenny argues this is a dangerously incomplete picture. Income, he explains, is not the goal itself; it’s a means to an end. It’s a proxy for the things we truly value, like food, shelter, health, and education.

A powerful illustration of this is the story of the Middle East and North Africa between 1975 and 2000. During this period, the region's economic growth was nearly flat, averaging just 0.5% per year. By the standard of income, it was a period of failure, especially when compared to the "East Asian Miracle" happening at the same time. But if you look beyond income, a different story emerges. In that same period, life expectancy in the Middle East and North Africa soared from 48 to 69 years. This region, a supposed economic laggard, achieved greater gains in longevity than the booming economies of East Asia. People were living longer, healthier lives, even as their incomes stagnated. This reveals a fundamental truth: progress in human well-being can, and often does, happen independently of economic growth.

Narrator: While Kenny offers an optimistic thesis, he doesn't ignore the bad news. The data is clear: the gap in average income between the world’s richest and poorest countries has grown into a chasm. In 1850, the richest country was about 4.5 times wealthier than the poorest. By 2008, that gap had exploded to 127 times. Furthermore, wealth is incredibly "sticky." As Kenny bluntly puts it, "If you want to be rich, be born to rich parents in a rich country."

Making this problem worse is what he calls the "worse news": nobody has a reliable formula for kick-starting economic growth. For decades, economists have proposed countless theories, from investing in machinery to implementing specific free-market policies. Yet, cross-country analyses show inconsistent results. Policies that work in one place fail in another, and growth often seems to be driven more by luck and complex institutional factors than by any simple prescription. This leaves the world in a difficult position. If income is the only path to a better life, and we don't know how to reliably increase it, the future looks bleak.

Narrator: For centuries, a dark cloud hung over humanity's future, an idea popularized by Thomas Malthus. He argued that population would always grow faster than our ability to produce food, trapping us in a cycle of famine and misery. This fear was echoed in the 20th century, with predictions of mass starvation. Yet, as Kenny demonstrates, this trap has been broken.

The world has not run out of food. In fact, famines are rarely caused by a simple lack of supply. The Nobel laureate Amartya Sen showed this with his analysis of the 1943 Bengal Famine. While millions starved, the region actually had an adequate food supply. The problem was one of distribution and entitlement. War-time hoarding, price gouging, and panic drove food prices so high that the poorest people simply couldn't afford to eat. Famine, Sen proved, is a man-made disaster of economics and politics, not a natural consequence of overpopulation. Thanks to technological revolutions in agriculture, global food production has tripled in the last half-century, far outpacing population growth. The Malthusian horseman of famine has been largely unseated.

Narrator: Here lies the heart of Kenny's argument. While incomes have diverged, the quality of life has converged. In the areas that fundamentally define human well-being, the gap between rich and poor is shrinking at a historic pace.

Consider health. In 1900, global life expectancy was just 31 years. Today, it’s over 70. More importantly, the poorest countries have seen the fastest gains. A child born in Niger today, one of the poorest countries on earth, has a better chance of surviving to their first birthday than a child born in the richest country in the world in 1900.

This convergence extends to education. In 1870, only a quarter of the world's population could read. By 2000, that figure had climbed to four-fifths. Literacy rates in sub-Saharan Africa more than doubled between 1970 and 1999. Even political rights show a similar trend. The average global "Polity score," a measure of democracy, has steadily climbed, indicating a worldwide shift away from autocracy. This is the great untold story of development: the world is becoming a more equal place in terms of health, knowledge, and freedom.

Narrator: How is this great convergence possible if it's not driven by income? The answer, Kenny explains, is that the most important drivers of a good life have become astonishingly cheap. The biggest success of development hasn't been making poor countries rich, but making the things that matter most—health and education—affordable.

The eradication of smallpox is a perfect example. This disease killed hundreds of millions, but it was wiped out by a simple, cheap technology: a vaccine. The entire global campaign cost the equivalent of thirty-two cents per person in the infected countries. Similarly, a simple solution of sugar and salt—oral rehydration therapy—can prevent death from diarrhea, one of the biggest killers of children. Insecticide-treated bed nets prevent malaria. Basic sanitation knowledge prevents cholera.

These are not complex, expensive solutions requiring massive economic output. They are ideas and technologies that, once discovered, can spread globally at a very low cost. A country doesn't need to have the GDP of the United States to teach its citizens to wash their hands or to deliver a vaccine. This is the great news: the path to a better life is no longer paved only with gold.

Narrator: This optimistic reality calls for a new approach to development and foreign aid. Kenny argues that aid agencies and governments should shift their focus from the difficult and uncertain goal of boosting GDP to the proven and achievable goal of improving quality of life directly.

The first rule should be "do no harm"—don't sacrifice health, education, or rights in the pursuit of economic growth. The second rule is to "do good" by directly funding what works. This means investing in public health, supporting the development and distribution of cheap technologies, and promoting basic education. A powerful example is the Onchocerciasis Control Program in West Africa. This aid-funded initiative virtually eliminated river blindness, a disease that had devastated the region for centuries, by distributing a free drug donated by Merck. It prevented 600,000 cases of blindness and made millions of hectares of farmland safe to cultivate. This is what successful aid looks like: targeted, technology-driven, and focused on a measurable improvement in people's lives.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from Getting Better is the power of realistic optimism. The world is not a perfect place, and immense challenges remain. But the data overwhelmingly shows that the four horsemen of the apocalypse—war, famine, pestilence, and death—are in retreat. We have made more progress in improving the human condition in the last century than in all of history combined.

This isn't a call for complacency, but a call to action fueled by the knowledge that what we are doing is working. The book challenges us to look past the bleak headlines and recognize that the spread of simple ideas and affordable technologies has fundamentally changed what is possible for humanity. The question it leaves us with is this: now that we know the path to a better world is not impossibly expensive, what will we do to help more people walk it?