I finally finished Charles Kenny's "Getting Better: Why Global Development Is Succeeding – And How We Can Improve the World Even More". We bought the book when he spoke at the "Confronting Global Poverty" lecture Series of the Alworth Center for Peace and Justice at St. Scholastica in Duluth on Nov. 13, 2012. You can watch his lecture here.
Many were disappointed in his talk and book because they thought he was painting a rosier picture than reality. Kenny's thesis is that we should concern ourselves less with increasing GDP and look more at quality of life measures.
These include health, longevity, education, child mortality, and family size. He claims that throughout the world with a couple of notorious exceptions, the first four measures are getting greater and the last less. Rather than look at the number of roads and dams, we should look at how people are living day-to-day and what they and we can do to improve daily life.
For an example of a low-tech solution that improved the lives of trash pickers in India, see "Out of India's Trash Heaps, More Than a Shred of Dignity", Sarika Bansal, New York Times, 2013-06-12 . Do read some of the comments.
