After plenty of aid pessimism, here is a relentlessly cheerful polemic, Getting Better, which is delighting development experts in the US and the UK. Charles Kenny's book celebrates an era of unprecedented human development. Across the globe, millions are now enjoying lives that are markedly better than those of their parents. Not just in China but in Africa and Asia as well, children are not dying at the rate they used to, and they are getting an education when many of their parents did not.
While the critics have carped about the failure of aid and plenty of armchair experts have bemoaned the state of Africa, the true picture, Kenny argues, is of huge improvement. And people in Africa and Asia know it, because the proportion of populations in surveyed countries saying they are happy is steadily rising.
Even some of the poorest countries in the world such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti and Burma have infant mortality rates that are lower than any country achieved in 1900. It's been a century of spectacular progress largely due to women's education and public healthcare. Furthermore, this is not just about the spread of technology, says Kenny, but that "governments are doing a better job at delivering services", so that "the most corrupt and inefficient of countries in Africa are still providing services of a quality and extent far in advance of any country in the world prior to the industrial revolution".
This is an argument that turns every accepted wisdom about development on its head. It is the much-delayed response to the diatribes such as Dambisa Moyo's Dead Aid or Bill Easterly's The White Man's Burden. It seems to suggest that the problem with contemporary development pessimism is that it has just been too impatient, and has failed to see the bigger picture over the course of the century.
Furthermore, it has been too tightly focused on income growth as the criteria of human development, instead of looking more broadly at human wellbeing indicators such as education and health. Some countries' income growth hasn't been too good, but it would be wrong to concentrate on that when life expectancy, for example, has improved. Basics such as boiling water, vaccines and literacy have transformed lives.
Of course, a handful of countries have gone sharply backwards, such as the much-quoted Zimbabwe and Congo, but these are relatively isolated cases. Set against these failures, is the remarkable achievement of how humanity has escaped Malthus's prediction, increasing food production to feed the burgeoning world population.
But Kenny has a very serious and really important point to make in all this Panglossian optimism: "Recognising the success that the world has already experienced gives us some grounds for believing that future development programmes won't go to waste."
He is reminding us of what we should already know, that you won't win the argument to maintain domestic support for aid budgets by telling people that it is all dire. The old fundraising strategy to shock your donor into a guilty lurch to their pocket is a short-term option that leads quickly to compassion fatigue. You can only really persuade people to part with more of their hard-earned cash if you can persuade them that the donation has worked in the past. This is Kenny's attempt to do just that.
Kenny takes on development orthodoxy, suggesting that we don't really know how to generate economic growth, so best to keep out of it and stick with what we know works – such as improvements in health, education and good governance with effective justice and taxation systems.
Threaded through Kenny's argument is the refreshing assertion that human beings have proved remarkably effective over the 20th century at reducing suffering and spreading happiness across the developing world. In the development business you simply don't hear this kind of stuff; the charities are too busy campaigning on the horrors of it all, and the development experts are usually too mired in their logframes and complexity theory to be this cheerful.
There are glaring gaps in his argument, which many bloggers have rightly pointed out. He skips much too quickly over issues of environmental degradation and how they might threaten the developing world's future. There is not much on how future youth bulges could be politically destabilising in rapidly growing slum cities. In fact, Kenny doesn't do much crystal ball gazing at all. But with those crucial caveats, this is an argument that is going to shake up the gloomy consensus that has gathered around development and aid.
Besides, who could possibly disagree with his conclusion: "Never before has it been more important to understand that there is more to life than money"? Development has not always been about making people richer, but it has been good at helping millions live longer, with better access to education and better government.
