Charles Kenny talked at the Overseas Development Institute today about his book Getting Better, with a capacity crowd and more watching online. Listening to an author speak is a great way of getting an accurate summary of the book, so here is the potted version of his argument.

We don't know what makes economies grow rich, apart from two key things:
– it helps to be rich to start with (i.e. economic fortunes change slowly for the most part)
– and governments should avoid acting like Robert Mugabe

On the other hand, there are two equally key pieces of good news:
– there is no 'Malthusian trap', or in other words there's no link between population growth and real GDP per capita growth, so poor countries can raise living standards
– and on almost every indicator apart from GDP per capita, the performance of poor countries has been converging with that of rich ones.

On indicators of health, education, democracy, violence, life expectancy etc, developing countries have all (except for Zimbabwe and Zambia) been recording great improvements even when their GDP per capita has declined. Today 80% of infants in the world are immunised. Simple messages like 'wash your hands' improve health dramatically. The conclusion? “It's a story of technology and ideas.” Kenny singled out TV, which has led to dramatic improvements in attitudes to women, for example. (He wrote about this specific point in Foreign Policy magazine.) And ended with a question for the audience of development types: Is it not time to celebrate some successes?

I was particularly struck, in the light of my review of Getting Better, by a question from someone from Engineers Against Poverty (an organisation I hadn't heard of before, looks like they do some terrific stuff). He asked isn't the problem that the development community has lost confidence in the idea of progress, and become 'deeply conservative'?

There's a special forum in the new edition of the Boston Review about the role of experiments in  development policy, with an essay by Michael Kremer and Rachel Glennester and responses from a number of people (including me). Not yet online but I'll add the link when it is.