Charles Kenny is the author of Getting Better: Why Global Development Is Succeeding and How We Can Improve the World Even More (Basic Books, 2011), The Upside of Down: Why the Rise of the Rest Is Great for the West (Basic Books, 2014), and The Plague Cycle: The Unending War Between Humanity and Infectious Disease (Scribner, 2021), among other books.
He spent fifteen years as an economist at the World Bank and now works at a Washington, DC think tank, the Center for Global Development, where he researches and advocates for policies on investment, trade, technology, and migration that would benefit developing and industrialised countries alike. He is also a widely cited researcher on the economics of happiness.
Charles was a contributing editor at Foreign Policy and a columnist for Bloomberg Business, where he wrote on global development and its impact on the US. His work has appeared in outlets including the Economist, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Politico, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, Time, the Guardian, Salon, and CNN. He has presented at the World Economic Forum and the Aspen and Legatum Institutes, spoken at universities around the world, and appeared on PBS, Al Jazeera, NPR, the BBC, Bloomberg TV, and many podcasts.
He holds a history degree from Cambridge, master’s degrees from the School of Oriental and African Studies and the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and a PhD in Development Studies from Cambridge. The product and beneficiary of transoceanic romances, he thinks globalisation is an immense force for good.
This is a reasonably up to date CV/pubs list. Charles can be reached at charlesjkenny [at] gmail [dot] com.
Charles Kenny 