Charles Kenny

Books, Papers and Articles

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). He spent fifteen years as an economist in the World Bank and now works at a Washington DC think tank, the Center for Global Development, where he researches and advocates for policies governing investment, trade, technology and migration that would be good for both developing and industrialized countries alike. In addition, he is a widely cited researcher on the economics of happiness. Kenny was a contributing editor at Foreign Policy magazine and was a columnist for Bloomberg Business¸ where he wrote on global development and its impact on the US. He has also written for outlets including the Economist, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Politico, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, Time, the Guardian, Salon and CNN. He has presented at the World Economic Forum, Aspen Institute and Legatum Institute events. He has given talks at numerous colleges and universities. He has appeared on PBS, Al Jazeera, CCTV, Vox, Reuters TV and Bloomberg TV. On radio he has been a guest on NPR and the BBC as well as numerous podcasts. Charles has a history degree from Cambridge University, Masters degrees from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London 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 globalization is an immense force for good. He can be contacted at charlesjkenny at gmail.

recent posts

  • Nationalism Can’t Beat a Global Problem

    For slate: America First can't beat a pandemic.

  • What to Do When You Can’t Prove DFI Additionality

    A note for CGD with Todd Moss.  Answer: competition, make loans less attractive than market, use transparent benchmarks.

  • Direct cash payments work. We’re about to see how

    In the Washington Post on the COVID-19 stimulus component that is giving cash directly to people.  

  • Pandemics Close Borders—And Keep them Closed

    Leaders around the world have restricted nonessential travel to varying degrees, some sealing off their borders entirely, to help curb the spread of the coronavirus. In the past, these measures may have worked. But the history of disease-driven border lockdowns has some sobering lessons.  For Politico.

  • Close the Pentagon: Rethinking National Security for a Positive-Sum World

    “You don’t have to be a peacenik or a lefty to be persuaded by this trenchant and witty book that the 21st-century American war machine is stupefyingly wasteful, protecting us against threats that no longer exist and failing to protect us against those that do.”

    –Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor, Harvard University, author of The Better Angels of Our Nature.

    “An agile and effective study concluding that the US military is not only wildly inefficient, but mostly designed to deal with problems that scarcely exist and inadequate or even irrelevant for dealing with problems that actually do exist.”

    –John Mueller, Ohio State University and Cato Institute

     

    The Pentagon, famed as the world’s largest office building, recently underwent a renovation. It took ten times as long and four times the cost of constructing the building in the first place.  That history leaves the Pentagon as a potent symbol of America’s foreign policy infrastructure: dominated by a massive, increasingly inefficient military machine better suited to the challenges of the mid-Twentieth Century than the early Twenty-First. 

    My new book Close the Pentagon describes the changing threats to America’s national security: the decline of war and the rise of global challenges that can only be tackled with collective action.  It outlines the awesome inefficiency of the Department of Defense at its traditional role of war fighting and its limited capacity to adapt to new tasks.  It concludes that America’s foreign policy apparatus should be overhauled –US military spending reduced to the global average with savings used to support economic assistance, global collective action and domestic priorities. 

    Close the Pentagon is available as a paperback ($7.99) and e-book ($3.99) and the first chapter is available for free here.   I wrote about it on the CGD blog in The Hill at Responsible Statecraft, Politico and for Barrons, and talked about it to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.  There's a pretty negative review by David Swanson here: beyond the fact he doesn't like my writing style and disagrees on the importance of resource dependency as a cause of conflict, I think perhaps he was looking for a book about the many moral failings of US foreign policy and I wrote one about the ineffectiveness of the Pentagon in responding to national security threats.

    Below a brief overview of the book’s argument.

    Prophecies of peace have gone awry before and it is too early to declare we are in a totally new era.  But the decline of violence means that –currently at least– we are left with the remnants of war.  Violent threats to the US and its allies are from small groups not big armies, and are a serious but exaggerated policing issue. 

    There are arguments over the causes of the relative peace of the post-1945 era: nuclear weapons, deterrence, hegemony, new institutions, new values, new connections.  But while many factors may play a role, there are reasons to doubt the importance of a large US military to peace and reasons to highlight economic and social factors including new norms of behavior.

    The changing nature of state power and economic wealth from people and land through resources and manufacturing to institutions, ideas and interconnection means that war is no longer a route to power.  Resource reliance is now the curse of poor countries, and fighting for those resources a strategy that only makes sense in broken economies.  That suggests the death of zero sum international relations and the importance of integration to global prosperity and peace. 

    Interconnection is a factor in some of the new threats to national security. New global challenges include the warming atmosphere, polluted seas, disease, financial instability and international crime.  These threats require collective response to shore up the global commons and preserve and extend our positive sum gains. 

    The US military is obscenely, inefficiently, over-fit for the purpose of deterring aggression against America and its allies.  At the same time, the Pentagon’s effectiveness in foreign entanglements is demonstrated by its mostly-not-winning-streak over the past seven decades: Korea, Vietnam, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Iraq.  US military presence doesn’t prevent civil wars and the US Navy is over-equipped for duty against pirates.  A massive Pentagon bureaucracy, including a huge army of contractors, runs a dysfunctional military management and procurement system.

    That inefficiency is one reason the Pentagon should not lead on new national security threats. It is ill designed to tackle cyber-‘war’ or support research and development programs, let alone lead on global pandemic response.  Other tools including aid agencies have a far better track record in delivering results. 

    How to respond? The Defense Department still has vital roles: sea lanes protection; logistics for the responsibility to protect; training; defending the homeland and allies.  But new national security threats take global cooperation best managed outside of the Pentagon. Set a short term goal of cutting military spending to one and a half times our nearest competitor’s as part of a realignment of international relations budgets.  The longer term goal should be to reduce defense spending to the global median of 1.5 percent of GDP.

    A portion of those savings should be redirected so that the US reaches the United Nations goal of 0.7 percent of GDP going towards aid flows to developing countries.  It should also provide finance for reinvigorated engagement in trade and investment agreements as well as international organizations and treaty making. 

    What could go wrong? Even if it is a significant cause of peace, US primacy won’t last.  It is inevitable that America will lose relative power to countries like China, India and Nigeria as they grow richer.  The question is, how do we sustain peace in a multipolar world? The answer: bind the new global powers into a peaceful, rules-bound world system.  And the problem: Washington DC is busy heading in the other direction.  This is the biggest risk to continued global peace and American prosperity that we face.

      

  • How America Leads Abroad: An Examination of Multilateral Development Institutions

    I gave testimony to the House Committee on Financial Services Subcommittee on National Security, International Development, and Monetary Policy (video here).  I said the IBRD should get its capital increase, and the IFC should get its capital increase if it reforms.

  • The Real Immigration Crisis

    For Foreign Affairs.  The next several decades will see populations in Europe and North America age and shrink as people have fewer and fewer children. That trend will hurt economic growth and dynamism and leave too few workers for every retiree. Robots and artificial intelligence will not save rich countries from the economic consequences of a shrinking population. Nor, without a dramatic reversal of current policies toward immigrants, will a flow of workers from elsewhere. To avoid sclerosis and decline, the rich world will have to compete to attract immigrants, not turn them away.

  • Gender Equality in US Think Tank Leadership: Data from Tax Records

    A CGD note with Julian Duggan.  Across the 71 leading US think tanks for which we have data, we find that the average share of trustees and directors that were women was 23 percent, the average share of highly compensated employees that were women was 30 percent, and highly compensated women were paid 92 percent of what highly compensated men were paid. 

  • Can the US Development Finance Corporation Compete?

    A CGD Policy Paper.  The new US International Development Finance Corporation (USDFC) will be considerably larger than its predecessor, and it will also be more focused on low and lower middle income countries. It will have new tools to deliver but face expanded competition. The major challenge to the DFC is not Chinese investment (which largely funds projects ill-suited to support from the DFC), but other development finance institutions, many of which are deploying increasing quantities of subsidized capital to attract project sponsors. It is not clear that there are sufficient suitable deals in the shrinking set of low and lower-middle income countries to absorb DFI development finance, and the USDFC could lose projects to subsidized finance from elsewhere if this turns out to be the case. Given that, it should be a priority for the United States to agree rules with other donors that prevent development finance institutions from competing on the basis of subsidy. The new DFC needs increased capacity to deliver deals: both the tools provided by the BUILD Act which are being constrained by the administration and the staff and budget to actively build a pipeline of projects. A considerably bolstered administrative budget may involve reducing –potentially to zero—the profitability OPIC traditionally enjoyed.

  • Automation and AI: Implications for African Development Prospects?

    A CGD note.  I'm comparatively optimistic about automation: Africa needs more of it, the rate of automation does not appear to be rapid enough to suggest short-term dislocation, manufacturing jobs have moved rather than gone away and services offers another technology-enhanced route to development.