Global Health Success?

According to Tina Rosenberg of the New York Times, the book Getting Better by the economist Charles Kenny argues that measuring quality of life improvements in developing countries by income level and economic growth rate misses the point.

We should not minimize a society’s dramatic improvements in health, education, gender equality, security and human rights over the last twenty years because their average income has remained the same, Kenny says. In many of these countries, sending their kids to school instead of arranging their marriage as young teenagers is becoming the norm.

According to Rosenberg, Kenny attributes many of these improvements to “the global spread of new technologies and ideas – but also rising expectations.” One reason advances in child survival have sped up since 2000 may be that that was the year the United Nations set the ambitious Millennium Development Goals to be met by 2015. While all of the targets may not be met, says Rosenberg, “it is hard to think of a more sweeping accomplishment than the results so far.”

How do you measure the height of a mountain?

The Old Way:

  1. Stand at a known distance from the mountain.
  2. Measure the angle from where you are on the ground to the peak.
  3. Triangulate the vertical height of the mountain.

The New Way:

  1. Climb to the top and plant a GPS receiver.
  2. Determine—to within a centimeter—the elevation of the receiver relative to an orbiting satellite by timing how long it takes for radio signals to travel between the receiver and the satellite.
  3. Determine the level of the geoid–the theoretical average sea level across all oceans.
  4. Calculate the height of the mountain above sea level by subtracting the level of the sea from the elevation of the receiver.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/