So, do you root for the profligate Greeks or the skinflint Germans? Do you put on the red and gold of Spain’s strip and cheer them to a cup that the country’s prime minister has already suggested is a prerequisite for lifting Spain out of depression? Or what about the Italians, hoisted by European Central Bank President (and Italian, no less) Mario Draghi’s petard into government collapse? Or maybe you admire the austere line of the Teutonic power, and think only Germany has earned the right to victory.

I say none of the above. Whether on the merits of the Eurozone dispute or on a needs-based analysis, we English are the most deserving of your fandom in this Cup. First, on the Teutonic-Mediterranean quarrel, a pox on both their houses. We were right all along that the monetary union was a mistake, and mind you we took a lot of grief for not playing well with others. Britain didn’t lie about the state of its fiscal health to get in like Italy or Greece, nor did it ignore those lies in order to prop up domestic export industries like Germany.

As to who needs this the most, compared to the bankruptcy staring Greece in the face–a crisis of recent vintage–English soccer has had nothing to put in the vault for well nigh two generations. Greece actually won the Euro tournament in 2004. And Germany won in 1996. Spain, France, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Italy have all won either the Euro competition or the World Cup since 1980. But do you remember the last time England won a major international football competition?

No? Well, nor do I. Because it was before I was born. It has been 20 years since I left Britain and frankly the memories of England’s footballers crashing out in the qualifying rounds, or the group stage, or once, even, in the semifinal have merged with disappointments over another loss to New Zealand’s rugby team, or repeated trouncings by the West Indies cricketers, or the last Briton exiting Wimbledon in the second round yet again. Still, I’m pretty sure the combined psychological impact of all that defeat has been crippling. We’re running out of sports to invent so we can lose at them.

The last time England won an international football trophy was before the vast majority of people alive on the planet today were born. It was before the moon landings, Cabbage Patch Kids, and videocassette recorders. In Britain, the Queen hadn’t even had a Silver Jubilee let alone a Diamond one, there wasn’t yet a Sex Pistols song asking God to Save Her, and Prince Charles was actually, honestly, still considered a heartthrob.

It was the 1966 World Cup. And that, by the way, wasn’t just the last time England actually won a significant international football trophy. It was also the first time England won a trophy. That would be an all-time total of one trophy. The nation has had a national team since 1870–it was the first in the world, alongside Scotland’s. That means the chance that England wins a Euro or World Cup in any given year averages one in 142.

Of course England supporters have been robbed of victory often enough–coordinated once by the hand of God, again by the blind eye of the referee. But the sad fact of the matter is that England, where the beautiful game was invented, where the first rule book was written, where the oldest clubs in the world reside, where the first league took root and the first competition took place, and where entrepreneurial fans pioneered the art of streaking across the field buck naked, has won only one-third the number of European Championships and World Cups as–brace yourself–France.

Also, back to the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. Being Britain, it simply poured cats and dogs with rain on the celebrations this month. And not chihuahuas and kittens, but dobermans and overstuffed lions. Added to that, London is about to host the Olympics, which will make travel on the un-air-conditioned Underground this summer as pleasant as getting stuck in a locked sauna stuffed with rotting beef carcasses. So, really, the British are due a metaphorical perfect sunny day to make up for it all.

Still, for all Wayne Rooney’s talent and the clean sweep in the group stage, the odds against an England victory (we face Italy in the quarterfinals) in Euro 2012 are long. So perhaps it isn’t too early to start fantasizing about a future victory, and how to achieve it. And the only time England won in the past, of course, was when we hosted the World Cup. That final–against Germany–took place in Wembley Stadium. It gave rise to the delightfully cosmopolitan and increasingly historic English fan chant “Two World Wars and One World Cup” (for the record: Germany has won three World Cups and three European Championships, which might suggest something about the efficacy of the ditty, but no matter).

Sadly FIFA–the sport’s governing body–wouldn’t let England host the World Cup again any time soon, probably because we didn’t bribe its executives as much as some other countries allegedly did. This might suggest that some of England’s international football victory problems are homegrown. After all, the U.K. is happy to stump up a billion-dollar bribe to sell weapons to Saudi Arabia. For the love of the game, couldn’t the country’s soccer officials have shelled out a few hundred thousand to the odd FIFA representative? Apparently not. Where’s the commitment? Where’s the resolve? England’s football leadership has shown all of the backbone of Ben Bernanke contemplating a third round of quantitative easing.

So England will have to look for another option to end its trophy-winning stagnation. One idea: make the team more competitive by joining across borders in an ever stronger union. The United Kingdom soccer community could bring together the football talent of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland and bind them under a single authority and set of regulations. What could possibly go wrong?

Charles Kenny is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development and a Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation. In his distant youth he was a lackadaisical supporter of Oxford United.

*Photo courtesy xispo.

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“It’s about exciting stuff that doesn’t happen. The book is about how much more frequently around the world nothing much is going on. Nobody starves, nobody gets sick, nobody gets shot, and nobody dies.”

But that’s exactly the point, said Kenny, a senior economist at the World Bank and senior fellow at the Center for Global Development whose book is called Getting Better: Why Global Development is Succeeding – And How We Can Improve the World Even More. There is less “bad stuff” happening in the world, signaling that things are better around the globe.

Kenny said people often assume the world is getting worse because so much attention is paid to its problems. Yet, he insists, by many objective measures – health, education and happiness, to name a few – life has never been so good.

First, the Bad News

Where people are correct in saying the world is worsening, Kenny said, is in the realm of income. Millions, if not billions, of people around the world are no better off financially than their parents, grandparents, or distant ancestors, he said.

“In 1950, the gap between the richest and poorest countries was about 33-fold,” he said. “Today, it is not 33-fold, it is more like 137-fold. And 800 million or so people still live on a dollar a day or less, and you just can’t get poorer than that.”

The reasons are attributable many years of history, he said, using two contrasting stories to illustrate. First he told the tale of Mungo Park, a Scottish doctor, who set out to find Tumbuktoo in 1805. Park’s team survived torrential rains, packs of lions and more, but ran into several tropical diseases, including dysentery and malaria. By the end, 41 of 43 people on the expedition had died – and when Park’s son set out to find him, he contracted malaria and died too.

Meanwhile, Lewis and Clark’s trip across America was occurring. They were gone for longer and exposed to just as many potentially devastating natural elements, but just one of 33 died. The results of those two trips show how much easier life can be on the developed continents.

“Africa remains to this day home to a lot of diseases we don’t know how to deal with,” Kenny said.

The Death Factor

The most important way to measure whether life is improving, though, is how long the average life lasts, Kenny said. And by that standard, the world has gotten better by leaps and bounds. The life expectancy for someone born in Africa averaged 41 in 1960, compared to 51 in 2005, he said.

Even in the 12 countries in which average incomes declined between 1960 and 2005 – Haiti, the Central African Republic, the Ivory Coast, Liberia, Madagascar, Nicaragua, Niger, Senegal, Sierra Leona, Venezuela, Zambia and Zimbabwe – life expectancy increased by more than 10 years.

“The declining cost of living means that people as poor as they have ever been – as poor as their parents, grandparents and ancestors back to the Roman Empire – are living longer and healthier,” he said.

Meanwhile, the rate of infant mortality has declined 75 percent over the past century, Kenny said. And the number of people who die on the battlefield is at a 60-year low.

Alluding back to his first point about how worldwide improvements mean less excitement, Kenny explained how seemingly boring lives look when they are going well.

“If you look at anything else apart from money, we’ve seen rapid, ubiquitous, worldwide progress toward beautiful banality,” he said.

That trend is demonstrated by movement in education and politics, Kenny said. More children are in school, more people vote, more people can read and hold jobs – the facets of life that most Americans take for granted.

Simple Technology

Many deadly diseases have been cured not by expensive technology that is inaccessible to poor people, but by simple fixes that can be carried out anywhere, he said. A cholera outbreak in Bangladesh in 1971 was contained through a brilliantly simple solution devised by a doctor named Dilip Mahalanabis.

Mahalanabis was running out of saline solution to rehydrate people suffering from diarrhea caused by cholera, so he made a move frowned upon by public health experts at the time: he mixed sugar, salt and water and told people to force it down sick relatives’ throats until they couldn’t stand it anymore.

“It is a brilliant way to deal with water-borne diseases that costs cents and can be done by untrained individuals,” he said. “The death rate went down from 20 or 30 percent of those who had the disease to two or three percent.”

A similar process eradicated smallpox worldwide, Kenny said. The disease was responsible for as many as half a million deaths in the 20th century, he said, but had disappeared by the 1970s.

“The total cost of the global program was in the region of $312 million – perhaps 32 cents per person in infected countries,” he said.

Spreading Knowledge

The key to replicating such success on still-existent diseases, he said, is disseminating information. Too many families in developing countries don’t know that oral rehydration is the cure for diarrhea, for example.

“We don’t need to wait on Tanzania or Ethiopia becoming as rich as Luxembourg to roll [vaccines] out,” Kenny said. “Even the poorest countries can afford universal primary education.”

So, he said, the notion that some countries cannot be saved or some diseases cannot be cured is a fallacy.

“We know things can get better because things have been getting better – ubiquitously, rapidly, and with a large part played by development assistance,” he said. “So sure, cut funding for development if you want to … but don’t hide behind the excuse that aid can’t work. It has and it can.”

For event photos, please click here.
For full video, please click here.
For an excerpt from Getting Better, please click here.
Buy the book: Skylight Books, Powell’s, Amazon

*Photos by Aaron Salcido

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