How We Grew So Big

There are many ways to measure Asia's remarkable economic progress over the past half-century, but you can't get more basic than this: starvation, for most of the region, has become a thing of the past. In 1943, India's Bengal famine killed more than 4 million people, and as recently as the early 1960s, tens of millions of Chinese died in the man-made famines of the Great Leap Forward. Just 25 years ago, the United Nations estimated that up to 40% of Asians were chronically undernourished. That number now stands at 16%. While people in countries such as North Korea, Cambodia and...