In 1993, I was sitting on a mud floor with a small group of women in a village in Karnataka, trying to start a conversation about their lives.

Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in September 2017. In the days following the hurricane, the government reported just 64 deaths.

It was the sort of puzzle that you don’t notice at first. It was Juba, South Sudan, in 2012; a place where and time when, frankly, problems were not hard to find. The perhaps surprising absence of a problem was easy to overlook.

Even as global progress against poverty seems to slow, India has remained a bright spot. In the last several decades, the now most populous country’s transformation has been nothing short of extraordinary, with per capita incomes increasing by over a factor of six in a quarter century.

History remembers two Robert McNamaras.