Putting Life Back into Miracles is an unpublished short paper. If you type "Middle East Miracle" into Google, you get a paltry 151 hits, compared to 29,000 for "East Asian Miracle." And yet despite a grim economic performance, between 1962 and 2002 life expectancy in the Middle East and North Africa increased from around 48 years to 69 years –the strongest growth in any region's health in history. It might, then, be worth questioning the assumption that economic growth is the only development grail we need quest after, and examining a wider range of miracles (and tragedies) might help uncover a range of different causal factors for success in a broader development effort.