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PhilGoetz comments on The Effectiveness of Developing World Aid - Less Wrong
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I believe that they corroborate my statement. Most countries that have a sudden decrease in child mortality, have frequent terrorism and/or civil war. Few countries today that did not have that sudden decrease, have frequent terrorism and/or civil war. Find me another variable that correlates as strongly with terrorism and war, or an argument that causation runs the other way, if you want to refute that. I find it hard to believe that terrorism and civil war cause a sudden decrease in child mortality.
I slightly edited my comment while you were replying to the parenthetical "(which seems to me to be quite sweeping)".
You raise a question which I will have to think about and may eventually have more to say something about.
My first reaction is that the collection of examples that you cite is too small to support the claim that in general to support the claim that there's even reliable correlation between decrease in child mortality to result in frequent terrorism and/or civil war.
The collection I cited is all the countries in the world today. I don't think you can get a bigger sample.
I haven't done a statistical test; I haven't searched for alternate hypotheses. The word "reliably" is too strong, since there are exceptions - I'll change it to "usually".
What about historically? The set of nations that exists now is a subset of all the nations and empires that ever existed. What was the median age in France in 1700?