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taw comments on The Effectiveness of Developing World Aid - Less Wrong
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Thank you for providing a great example that you can get a lot of upvotes on LW for totally making shit up, as long as it resonates with some LWer's prejudice.
For people naively upvoting billswift's bullshit, . For example in the most populous African country Nigeria life expectancy in 1950 was 35 years. Last year it was 48 years. You'll see such improvement in nearly every country, and this accelerated drastically in early 1990s, about the same time as Americans and Soviets stopped having proxy wars in which locals got killed.
For anyone else who, like me, saw taw's callout bubble up in Recent Comments and wanted to find life expectancy data to check it, a graph:
The bottom line (in teal) represents sub-Saharan Africa. Vertical axis is life expectancy in years, horizontal axis is year.
This graph seems to offer a point against my claim that progress has been recently accelerating (while totally confirming my claim that billswift is making stuff up), so I'll explain.
The late 90s drop you can see on the graph is a statistical artifact related to AIDS, early 2000s cutoff, and clustering countries into unnatural categories.
The worst affected countries were mostly in relatively well off countries like South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, Zimbabwe (it was well off until recently) etc. that don't really cluster with most of the poor Sub-Saharan Africa, and have incomes and standards of living more like Brazil or Turkey. Most of them had clear and very rapid rebounds in life expectancy since the worst in early 2000s in any case, trend-line won't be significantly affected by that.
For the poor everyone else of Sub-Saharan Africa, AIDS had much less severe effects, and for many like Nigeria I mentioned you wouldn't even notice anything just looking at life expectancy statistics. Here's per-country graphs going to 2008.
Disregarding AIDS, the most recent decade has been the best one ever for Africa by nearly any metric, be it average income, equality, poverty rates, democracy, peace, etc.
An experiment someone should do at some point (if it hasn't already been done):
Divide (educated Western) subjects into two groups. Ask the first group how much they think life has improved in a particular African country since decolonization, without mentioning the date of the latter. Ask the second group how much they think life in that country has improved since 1950 (or whatever the actual appropriate date for "decolonization" is for the country selected), without mentioning colonization. Compare the results.
Prediction: the second group's answer will be higher.