We don't know why Malawi is poor

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"Chat, can you show me an example of why correlation is not causation?"

The article actually addresses this specific point:

"Human capital is thin. Mean years of schooling sit around 5. Stunting rates have been at 35-40% for decades, with measurable downstream effects on adult cognition and earnings."

"-- It is also, upon reflection, mostly a description of being poor rather than an explanation. 'Malawi is poor because its agricultural productivity is low' is closer to a tautology than an answer."

There is in general no such thing as "national" or "national average" IQ, pretty much anywhere in the world, but that's doubly true in subsaharan Africa, where the numbers aren't just not representative but in many cases literally fabricated --- "interpolated" from neighbors and reconciled with economic statistics.

"70% of Malawians live on less than $2.15 a day. Under the World Bank’s revised $3-a-day poverty line, it’s 75%."

This sounds like an extremely bimodal distribution -- a 40% increase in the cut-off line only captures 5% more of the population, so only a small number of people are in this "poor but survivable" zone, with most well under and some well over, I assume. Does this map to the usual rural/urban divide?

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