Video of the day -- a walk around town

This is a few minutes just walking around in an ordinary town (I'm not sure which one) in the country of Angola in western Africa.  Compare what this looks like to where you live.  Watching this, a couple of salient points immediately occurred to me:

First, try to imagine the mentally debilitating effect on a child growing up in a stultifying environment like this.  We all know the benefits of a colorful, variegated, stimulating environment with trees and interesting things to do.  Even for an adult who is used to these conditions, it seems it would be depressing living among this all the time.

Second, you are probably asking yourself "why does Angola look like this?" when in fact you should be asking "why doesn't the whole world look like this?"  Because most of it did, for most of history.  A typical European village a thousand years ago probably looked almost equally miserable, centuries after the loss of the advances under the Romans and centuries before the beginning of their restoration in modern times.  At least some houses shown in the video have electricity, based on the overhead wires, even if it only works some of the time.

Poverty and squalor and filth are not some special condition that requires malevolence or a conspiracy to explain.  They are the normal default state in which life naturally languishes when nobody undertakes the hard work of improving things.  That hard work -- scientific research and the technological infrastructure it makes possible -- are why we live our lives at a level of hygiene, convenience, and variety which our ancestors of a few centuries ago literally could not have imagined.  What hardships remain in the modern world are mostly due to extreme unequal distribution of wealth -- the product of a flawed economic and political system, not of science or technology.

One final observation:  The life expectancy in Angola now is sixty-five years.  This is among the lowest in the world and obviously far worse than that of the West or eastern Asia -- or most regions today.  But it's far better than that of even the richest countries in 1900.  The reason for the difference is vaccines and other modern medical innovations, which are available to some extent even in the poorest countries today.