I’ll focus on the human capital question here. Comparing African countries to non-African countries gives you zero information about the underlying potential of an area.
Consider if we have two populations, and one has been given 1250 calories a day for the first 20 years of their life, no climate control, and subjected to routinized violence. The other got 2500 calories a day, had good shelter, and was never the target of violence. If we presume the identical genetic makeup of these populations, we would nonetheless find that the 2nd population was very well-performing. Even when we relocated people from the first population, they’d bring the legacy of malnutrition, violence, and discomfort with them and probably continue to underperform.
However, we could then look at their children to get a sense of genetic potential. So, for example, when we exclude foreign-born people from the sample, West African ancestry native-born people have average incomes of nearly 2 times that reported for the typical ancestry-reporting American, equivalent to Israeli, British, or Scandinavians ancestry-reporters. Native-born Kenyan-Americans have higher incomes than native-born German-Americans. Now, much of this is of course driven by selection pressures through differential immigration.
But the point to be made here is that there is very little evidence that any genetic component in cognitive capacity is economically significant; certainly nothing compared to the impact of civil wars, corruption, colonialism, or even just plain old low capital ratios.
Fertility is below replacement throughout most of the western world. If Western society is to survive, it will only be through non-Western genetic stock. And with more of its non-genetic handicaps taken care of, I’m confident that Africa’s contribution will be quite robust. Already, the markets of the great African cities are thriving hubs of business dynamism and small-scale capitalism. When they eventually develop capital sufficiently and get good enough governance to have real innovation clusters, they’ll be just like all the other non-Western societies to experience vigorous economic success.
