[beat]

This got me to do a sad reality check. Since reading Hans Rosling's Factfulness, I've started using a decline in birthrate to Western levels as a proxy for nations getting their shit together. But checking Uganda, they're still above 5, declining slightly now but not precipitously.

Idi Amin, awful as he was, is the past now. What's the present like? That's what matters for countries that have yet to modernize. And it looks to be not good yet. Every nation in Europe was ruled by an Idi Amin at some point. They got better. African nations will too, someday. But I really want to see more African nations on that rapid-modernization cycle that we see in places like Iran, China, and Vietnam.