Picture fixed. Thanks for spotting that.
It would take a large amount of research...
That’s the nature of illusion: If you research it there’s no illusion. If you just glance at it without much thinking, the illusion is there.
Is this true?
As far as I am aware, yes. At some point it was all about Africa. I recall complaints about that in the media back at the time.
I was thinking about this the other day, but from a slightly different perspective. Consider trust in the society. If a country goes through a civil war, or maybe a period of a state collapse, the people are—based on their experience—less trusting of strangers and maybe even willing to take advantage of a defenseless stranger. The prospects for cooperation (and therefore societal progress) are not great. One is likely to see clique formation, tribal thinking, corruption.
Now, new generation doesn’t have the civil war experience (or a street gang experience, or whatever). It is generally more trusting. They are able to cooperate on a higher level, but the old generation is distrustful, considers the youngsters to be dangerously naive and throws a wrench into the machine. And the longer the average length of life is, the slower the process of moving away from zero-sum games to positive-sum games becomes.
The interesting observations are:
Solutions like “retire at 350” are not going to work—you can’t retire a person from the society.
The “old guard” problem could be, in theory, solved if the old generation would learn to change their mind, to adjust to the changed conditions on the ground. However, I am not sure how realistic is the unlearning the civil war experience, unlearning of not trusting the people around you.