The State Department's Forgotten Continent

[rucky]

Yes. this is the world. Oops, no not exactly - it has a continent missing in it - Africa! After several years of using cartographic projections that misrepresented Africa as being smaller than Greenland, now we seem to have completely eliminated it from our scope of interest. Yet, this is a continent that could use help the most. A continent that suffers from diseases and despair; inhuman tragedies - caused both by nature and humans. But beyond the formal visits, how much do we actually spend on this continent?

USAID has a interesting collection of data on the amount of economic assistance that is being dispersed to individual countries. You can find the data here in Finder! The following figure illustrates the disparity. The darker the color of the country on the map, the more assistance they received from the U.S. in 2006. Apparently we gave approximately $5 to each person in Africa while we gave $400 to certain countries in the Middle East that are already quite well developed. As you can see below, the greenback sure is thin in Africa!

more...
http://blog.fortiusone.com/2008/08/21/dataset-of-the-day-the-state-departments-forgotten-continent/

[Igel]

1. "All non-military aid" would have been more appropriate.

He points out the health and humanitarian needs in Africa as something that need to be addressed, says that African countries get less economic need, and wants us to conclude that there is no health or humanitarian aid.

Another odd point is that he overlooks PPP. Give me $1000 to help somebody in the US, and it won't go far; give me the same amount for, say, Pakistan, and it will go much further. Give me $1000 to help somebody in Tanzania, and it's likely to go even further than in Pakistan. (A point most notably visible during many posts in the recent discussion of George Obama--$1 a day isn't necessarily "poor" in Kenya, which has a lower standard of living, so Barack Obama was off the hook for helping him; but $1 a day in Russia is likely to entail quick starvation.)

As for map projections, you decide on your purpose and you pick your projection; the only confound after that is usually tradition. So you look at criteria and technology. Most modern projections wouldn't have been useful for the reason maps were usually made 50-400 years ago, so Mercator's made sense. As navigation and familiarity have become less important, and the assumption that somehow a map is to reflect or support ethnic, national, or communal worth and prestige by showing the amount of territory a group holds in some iconic fashion, other projections have become more important. We used to look at lists of surface areas to understand size. Guess that's not an option any more.