So smart he's an idiot

Don Surber posted an article on Sunday about Be North Korea for an hour err Earth Hour. In his article he linked a tweet by Calestous Juma, a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. IN that tweet, it compared people five "developing" countries to five electrical appliances. Specifically their electric consumption. I went and checked out his twitter feed. I found a couple of graphics that run contrary to his Be North Korea message.
The first one I noted was this:

I'm sure that New York does indeed consume as much electricity as the bulk of Africa. New Yorkers also live more than twice as long. The median age for folks in the Big Apple, 35.5 years. New York state as a whole, 38.0 and upstate, 40.0. For most of Africa, the median age is in the late teens. Only seven of the nations in his swath had median ages over 20 years. You don't get to be old cooking over a cape buffalo dung fire now do you? People in New York waste a lot of electricity. Given the climate, a large chunk goes toward heating in winter and A/C in summer. Many folks there also rely on the subway system, powered by good old Edison, to get them to and from work. New York has a gross state product of $1.44 Trillion. Africa has a combined GDP of $2.26 Trillion, but when you factor out the countries not included in the graphic, it drops to a stumbling $1.21 Trillion. Thus their output per kwh is significantly less.
The next tweet that caught my attention was about median age. it had two pics, one for Africa and one for Europe.

 Again, note the media age disparity. Europeans live more than twice as long thanks to all the development brought on through the consumption of electricity. I wonder if Mr Juma thinks about that as he muses on life in his native Kenya. Juma has a love affair with China, praising all it is doing to expand influence in Africa. China has a GDP of $11.3 Trillion, nearly ten times New York, but with a population of 1.3 billion souls. China has a median age of 37.1 years. Not bad, but lacking by European standards.
Considering what little electricity has done for New York, aren't you glad you don't live in Kenya? Dor me this shows the radical disconnect which people on the left suffer from. They see all that is in the world as wrong, failing to see how drastically it has improved life for those who live in the United States and Europe. Bringing more people here won't help things in the developing world. Instead, it will be the spread of tech to those regions which will help pull them up by their shoe laces. The question then is are they better off to get that aid in development from the United States and Europe, or from China. who ever builds it will be their master because things break, and a part from a Chevy does not always fit on a Dongfeng.