>It is fairly certain that the bulk of Africans lived better before 1800
>or 1850 than _the bulk_ of them have been living since. Generalizations
>are _very_ difficult.
Quoting myself from the excerpt from After the New Economy that will shortly appear in The Nation:
>According to economic historian Angus Maddison's estimates, African
>and U.S. incomes were roughly equal in 1600, but with
>industrialization, they started diverging in earnest. U.S. incomes
>were three times Africa's in 1820, five times in 1870, ten times in
>1913, and twenty times in 1998.