Regarding government effectiveness, positive features of life are more important than democratic values.

I’ve had this thought softly before, but I had a discussion with Tyler Hall about this on 2022/02/04 (I think). From his experience working at GiveDirectly and visiting a few countries in Africa (e.g. Rwanda), he seems to very much believe that stability can be more important for countries there than free and fair elections. And the locals have expressed as much. This probably means there’s an overvaluing of democracy strength as a metric of success for nations by organizations and the government here in the United States