A Colombian friend asked me the other day how Chile was. I said “It was strange to be in a Latin American country where they don’t blame the U.S. for whatever ails them. In Chile, instead of bitching about George W., they just quietly go to university, build factories, plant farms, and sell their products worldwide.” She took this as an implication that other Latin Americans were lazy and, instead of working, preferred to complain about the U.S. She said that all of the poverty or wealth of nations can be explained by distance from the Equator (more is better) and distance from the sea coast (closer is better). Bolivia, therefore, is a guaranteed loser. Most of Africa likewise. What is it about the Equator that is so deadly for economic development in her view? Tropical diseases and a difficult growing climate.
How do we like this theory compared to the alternatives? Alternative 1 is my personal theory, which is that wealth comes from investment and that countries with stable governments and efficient courts are the ones where people feel comfortable investing [this has some troubling implications for the U.S. because corporate managers are taking most of the profits from public corporations home as salary, thereby reducing the amount of capital available to invest and decreasing investor confidence]. Alternative 2 is Jared Diamond’s, put forward in his book Guns, Germs and Steel. Diamond claims that economic development only works well in continents that are oriented east-west like Eurasia. This way an agricultural technique that is invented in one place can be spread throughout the continent. North-south oriented continents such as Africa don’t have this advantage because a technique that works in the plains of South Africa won’t work in the central jungle or northern desert. The lack of development of North America, which is oriented east-west, is explained by the fact that humans came here suddenly and wiped out all the animals that might otherwise have been domesticated.
Phil,
I think the difference lies in the fact that those further from the equator have to be more ingenius and industrious to survive. When you live near the equator, you have pretty much everything you need. You don’t need heat and you can just go out and pick your food supplies. You don’t really need any sophisticated shelter either. Just look at the cultural differences betweeen Northern and Southern Europe. I would like to stress cultural/geographic as I am in no way implying any “racial” basis for this disparity. The coastal/water bias seems obvious. Water provides mobility enabling travel, as well as a food source.
imho.
The east-west vs. north-south business seems like a bit of a stretch to put it mildly. It’s not as if he has a large data set to work with. He considers four continents (counting Eurasia as one). Then he notices that only one of them generated world-dominating cultures in the last millennium. If it had been South America instead, I’m sure he would have come up with a reason why being oriented north-south provides a crucial advantage (of course his name would probably be something like Ixtoplaql instead of Diamond). And then he would have come up with an ad hoc reason why Africa didn’t succeed.
Singapore is practically on the equator and seems to be doing well, but they are a tiny island so maybe the proximity to the ocean idea negates its closeness to the equator?
While this makes interesting reading – please remember – Pakistan, North Korea,Afghanistan most of splintered russian nations, mongolia are all away from equator – how prosperous and forward looking that countries are to ever get prosperous is open to guess!!
Survival near the equator has its own challenges other than the cold — one of which is that it is damn HOT. Former Prime Minister Lee Kwan Yew of Singapore sites air conditioning as the most important invention of the 20th century. As he put it:
“The humble air conditioner has changed the lives of people in the tropical regions. Before air-con, mental concentration and with it the quality of work deteriorated as the day got hotter and more humid. After lunch, business in many tropical countries stopped until the cooler hours of the later afternoon. Historically, advanced civilizations have flourished in cooler climates. Now lifestyles have become comparable to those in temperate zones and civilization in tropical zones need no longer lag behind.”
Diamond’s theory works only for historical conditions. Farming techniques now can spread throughout the world, across continents and great distances. The relative poverty of Latin American in comparison to North America is not something that can be explained by Diamond’s theory, as settlement of the two continents by Europeans happened in modern times. There are plenty of domesticated animals in South America today.
Argentina at the beginning of the 20th century was one of the world’s richest countries. A century of bad government fixed that. So I’d say that Phil’s theory applies to the modern world a lot more than Diamonds, which is better for understanding the past.
Phil you should do an iPodcast. Record your own little radio show and then post it online.
If you change “stable government” to “entrenched lower class with no social mobility who have no choice but to continue to contribute to whatever hack places himself in the role of the president/emperor/king, and with a massive military presence that keeps invaders with less efficient methods of subjugation from screwing up the labor potential”, I’ll go with Philip’s theory.
The location theories are all a bit kooky, because as one poster mentioned, the n=4 and they all have to invent something offhand to explain Africa’s low place in industrial history. Any attempt to explain Africa in terms of its geography is fruitless (unless there’s a “southern hemisphere” explanation. I mean, Africa is huge, and does contain deserts and savannas in its interior, but the damn continent stretches across the equator and down to the Cape, has just massive amounts of coast, and plenty of arable land (you don’t see much farming in Arizona but that doesn’t mean the whole continent is barren).
So I’ll throw out one more twist that would further refine the stable government/entrenched labor force theory- maybe what you need is a stable, reasonably universal RELIGEON. Not necessarily top-to-bottom, but something to tell the peasants that they don’t need to rebel, they’ll get their reward in non-tangible ways, and that their place on this earth is fixed by the divine.
Some of the economic theories you’ve posted, ie, east-west continental orientation are quite interseting. However, I would ask this: What animals did the early American settlerts wi[e out that we migh better have domesticated?
Like your site and your link to some good picture art.
NH
How about this for an explanation: countries farther from the equator have less poor people because they have a phenomenon called “winter” that has been wiping out the very poor for centuries. Here in Brazil hundreds of thousands of people live in cardboard shacks. In the city where I live, if the temperature dropped to sub-zero for 48 hours, around 50% of the population would probably die. Warm countries have more poverty because they are better able to sustain large populations of extremely poor people.
While I do not mean to discount the importance of AC, Greeks, Egyptians and Mesopotamians were all capable of “sustained mental concentration” in their respective hod (but arid) climates. Ditto for the Central American civiliztions…
If “all of the poverty or wealth of nations can be explained by distance from the Equator” then air conditioning is the great equalizer.
Note the rise of many countries – Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, or even Arizon after the common availability of air conditioning.
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