Asymmetrical Information

Yes, the Amerinds created corn out of teosinte, but it must have been an enormous, slow effort and as a result they had only one staple crop. The fact that Eurasia had plants that were easily adapted means that the inhabitants could create multiple food crops. The same applies to domesticated animals.

I always took the thesis as incorporating luck, but showing that the odds were strongly in favor of Europe creating the first technological civilization (and once a single techciv arises, no other will).

Have you ever read William McNeill's Plagues and Peoples? I haven't read the Diamond book yet, but it seemed from reviews that it tread much of the same ground as the McNeill book. Is that the case?

My main problem with GGS: Diamond starts out with the promise of telling you why the West got "cargo", and everyone else didn't. He then goes on to argue based on geographic and biological features of the land. So it ends up that the Americas, and Africa, and the islands of the Pacific never had a chance.

Fair enough. I'll buy that.

But that does not explain why only western Europe developed... whatever it is that makes us rule the world. What is it exactly? And why not China, or the middle east, or India? All of them led, culturally, at one point or another.

Probably most people reading this know what we rule the world due to "capitalism", or some aspects of it. Which aspects, and why did we get it and nobody else?

I too read Guns, Germs and Steel, and found it a fascinating read and quite thought provoking. But there's a limit to Diamond's theory.

Yes, the continental U.S. and Europe are endowed with much natural resources that give it an edge over other regions of the world. And perhaps that accounts for some disparity in levels of economic development. But there's also cases over the last 100 years that point to other, perhaps more important factors dictating growth and development.

For example, consider the wide, wide disparity in economic development between the Koreas over the past 50 years. None of the difference is explained by climate or culture. The key issue was the north backed a losing economic system while the south supported a winning one, i.e., K. Marx v. A. Smith.

Meanwhile, I'd like to hear Diamond explain why Hong Kong and Singapore rose to such great heights of prosperity in the latter half of the 20th century, considering that neither has any natural resources to speak of. Ditto for Japan.

Simple solutions, in short, explain, at best, just part of any economic puzzle.

James -

Diamond's thesis has nothing to do with your questions. He was asking about why complex civilizations originally developed among neolithic tribes, and why some civilizations (european) were able to overwhelm others 500 years ago. He has nothing to say about the relative development of modern civilizations, which takes place in a environment of easy international travel.

And as for not explaining China, it's been awhile since I read the book, but I seem to remember him talking about the fact that China has no natural barriers, and so tended to be rather easy for one power to conquer. Thus, China tended to be ruled by long-lasting dynasties that became increasingly conservative. The landscape of Europe prevented this, and created competing powers that were couldn't become complacent. So even though China developed a lot of stuff first, Europe surpassed them.

Dr Manhattan -- yes, Diamond's book is a descendent of McNeill's but it is a updated to include recent research and ideas by a writer who from what I have heard is a superb research scientist. I recommend the book highly.

Jimbo, I quite agree. Diamond's book doesn't have anything to do with my questions. And that's the point.

Diamond's book doesn't have to do with your questions, although it doesn't have to. The thesis can be limited. Your questions are still fascinating, if unaddressed by the one book.

I understand your complaint-- people often engage in slight-of-hand to argue that Diamond's book does explain your questions, when it definitely doesn't. That's not explicitly his fault, except to the extent that he encourages it. (Not sure on that score.)

While natural resources surely have some role in developing civilization, I think that historically, the major drive for whether a society succeeds is its success in pursuing wars of conquest. (or in the modern age, its success in cultural dominance via a capitalist economic system.)

>>Meanwhile, I'd like to hear Diamond explain why Hong Kong and Singapore rose to such great heights of prosperity in the latter half of the 20th century, considering that neither has any natural resources to speak of.

You are on much stronger ground with your examples relating to Japan and Korea. Hong Kong and Singapore "rose to such great heights" from a base created by years of investment by the British; a useful location for an imperial power *is* a natural resource.

In related news, although everyone (including Karl Marx) knows about the immense productive capacity of the capitalist system, it would seem fair to at least mention that the economic development of Western Europe and North America has, as a matter of historical fact, involved the dispatch of a fair amount of "guns, germs and steel" in the direction of less fortunate peoples, in the cause of stealing their land and labour. What I would like to see would be an analytical work by someone on the question of whether or not the process of Empire-building was incidental to capitalist development; what would the capitalist world look like today if its history had not been steeped in blood?

Dsquared,
The question is, why was it Europeans sending out conquest fleets to India and not Indians conquering Europe, which surely would have happened if it were possible? And what land did did the US steal? Many poor nations have been sitting on major resources for decades if not centuries because of political incompetence, tyranny and socialism, but I repeat myself. In the world before the Guardian, conquest was accepted as inevitable and just. Jimbo's comment makes me think the answer lies in a level of competition among separate entities that was vigorous enough to stimulate invention and prosperity but not so intense as to destroy everything anyone created.

Jimbo,
China has significant natural barriers to conquest, in fact they are quite a bit more significant than those that Europe has to offer. Europe has no equivalent of the Gobi Desert separating it from North Central Asia, the Himalayas make the Alps look like foothills, and the great rivers of China make the Rhine and Danube look like rivulets. This is only one of the many problems with the Diamond thesis. Another, as Jane has pointed out, is that he tends to define easily domesticable animals as those that have been domesticated in Europe. What is the crucial biological difference between European water buffalos (the ones that they use to make mozzarella) and the water buffalos of South Africa and the American bison? Why was one easily domesticable, the others not? What is the difference between Asian elephants domesticated by multiple cultures and African elephants, which weren't? I can't see one other than ear size. Why are horses easily domesticated but not zebras? This list could easily be duplicated for plants. The answer is to be found somewhere other than the simple materialism of Diamond.
cheers,
-jack

D-squared, you raise an interesting question re: how much is wealth creation due to empire building, i.e., war? An alternative, and perhaps more enlightening way to ask the question is: Would so-called under-developed civilizations found much greater wealth and prosperity by engaging in more wars? By asking the question, of course, one presumes that relatively little "empire building" was going on in lesser developed civilizations. But that's not necessarily true, right?

>>The question is, why was it Europeans sending out conquest fleets to India and not Indians conquering Europe, which surely would have happened if it were possible?

Might I recommend a very good book on this subject called "Guns, Germs and Steel", by Jared Diamond?

>>And what land did did the US steal?

You stole it from one of the earlier His Majesty King Georges, I forget which. I believe he got it from some Red Indians.

>>An alternative, and perhaps more enlightening way to ask the question is: Would so-called under-developed civilizations found much greater wealth and prosperity by engaging in more wars?

Depends on whether they won them, surely?

>>Diamond spends a great deal of time telling us that it's simply not true that primitive societies remained primitive because they are genetically inferior. I am sure he is correct, but he's rather strenuous about it considering that this argument is not seriously advanced by anyone I've ever met, and hasn't been for the last fifty years or so. It's a lot of space to take up refuting an argument no one is making.

My read was, he was concerned that people would accuse him of making such an argument (not an unreasonable expectation, given the zest with which accusations of racism are flung about these days), and he wanted to deny it, emphatically, at length, and right up front.

But Diamond is very bad at explaining other differences: why did China and India, with as many or more natural advantages, end up on the wrong end of the gun? He does pretty well until about 1000 AD, but after that, it kinda falls apart. Which makes sense, since he's spent his life with stone-aged peoples.

Wars of conquest don't benefit modern economies for the same reasons that modern trade wars don't, as outline by Paul Krugman in Pop Internationalism
: a society's ability to procure other goods is based on its own productivity. Unless they reduce the population of a country to slave labor (even then, possibly uneconomic), the members of the rich country will lose more than they gain. Except in the case of a few key resources, such as land and oil, there's no percentage in it these days. The easily looted commodities, like food, are not the ones we need more of.

I agree that in the modern world, wars of conquest are more harmful to civilization than they are beneficial. But in the ancient world, the opposite was true. And as I said in my lengthier post on my own site, the genius of capitalism is that it takes the drives and ambitions that previous led to war and channels them into productive forces.

to j funchion.. ggs covers the territory that you talk about... he specifically mentions why not zebras, or african water buffaloes... as for elephants he doesn't see either as being domesticated, just tamed...

for zebras, it's that their behavour individually and as a herd just doesn't work with humans trying to order them around, where horses do ( i don't have the book in front of me.. but it seems that the zebra is a prickly beast, and efforts in the past few hundred years by very experienced peope to domesticate them have failed)

as for china being hard to conquer... you should look at the history, and you'll find that china tended to have one ruler since unification, back several thousand years ago... once you break into the good areas its pretty easy to get around, whereas europe is crisscrossed with mountains... at least 2 mountain ranges or large sea between italy and spain, 1-2 ranges between italy and germany, vast number between italy and greece... san marino, andorra, switzerland, and monaco are all independent based on very tough geography.. china has mountains in tibet and on its borders but that's about it...

you guys really need to read ggs.. very good book that goes over all of these arguments

Dsquared,

You were the one who said that the West's preeminence was based on conquest. Other comments have said that Diamond does not adequately address the question: why did the West conquer and not the East (or South)? You assert the West is now preeminent because it had an empire. That ignores the question as to how it got that empire. The main complaint about the book seems to be that he advances no coherent thesis to answer the basic question. I advance the competitiveness argument, which contains a grain of luck, as an alternative. Darn, don't tell me I'm actually going to have to read the book before I condemn it! That's no fun.

D-squared:

You suggested that Hong Kong's and Singapore's and Korea's success can be attributed to British investment in Hong Kong and Singapore, conveniently forgetting about Korea. Very sneaky! Is it coincidental that both Hong Kong and Singapore (and, to some extent, Korea as well) have cultures derived from China, which was long one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world (Chinese people like to think they were the most advanced, but I think that's pushing it)?

Actually, I'm not so sure GGS does a good job at all with explaining anything since the Roman Empire, if not even earlier. His arguments about Europe vs. China and India are incredibly handwavy and vague, suffer from a sample size of 1, and don't even fit that sample so well. (India was invaded several times and was divided into smaller nations for much of its history, just as Europe was.)

The same goes for North Africa and the Middle East--geographical factors simply don't suffice to explain why they fell behind Europe, given that they had the same crops and domestic animals the Europeans did.

I would go even further than the earlier poster and say that GGS is an interesting look at prehistory, but past that it doesn't have much to say. And given that the real differentiation of the West only occurred in the past 500 years, I think GGS fails in it's main aim, which is to explain why the West became the dominant power in the world.

And this leaves aside the dreadful dullness of the book, hammering home the same thesis over and over again. It would have fit in about 30 pages--the rest was simply repetition. And, actually, it did fit in 30 pages, in his previous book, the Third Chimpanzee, in which it formed one of 8 or 10 almost equally interesting chapters.

I am sure he is correct, but he's rather strenuous about it considering that this argument is not seriously advanced by anyone I've ever met, and hasn't been for the last fifty years or so.

Might I point you at the denizens of Gene Expression? I just picked a page at random; search for provisionalism.

I think he's focuses on it because he's worried about the leftovers of the Bell Curve; I know I've met far too many people who were convinced by media reports of the book.

That ignores the question as to how it got that empire. The main complaint about the book seems to be that he advances no coherent thesis to answer the basic question.

It got that empire by being the first one past the tech gate, due to factor endowments and geography. It's in the book.

It's been awhile, but as I recall Diamond says little or nothing about China vs. the West. He may even explicitly say that his thesis explains nothing there. At least, I'm pretty sure that he recognizes that his argument is strongest for the Americas, Africa, Oceania, and perhaps India and SE Asia.

My opinion is that we're dealing with a test sample of one and that with a few more trials China might have dominated in some. The Chinese dominated the Indian Ocean a century before the Portuguese arrived, with enormous cannon-armed ships reaching as far as Zanzibar. But this expansionism was voluntarily halted by the government for internal political reasons, partly because it was expensive and not immediately profitable. (Two books: When China Ruled the Seas and The Star Raft.)

Rergarding "post hoc ergo proper hoc": Diamond argues that the eland the the American bison could never have been domesticated because 19th and 20th-century experiments failed. However, this only meant that they could not compete economicaly with long-domesticated cattle.

A Siberian fur farmer succeeded in domesticating the fox. It took ten generations of careful selection.

When I read the book, I took it as a totally different aspect than you all, I guess. The main point I got from the book was not the specific resources, but the general resources, based on relative width of latitude which gave rise to the agrarian civilizations, which, in turn, gave rise to classes such as warrior classes by providing liesure and specialization. The wide expanse of equal latitude in the cradle of civilization provided the means for interchange of ideas, crops, animals and social evolution on equalized footings between tribes, which led to the struggles we see as recent history and wars. This competitive nature and devaluation of individuals by specialized classing has directly led to our current situation of overconsumption and disregard for the sparse hunter's respect of resources. Anything in between is just time, luck, and labels.

I would take Diamond's book as explaining the state of the world circa 1000 AD: why advanced civilizations in Eurasia, with nothing comparable in wealth etc in the Americas or Africa. For the followup, try David Landes' _The Wealth and Poverty of Nations_--which does indeed address the importance of European empires, among other things.

Leonard: if you want a good history of the development of the capitalist system in Europe, check out How The West Grew Rich by Rosenberg and Birdzell. They examine the origin and growth of necessary capitalist legal institutions: property, rule of law, the corporation, insurance, and all that jazz.

I left my copy of Wealth and Poverty on the bus, which was too bad, because until then I was greatly enjoying reading them together -- WAPON would say that the problem with Africa was epidemic diseases, while GGS would say that the problem with Africa was that it didn't have any epidemic diseases, and so on. It was a lot of fun.

>>conveniently forgetting about Korea. Very sneaky!>>

Oh read my post you twit. I explicitly said "you have a stronger argument about Korea". You're not in the fourth form debating society now you know.

It's been a long time since I read the book, but Diamond did attempt to address the question, "why Europe, not China?" He recognized that it was the difference in governments. (Is there anyone at all on this web site that doesn't agree with that. He attempted to argue that the difference in governments arose from the difference in geography, but recognized that this is rather weak.

To address that point for myself: China's greatest geographic barriers are it's natural boundaries, the Himalayas and the Gobi desert. Europe's greatest geographic barrier is the Alps, right in the middle. But on the other hand, at the dawn of the industrial age one of the most politically fragmented parts of western Europe was the one part without natural boundaries - the plains of northern Germany, with dozens of sovereign realms, some so small that their "kings" had to hire themselves out as mercenaries to feed their families. (Catherine the Great grew up in such a pocket kingdom.) I also question Diamond's definition of barriers - he sees Europe as being split up into many peninsulas and islands, but until the invention of the steam railroad, water transport was far easier than land transport for most purposes, although it was probably easier to invade when your troops could walk all the way... But overall, considering the example of Germany, I'd think that while geographic factors may have had some influence, historical accident probably had more to do with the different governmental histories across Eurasia in the last 1,000 years.

On the "ad hoc" argument, I have to partially agree. Eurasia probably did have the widest selection of animals and plants, but it seems a truly remarkable coincidence that 80% or so of the domesticable plants and animals just happened to come from areas around the Black Sea. It's more likely that for some reason lost in pre-history, the tribes in that area were far more patient and persistent in selective breeding than those in the rest of the world, turning barely usable tamed plants and animals into very useful domesticated breeds. Note that most of the wild ancestors are now either extinct or differ so much from the domesticated version that they cannot be identified with certainty.

One example: the American bison CAN be domesticated. I can go to the store and buy buffalo-burger, raised on a farm in northern Michigan not 50 miles from here. The American bison is a very close relative of the now extinct European "wild ox" (Aurochs), which appears to be the ancestor of domesticated cattle. The bison can breed with domesticated cattle, which under the usual definitions of biology would make them the same species. Of course they are a lot harder to control than animals with 5,000 generations of captivity behind them, but it's not at all likely that the Aurochs was any easier to tame. (I'd assume that whoever started that project had plenty of experience with sheep or goats first, and that they tried taming such a dangerous beast because they wanted to haul heavier loads than goats could handle. IIRC, most Biblical references to domesticated bovines are as beasts of burden rather than food source.)

>>but it seems a truly remarkable coincidence that 80% or so of the domesticable plants and animals just happened to come from areas around the Black Sea.

See Jane's very sensible comments about "clusters", further up this weblog. Also note that domestication is a process with significant positive feedback; lots of plants are domesticable so long as you've got some means of not starving to death while you're domesticating them.

D^2:

Undoubtedly, that's part of the effect, as, one imagines, is the fact that once you've domesticated one thing, it occurs to you to domesticate others. What's really a miracle is that someone tried to domesticate corn, which is inedible, or practically so, in its wild form, since that was the first major staple crop of the Mexican area.

But Diamond makes a stronger statement than that; he says that the reason all the domesticates come from one area of the Middle East is that they had all the best candidates. Since the wild ancestors are often unavailable, especially where animals are concerned, I don't think his data make his case. One does not, obviously, leap from that to concluding that the residents of other areas had some genetic predisposition to be backwards. I think probably there was a clustering of the good crops in certain areas, but that's insufficient to explain why almost all of the crops and animals used by humans come from one region. Time and luck, at the very least, need to be added to the picture.

Whether if, that which, snivel all you want.

Glad to read this commentary. I put the text down in disgust after 3 chapters. Later have heard that I missed out on some pertinent historical data -- but I couldn't take what the intro left out. . .

On page 412, he explicitly says China lost its technological lead due to too much political unification. For example, China stopped sailing its treasure fleets on a whim, and that was the end of it; they lost their shipyards, lost their trained shipbuilders, and couldn't restart again for a long time even if they wanted to.

By comparision, Europe was a mishmash of sailing & non-sailing nations, and it was highly unlikely they'd all do the same thing. Eventually, they'd all converge on the optimum path to keep from losing out to neighboring governments. China didn't *have* any neighboring governments, really.

Decentralization has its advantages. There's interesting short-run vs. long-run growth parallels here, too.

"I am sure he is correct, but he's rather strenuous about it considering that this argument is not seriously advanced by anyone I've ever met, and hasn't been for the last fifty years or so."

Having heard Diamond speak in person, I can say that he's convinced racial superiority is the only other explanation going. He flat-out said that anyone else he's ever asked the question to has, with varying degrees of reluctance, concluded that Europeans are better people in some way than everyone else.

"It seems to me that there is a stronger element of luck to all this than Diamond is willing to allow."

Luck, or sheer pig-headedness combined perhaps with desperation. The root of the manioc (no, not maniac - though that may be closer) is grown domestically for food. But it is deadly poison raw, and remains deadly cooked. How many died before someone figured out that the poison was in the juice and could be aqueezed out? And why did they keep trying?

As a complement to the book, I strongly recommend reading The Ideal Form of Organization, a subsequent essay by Diamond which appeared in the Wall St Journal. It answers many of the questions raised by commenters here. Much of Europe's "optimal fragmentation" arose as a result of the fractal dimension of its coastline; in proximity with the suite of domesticated plants and animals in the Fertile Crescent, this made it the likely long-term winner.

GGS draws on a whole bunch of processes to explain why things are as they are. Luck is part of it, first mover advantage is another, geography, especially whether innovation can spread easily along east west axes because there are fewer climatic challenges than along north-south axes.

Seems to me that a lot of posters here either haven't read the book or have given up early or not paid attention. All about normal.

However, my impression is that his argument is very careful, doesn't claim more for itself than is reasonable and moves along at a fairly slow pace, occasionally doubling over the ground from a slightly different angle. He owes no-one an apology if he doesn't solve it all in 30 minutes minus commercial time.

I suggest you also read Tim Flannery's The Future Eaters, especially for his take on the reverse process where societies lose capabilities as they did on Easter island and Tasmania. The two books go well together.

I for one have not read this book, however i do feel that the book seems to be forgeting one thing...Choice. Not everyone CHOOSES to be "civilized" or rule the world. Some are content with living there simple lives. Who is to say that our life is that much better than theirs. A good book that rufutes the idea of agriculture is Ishmael by Daniel Quinn.

Jane:
One reason Diamond is arguing so strongly against European genetic superiority, imao,is that in his heart, he suspects its true himself. I don’t see why everyone gets so het up about this, myself. Don’t stupid people have rights too?

Everyone:
One reason Europe developed in ways other places didn’t is rainfall agriculture. Iraq almost certainly developed farming first, but all the best land there is near certain rivers that feed an irrigation network. You can’t afford to move away from that capital investment for anything but a life or death emergency. In such places, “the State” developed, and immediately froze culture.

Europe was linked to these first states by the Mediterranean, a highly tranquil body of water half of every year. It greatly facilitates transportation.

And most of Europe permits good crops grown on non-irrigated land. You can afford to move away there, and people did. The result was a tribal structure that learned from the East without becoming a universal despotism.

For the place I stole this from was inspired by, see A theory of the origin of the state by Robert L. Carneiro.

To my mind, these two factors are things Diamond should have seen, but didn’t. But they don’t contradict his thesis, rather, they supplement it.

The question of why North Africa fell behind is something Diamond doesn’t address. The short, p.i. answer is, ‘It went Islamic, and then Islam froze, culturally.’ Why that happened, I don’t know.

But Diamond doesn’t have to explain everything, to explain many things.

dsquared:
the world is full of imperial and non-imperial civilizations steeped in blood that did not become capitalist. That suggests that imperialism, war, and conquest were incidental to capitalism.

As for stealing land, I always think of that great scene near the beginning of Red River, where John Wayne’s character asks the Mexican gunman how his boss acquired title to this land?

‘It was a grant to his family from the King of Spain.’
‘And how did the King acquire title?’
‘By right of conquest.’
‘Oh, he took it away from whoever had it before him. Well, from now on, everything north of the river belongs to me.’

They draw, Wayne’s character wins.

The history of real estate acquisition, summed up in a few minutes' footage.

If Diamond says Africa doesn’t have epidemic diseases (I don’t remember the book well enough tonite), then he’s wrong. Malaria, yellow fever, human sleeping sickness, and ‘animal sleeping sickness’ all exist there.

Jack Funchion:
Diamond dealt with the case of the zebras: they’re so vicious they cause more injuries to zoo keepers than any other animal. It would take many generations to bead that out of them, and no one ever found it worth while to do so.

zikka’s point about fox’s illustrates this. Zebras eat far more than foxes, are more dangerous to raise, their population multiplies more slowly, and their hides aren’t as valuable as fox furs for the effort of raising them.

markm:
Actually, Diamond didn’t deny that most plants are domesticatable. He rather emphasizes that of the eight that make up the bulk of calories grown worldwide, four grew wild in the fertile crescent. Then, Eurasia’s east-west geographic axis made them relatively easy to spread. This jump started Eurasia

I am Jane Galt, I live in Connecticut. where are you? Who is jane Galt?

Jane Galt

Gad, you people, take a breather!

I've read the book. Given it to friends and family. Cited it in discussion. All to my considerable pleasure and education.

Is it the last word on all aspects of human history? No, for that get yourself a library card.

Is it an interesting take on how we got where we are? Dang right. Is there other source material out there? Of course - scratch any historian worth his salt and you'll get a reading list.

Quit your bitchin' - you know who you are - then offer up some titles. Or better yet - write your own dratted book.

You will all note that I wrote this with only the mildest of invective. Didn't think I could!

If anyone reads down this far - I just now read the date on the original posting

Talk about crying in the wilderness!!!

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