Federal grant money probably paid for this “study” and the author will undoubtably get the Nobel Prize... in keeping with the tradition of Obama/Gore/Krugman.
Not all warm places are easy. It seems to me that it would take plenty of brains to survive in the Kalahari, or to chart the islands of Polynesia. And it’s probably a lot easier to store food in Norway, than in the Amazon.
A lot of glittering generalities here with few specifics to back them up.
Seems like this study ignores the role of culture. In those societies where freedom and property rights were the norm, technology advanced. Why develop anything if the government will only take it away and redistribute it.
I didn’t have kindergarten when I went to school.
That must make me smart.
This study is obviously racist.
Ping.
http://article.nationalreview.com/267356/in-defense-of-elitism/jonah-goldberg
About a decade ago, one of the Smithsonian museums here in Washington had an exhibit on the history of human civilization, or something along those lines. I didn't see it, but a friend of mine went and his description always stuck with me. One of the displays was a comparative timeline of different cultures. At, say, 1250 you'd see what the British, the Japanese, the Chinese, or the Arabs had come up with. The sight that really struck home for my friend was a beautiful Renaissance Italian clock, with movable gears and a stunning hand-painted face with a sun and moon alternating for AM and PM. The clock came from the 15th or 16th century, I think. But that's not really important. On the same timeline for African culture there was a wood mask with eye- and mouth-holes cut out in some "novel" way. The little explanatory card on the wall tried to make it sound, somehow, as though the handcrafted clock and the mask were similarly impressive accomplishments. To which my friend responded, roughly, "Are you high?"
I may have gotten the details a bit off here, but the substance is obviously true. Some things are better than other things. Some cultures are better than other cultures. Some things are more worth studying, celebrating, and emulating than other things. Or as the late William Henry III put it in his wonderful book, In Defense of Elitism, "It is scarcely the same thing to put a man on the moon as to put a bone in your nose."
The dumb ones were all eaten by reindeer.
Need to see the R-squared but it looks like a fairly strong correlation...
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There are lots of things that make up a flowering civilization including climaate which implicates food availability.
However, if I were to put money on any one thing that gave Western civilization a booster shot, it would be the invention of movable and standardized type.
The expansion of information and general knowledge that came with the ever increasing ability of the average man to obtain cheaper and cheaper books gave the West the advantage of multiplying the numbers of educated people who COULD do things like invent steam engines.
Watt didn’t start with an idea of a steam engine from scratch (eg. Newton’s legendary apple falling from a tree) but he had a whole conrnucopia of knowledge of various kinds of mechanical devices and physics that he could put together into a successful invention.
In a 1000 years people will look back on the next big thing that moved civilization as the computer invented by IBM, Jobs, and Gates and the internet invented by Al Gore on an unseasonably cool day.