Posted on 08/02/2010 3:00:32 PM PDT by reaganaut1
The recent finding that economic success in life is largely determined by what you learned in kindergarten has proven contentious (at least among our readers). So what if I told you that economic success was instead determined by what your ancestors did more than a millennium ago?
That is one implication of a provocative new study by Diego Comin, William Easterly (known for his skepticism of foreign aid programs) and Erick Gong.
The study gathered crude information on the state of technological development in various parts of the world in 1000 B.C.; around the birth of Jesus; and in A.D. 1500. It then compared these measures to per capita income today.
As it turns out, technology in A.D. 1500 is an extraordinarily reliable predictor of wealth today. Heres a scatter plot showing the relationship between these two measures, in which each dot represents a different country:
As Mr. Easterly writes in an accompanying blog post, 78 percent of the difference in income today between sub-Saharan Africa and Western Europe is explained by technology differences that already existed in 1500 A.D. even BEFORE the slave trade and colonialism.
Whats more, these differences in technological development between regions had actually appeared as far back as 1000 B.C. (Side note: The big counterexample is China, which historically outshone other countries in its adoption of advanced technologies, but then did not go through the Industrial Revolution.)
There are multiple ways to explain persistence of technological differences over multiple millenniums.
...
In this earlier paper, Mr. Sachs and his co-authors argued that geography can help determine a countrys destiny, since location and climate have significant effects on the likelihood of disease burdens, transportation costs and agricultural productivity.
(Excerpt) Read more at economix.blogs.nytimes.com ...
No, but you can rent them for a while; maybe even as long as needed to get to the point of not needing them any more.
Cf Arkancide; Obama's Bus, diminishing space under; Ketchup Boy's....
Add “Jedaeo” to Christianity and You have a or the major component of rapid progress.All of these characteristics came straight out of Hebrew monotheism. One major component is the early and continuous Hebrew strictures on sex.
Whoops!
Thanks colorado tanker!
I absolutely agree. That is certainly an important factor.
I was amazed to see chitin as an added ingredient in some diet pills. Yeah, you might feel full but you will not get any nutrition or fat from these parts.
On the other hand, most female insects and laden with eggs which are high in protein and all those whitish parts are fat.
Lobster and crab are seagoing insects with the same structural build. Would you eat the carapace?
It's those yummy reindeer.
It’s not just the protein. Vitamin B12 is essential for proper brain function; the first thing my doc did when I complained about insomnia and anxiety was check my B12 level. The best sources of B12 are meat and dairy- a vegan diet without supplements will lead to deficiency.
You're right. The book I was talking about went into some detail about the other vitamins and minerals that were absent in the islander's diet - but I'm not a doctor or scientist, so much of it left my mind almost immediately after reading it.
Property rights probably would have trouble developing in tropical areas where slash and burn agriculture was the norm. That is clear land with burning, harvest crops a few years until rain and crops rob nutrients, then move on. This actually was the pattern in our own south, where cotton growing kept moving west, leaving the south east impoverished and lacking freedom.
In the great central plains of Russia and Asia, people migrated with the grass, and a number of countries still have nomadic herdsmen, which think in term of grazing rights, but not land holding.
In antiquity, the fundamentals of wealth would be first, lots of arable land with a water source, thus the riverine civilizations of antiquity. But the Greeks showed a counter-example to this. Name a river in Greece. Or the Minoan civilization. It seems both borrowed a lot of knowledge from Egypt, which had run its course as a great power.
Thus, land and food = leisure time for education and study, leading to knowledge, a permanent asset in exploiting nature. After knowledge reaches a critical point, the civs of the Nile, Tigris/Euphrates and Indus rivers lost their special advantage.
These older civs ran on slave labor. But when a civ uses knowledge as its primary tool, a lot of individual freedom is needed. Technology, of course, is the offspring of knowledge. Thus, the free Greeks defeated the hordes of Persia again and again, both because they were free, and wished to stay that way, and because their military technology was far advanced.
In order to keep freedom alive, it must be codified. The Romans and the Chinese were good at this, and it avoided a lot of conflict. Rome grew too big to defend it own borders, and the public spirit which enlivened it became degenerate hedonism. Mercenary Germanic troops rebeled and helped divide the empire, while huge migrations from central Asia finally took down both the Western and the Eastern Empire. That is what is starting to happen to us today.
So I have first, surplus food, leading to leisure, leading to knowledge, leading to technology. What brings otherwise successful civilizations down? Internal dissoluteness and external invasion. What could prevent this fate, for the US or any advanced tech civilization? A unifying, unyielding ethos and rational laws justly applied. The Founders provided us the basics for this, but warned that such a government was meant only for a moral people.
OK, there's my history in a nutshell.
Ask me again after the Bush tax cuts expire.
Maybe it simply never occurred to the Papua New Guineans to rustle up some grub?
...a møøse once bit mi sister...
National Socialism is robbing Peter to make Paul rich writ large.
When you have beggared all of your own Peters, you must invade the surrounding countries and rob their Peters to keep the party going.
People tend to forget that France was Germany's #1 trading partner in the 30's...
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.
Thanks for the ping. There are so many intelligent and plausible theories put forth here that I am sort of hesitant to say anything, but here goes.I'm glad you did!
In antiquity, the fundamentals of wealth would be first, lots of arable land with a water source, thus the riverine civilizations of antiquity. But the Greeks showed a counter-example to this. Name a river in Greece. Or the Minoan civilization. It seems both borrowed a lot of knowledge from Egypt, which had run its course as a great power.Greece is only about 30 percent arable land; the Eurotas river in the Peloponnese appears to have been the one naturally well-endowed ag area, and not surprisingly was powerful in classical times (Sparta enslaved nearly every Greek living in the Eurotas valley, and totally dominated (basically ruled) all other towns and villages there. Walling a settlement was not acceptable to the Spartans. Only after Thebes beat the Spartans' vaselined asses at Leuctra and freed the enslaved Greeks did city walls spring up all over the Peloponnese. Those walls kept those freed Greeks free.
Thus, land and food = leisure time for education and study, leading to knowledge, a permanent asset in exploiting nature. After knowledge reaches a critical point, the civs of the Nile, Tigris/Euphrates and Indus rivers lost their special advantage.I agree. What little is known in their own words of Mycenaean Greece has been translated from a fairly small body of Linear B tablets. These contain details of local economic activity, which was apparently at least minutely inventoried by, and probably controlled by, the state. Besides olive oil and wheat, slaves and flax products were apparently typical. The careful management of production led to surplus and political organization -- and trade, and wealth for the lords of the manors. Local sovereignty was so important that it took an outside invader -- Alexander the Great (and then the Romans, etc) -- to unify them.
These older civs ran on slave labor. But when a civ uses knowledge as its primary tool, a lot of individual freedom is needed. Technology, of course, is the offspring of knowledge. Thus, the free Greeks defeated the hordes of Persia again and again, both because they were free, and wished to stay that way, and because their military technology was far advancedThe Persians moved an immense army made up of more than two dozen ethnic groups drawn from all over the empire across Anatolia, across a pontoon bridge at the straits, and down into a mountainous peninsula. At one point Xerxes had a canal dug through a long narrow landmass in order to bring his fleet along a more favorable course. There was no comparison -- the Persian Empire had a huge superiority in military logistics and strategy, and a very deep well of manpower and wealth. The "free Greeks" consisted of groups of occasional soldiers trained in a very simple but very effective (and small) set of battlefield tactics -- as well as the standing army of Sparta, which was supported by a massive slave population eventually held in bondage for about two centuries.
In order to keep freedom alive, it must be codified. The Romans and the Chinese were good at this, and it avoided a lot of conflict. Rome grew too big to defend it own borders, and the public spirit which enlivened it became degenerate hedonism. Mercenary Germanic troops rebeled and helped divide the empire, while huge migrations from central Asia finally took down both the Western and the Eastern Empire. That is what is starting to happen to us today.Codified law is a necessary protection -- as "A Man For All Seasons" puts it, after you've knocked down all the laws to get at the Devil, and he turns round on you, where do you turn for help, all the laws being flat? The Romans had a massive set of books that were (like ours) made from both the legislation (including common law and local practice) and legal precedents from litigation results. There was an index, also from Roman times, that had made the massive body of law teachable, learnable, and usable. The index was the one part of the corpus of Roman law that survived into the Middle Ages, and was found (oddly enough) preserved in a library in Spain that had recently been liberated from the Moslems. That discovery revolutionized European law, and came along at a good time, because the bubonic plague destroyed the folklore-based settlement of disputes pretty much universal in feudal societies. The sage oldsters were simply not there due to sudden death, and the societies of Europe were having their props kicked out, because traditional ways (regardless of what they were locally) were shown to be unable to cope with or even anticipate such a disaster.
So I have first, surplus food, leading to leisure, leading to knowledge, leading to technology. What brings otherwise successful civilizations down? Internal dissoluteness and external invasion. What could prevent this fate, for the US or any advanced tech civilization? A unifying, unyielding ethos and rational laws justly applied. The Founders provided us the basics for this, but warned that such a government was meant only for a moral people.Wholeheartedly agree -- all civilization is based on agricultural surplus (and so far that has always included animal husbandry, i.e., meat); the centralized states of whatever size have been made possible (and really, made necessary) by food surplus. Standing armies to defend against external threats -- as well as internal ones -- were made possible by food surplus. Writing was necessitated by the needs of title to property, water rights, what we would call probate, and of course the collection of taxes (no joke, that). Once writing existed for one purpose, the recording of previously oral-only traditions made perfect sense, and helped homogenize culture, leading to a sense of nationality and national origin where it had never existed in quite that form.
Uh, okay, so, I may have gone a bit long there...
“Could it be I’ve carried this thing too far?” — Bugs Bunny
Not at all.
I love productive give and take discussions. For example, I learn from you that Persia was actually technologically and militarily more advanced than I realized. Of course, the very long supply lines were a big problem. Salamis was the decisive battle, because Athens was occupied and burned.
When I say 'free Greeks', I mean that they were a rational people, not beholden to the autocratic whims of a God-Emperor as in Egypt, Persia and China. Even the monarchies hated a despot. Knowing this, it is a puzzle to me why Sparta made alliance with Persia. What did they expect the final result to be?
What little is known in their own words of Mycenaean Greece has been translated from a fairly small body of Linear B tablets. These contain details of local economic activity, which was apparently at least minutely inventoried by, and probably controlled by, the state.
I have heard that the earliest known examples of writing were inventory lists of goods and monetary accounts. Who would guess that the need for record keeping would lead to sonnets and novels? I think the ancients preferred to keep their mythologies in the oral tradition. This gave great status to those elders with good memories who were living tomes of their civilization's history. And it allowed for creative embellishment.
Hegel wrote that the ancient empires showed that "One could be free" (the Emperor), and the caste system states of Greece showed that "Some could be free." And finally, the emerging republics of his own time showed that "All could be free." This is about the only sensible thing I have read from Hegel.
The some free men of the Hellenic city-states started a trend in freedom of thought and action that continues to unfold. One man can make a monumental difference. One man can change history. The value of creative thought was proven. And the dangers of one man given too much power was also demonstrated. I am thinking of the egomaniac Alcibiades, whose treasonous and destructive acts forced him to take refuge in a Greek city in Asia. Unlike Themistocles, he didn't make it to old age, as you know.
Was Alcibiades one of the players behind the disastrous Syracuse expedition? My history time-line is not clear. One thing that amazes me about that venture is that the Athenians were supposed to have lost 50,000 men. Or so I have imbibed from some source. But Athens had only about 10,000 free citizens. Can you clear me up on this?
The Roman Empire tore itself apart because it didn't have any kind of unifying national identity, and those who did identify with the Roman civ wound up fighting each other for power. It never had any kind of system of orderly succession (or even any way out of office except death) until Diocletian came along, and his system didn't work perfectly either.
Of course the Roman system of government was not designed to accommodate Emperors. It did have a tight unifying national identity at its inception, but as the city-state grew into a vast empire, that national identity kept getting watered down. Citizenship was extended to more and more peoples, and after Julius Ceasar, that citizenship was hardly equal to what the original inhabitants of the seven hills enjoyed. Compare the right to vote today with what it meant in 1800 in our own country.
IMHO, Rome should never have messed with the Germania. But with Emperors instead of the Senate in control, status was based on conquest. The Emperors were named after the regions they conquered. This inability to live within limits was a major factor for the Empire. Somewhere in their history Rome's wars changed from defensive wars to offensive wars of sheer conquest. Thus runs the course of all over-reaching Empires.
Well, I surely have rattled on as much or more than you, SunkCiv. But this is OUR forum (by the good graces of JR), so who cares what the neighbors think. If you like, we can continue an exchange via FReep mail.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.