Jared diamond what makes countries rich

Thus, geographical latitude acting independently of institutions is an important geographic factor affecting power, prosperity, and poverty. The other important geographic factor is whether an area is accessible to ocean-going ships because it lies either on the sea coast or on a navigable river. It costs roughly seven times more to ship a ton of cargo by land than by sea.

That puts landlocked countries at an economic disadvantage, and helps explain why landlocked Bolivia and semilandlocked Paraguay are the poorest countries of South America. It also helps explain why Africa, with no river navigable to the sea for hundreds of miles except the Nile, and with fifteen landlocked nations, is the poorest continent. The remaining major factor underlying wealth and poverty is the state of the natural environment.

All human populations depend to varying degrees on renewable natural resources—especially on forests, water, soils, and seafood.

Countries that excessively deplete their resources—whether inadvertently or intentionally—tend to impoverish themselves, although the difficulty of estimating accurately the costs of resource destruction causes economists to ignore it. It helps explain why notoriously deforested countries—such as Haiti, Rwanda, Burundi, Madagascar, and Nepal—tend to be notoriously poor and politically unstable.

These, then, are the main factors invoked to understand why nations differ in wealth. The factors are multiple and diverse. Within this frame, Acemoglu and Robinson focus on institutional factors: initially on economic institutions, and then on the political institutions that create them.

Instead of being vested in a single individual or a narrow group, [inclusive] political power rests with a broad coalition or a plurality of groups.

Inclusive economic and political institutions provide individuals with incentives to increase their economic productivity as they think best. Such inclusive institutions are to be contrasted with absolutist political institutions that narrowly concentrate political power, and with extractive economic institutions that force people to work largely for the benefit of dictators.

The ultimate development of inclusive political institutions to date is in modern Scandinavian democracies with universal suffrage and relatively egalitarian societies.

However, compared to modern dictatorships like North Korea and the absolute monarchies widespread in the past, societies such as eighteenth-century Britain in which only a minority of citizens could vote or participate in political decisions still represented a big advance toward inclusiveness.

From this striking dichotomy, the authors draw thought-provoking conclusions. While absolutist regimes with extractive economic institutions can sometimes achieve economic growth, that growth is based on existing technology, and is nonsustainable and prone to collapse; whereas inclusive institutions are required for sustained growth based on technological change.

One might naively expect dictators to promote long-term economic growth, because such growth would generate more wealth for them to extract. In their narrow focus on inclusive institutions, however, the authors ignore or dismiss other factors. Even within the focus on institutions, the concentration specifically on inclusive institutions causes the authors to give inadequate accounts of the ways that natural resources can be a curse.

True, the book provides anecdotes of the resource curse Sierra Leone cursed by diamonds , and of how the curse was successfully avoided in Botswana. Nor does the book show how some big resource producers like the US and Australia avoid the curse they are democracies whose economies depend on much else besides resource exports , nor which other resource-dependent countries besides Sierra Leone and Botswana respectively succumbed to or overcame the curse.

Two major factors that Acemoglu and Robinson do mention, only to dismiss them in a few sentences, are tropical diseases and tropical agricultural productivity:. Tropical diseases obviously cause much suffering and high rates of infant mortality in Africa, but they are not the reason Africa is poor.

Disease is largely a consequence of poverty and of governments being unable or unwilling to undertake the public health measures necessary to eradicate them…. The prime determinant of why agricultural productivity—agricultural output per acre—is so low in many poor countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, has little to do with soil quality. Rather, it is a consequence of the ownership structure of the land and the incentives that are created for farmers by the governments and institutions under which they live.

These sweeping statements, which will astonish anyone knowledgeable about the subjects, brush off two entire fields of science, tropical medicine and agricultural science.

The upward-sloping line in our figure reflects a strong relationship on average between political institutions and economic development, validating the central argument of Why Nations Fail. And the interesting thing is that each of these countries is an exception to, or even a challenge to, their thesis in opposite ways. India which is way below the line is too economically underdeveloped given the quality of its political institutions, and China which is well above the line is too rich given its lack of democratic institutions.

Acemoglu and Robinson can mount two defenses. First, they can contend that all countries should be treated equally because every political unit is only one experiment, and thus one data point regardless of size. After all, their thesis holds true for a vast majority of countries that is why the line is upward sloping.

Therefore the authors must be allowed some exceptions, given they have daringly embraced a mono-causal explanation of what is clearly a complex relationship between politics and economics. Still, at a basic level, explaining economic development while leaving out one-third of humanity from it is not entirely satisfying. Second, Acemoglu and Robinson can contend that theirs is a claim about the medium to long run.

These horizons are never clearly specified but would rule out criticisms based on relationships observed for only, say, 20 to 30 years.

Reproducing the figure for , for example, would show China near the line although India would still be far from it. We promise developing countries that if they just adopt good policies such as honest government, they too can enjoy affluence—but that promise is a cruel hoax. Of course it will persist: People of other countries want to enjoy the consumption rates that Americans enjoy.

The only sustainable outcome for our globalized world is one in which consumption rates are more nearly equal around the planet.

Does that guarantee that we will end up in disaster? We could have a stable outcome in which all countries converged on consumption rates below what developed nations enjoy now. As former U. Much U.

When you finish reading this page, go out into any U. Those trends are desirable goals, rather than horrible prospects to be resisted. Should we be depressed by the consequences of inequality? Again, no! While problems are getting worse, potentials for solutions are getting better. Multinational or world agreements have already succeeded in solving some big problems. Hence I view our world as being engaged in a horse race between a horse of destruction and a horse of hope.

Within a few decades we shall know which of those two horses has won the race. All rights reserved. This story appears in the December issue of National Geographic magazine. Other Threats Facing Earth. Share Tweet Email. Read This Next Wild parakeets have taken a liking to London. Animals Wild Cities Wild parakeets have taken a liking to London Love them or hate them, there's no denying their growing numbers have added an explosion of color to the city's streets.

The fence that divides the city of Nogales is part of a natural experiment in organizing human societies. On the American side, average income and life expectancy are higher, crime and corruption are lower, health and roads are better, and elections are more democratic. Yet the geographic environment is identical on both sides of the fence, and the ethnic makeup of the human population is similar. The reasons for those differences between the two Nogaleses are the differences between the current political and economic institutions of the US and Mexico.

Continue HERE. The book has just been published by Phaidon. I am not my name.