Neither geographic isolation nor its economic and cultural handicaps have been confined to people living in mountains, however. Similar effects have been seen where isolation has been due to islands located far from the nearest mainland. When the Spaniards discovered the Canary Islands in the fifteenth century, for example, they found people of a Caucasian race living at a stone age level.{886} #51 | | |
What mountains often create are cultural “islands” on land, where people in one mountain valley have had little communication with people living in other mountain valleys, perhaps not far away as the crow flies, but not very accessible across rugged mountain terrain.{887} Deserts, jungles, rift valleys and other geographic barriers can likewise create the equivalent of “islands” on land, where people are isolated from the progress of the rest of the world, and live deprived of both the economic benefits of that progress and of opportunities to develop themselves as individuals and societies by learning how things are done elsewhere. #52 | | |
The poverty of many mountain peoples has often led them to put their children to work at an early age, {888} depriving them of education that could at least partially break through their physical isolation from the rest of the world. Most of the people living in various mountain communities around the Mediterranean remained illiterate on into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.{889} Thus lower levels of human capital have been added to the other, more direct handicaps of isolated mountain communities, such as high transportation costs and high costs per capita of building water supply systems, sewage systems, electrical systems, railroads and highways in distant and sparsely populated communities. #53 | | |
Mountains play a major economic role, not only in the lives of people living in those mountains, but also in the lives of others who are affected indirectly by the presence of mountain ranges. For example, the melting of snow on mountainsides supplies rivers, streams and lakes with water, so that these waterways are not wholly dependent on rainfall. But where there are no mountain ranges, as in sub-Saharan Africa, the waterways are in fact wholly dependent on rainfall—and that rainfall is itself undependable in tropical Africa, so that rivers and streams can shrink or even dry up for months until the next rainy season comes. #54 | | |
While mountains have often kept the people living in them mired in poverty and backwardness, these mountains have at the same time often brought prosperity to people living on the land below, by supplying water to otherwise arid regions. The Sierra Nevada in Spain and the Taurus Mountains in Turkey both supply the water that makes a flourishing irrigated agriculture possible in the lowlands, {890}where rainfall alone would not be sufficient. This water comes not only from melting snows on the mountainsides but also from the drainage of rain water from vast mountainous areas—trickles of water joining together as they pour down the mountainsides to become streams and the streams joining together to become rivers that can be put to use by farmers and others below. #55 | | |
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Although much of the Western Hemisphere seems geographically similar to Europe, in terms of land, climate and waterways, it was a profoundly different economic setting for the indigenous peoples of North and South America before the Europeans arrived. What was totally lacking throughout the Western Hemisphere when the Europeans arrived were horses, oxen or other heavy-duty beasts of burden. #57 | | |
The whole economic way of life that existed in Europe for centuries would have been impossible without horses—and was impossible in the Western Hemisphere before the Europeans brought horses across the Atlantic. Severely constrained transportation options meant that the cultural universe in the Western Hemisphere was for millennia much smaller than the cultural universe available to the people living in much of Europe, Asia or North Africa. Advances made in Asia, such as gunpowder in China or so-called Arabic numerals in India, {xxix} could find their way across thousands of miles into Europe. But the indigenous peoples living on the east coast of North America had no way of even knowing of the existence of indigenous peoples living on the west coast, much less acquiring knowledge of the skills or technology developed in their different cultures. #58 | | |
Large, ocean-going ships also facilitated trade in goods and knowledge between Europeans and Asians. But the loading and unloading of large cargo ships was by no means as economically feasible when there were no heavy-duty beasts of burden to carry these cargoes to or from a wide enough area on land to either supply or carry away cargoes large enough to fill a ship. Accordingly, water transport in the Western Hemisphere was in smaller vessels such as canoes, whose economically viable range and cargo capacity in the pre-Columbus era were by no means comparable to that of the ships in Europe or the even larger ships in China at that time. #59 | | |
When the invaders from Europe encountered the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere, it was an encounter between races with cultural universes of vastly different sizes. The Europeans were able to navigate across the Atlantic, in the first place, by drawing upon information and technologies derived over the centuries from Asia, the Middle East and North Africa. Western Europeans’ knowledge was preserved in letters created by the Romans, written on paper invented by the Chinese. They made navigational calculations at sea using a numbering system that originated in India, and were able when they landed to prevail in armed conflicts as a result of gunpowder, invented in Asia. #60 | | |
When the British confronted the Iroquois or the Spaniards confronted the Incas, it was by no means a confrontation based solely on what each culture had developed within itself. The Iroquois had no way of knowing of the very existence of the Incas or the Mayans, much less drawing upon features of Inca’s or Mayan’s culture to advance their own. #61 | | |
Australia likewise had no heavy-duty beasts of burden before the Europeans arrived. Nor were there farm animals like cows or goats, or herd animals like sheep or cattle. Given this vast island continent, isolated in the South Pacific, much of the land a desert and therefore sparsely populated, it can hardly be surprising that the Australian aborigines were long regarded as among the world’s most backward peoples. Rainfall patterns in the arid interior were at least as unreliable as in parts of tropical Africa. As a National Geographic Society publication put it: “Years without rain may be followed by summer deluges.”{891} These are clearly not conditions for agriculture, or even for much spontaneous growth of vegetation. #62 | | |
Much of the soil in Australia is of low fertility. However, Australia has an abundance of valuable natural resources and has been the world’s largest exporter of titanium ore.{892} However, this and other mining products became natural resources only after the British arrived and applied modern science and technology. Such resources were of little or no value to the aborigines. #63 | | |
The coastal fringe of Australia, where most of the country’s population lives today, had better land and climate. But, even there, it was only after the British settled in Australia, and brought Western technology, that agriculture and cattle raising were introduced to replace the hunter-gatherer societies of the aborigines. Here as elsewhere, the Europeans came armed with knowledge and technologies gathered from a vastly wider cultural universe. Geography alone was enough to keep the aborigines from having equal economic or other advances. #64 | | |
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Location, as such, can affect the fate of whole peoples and nations, even aside from the particular geographic characteristics of a particular location. #66 | | |
Something as simple as the fact that “Russian rivers run north-south, and most traffic moves east-west”{893} means that the economic value of those rivers as transportation arteries was greatly reduced. Differences in location can also mean differences in climate that affect how much a particular waterway is subject to being frozen, and therefore unable to carry any cargo. In the south of Russia, “waterways remained open nine months of the year; in the north, only six weeks.”{894} Most of the water in Russian rivers drains into the Arctic Ocean.{895} #67 | | |
Although the Volga is Russia’s most important river economically, in terms of the cargo it carries, there are two other Russian rivers which each have more than twice as much water as the Volga. But the Volga happens to be located near centers of population, industry and farmland, and the others are not. Location can matter more than the physical characteristics of a river—or of mountains or other geographic features. #68 | | |
Agriculture—perhaps the most life-changing innovation in the history of the human species—came to Europe from the Middle East in ancient times, so that Europeans who happened to be located in the eastern Mediterranean, closer to the Middle East, received this epoch-making advance, moving them beyond the era of hunter-gatherers, centuries before those Europeans living in northern Europe. Agriculture greatly reduced the amount of land required to provide food to sustain a given number of people, and thus made cities possible. #69 | | |
Cities were common in ancient Greece but very uncommon in northern Europe or in many other parts of the world at that time. From these ancient Greek cities came Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and others who helped lay the intellectual foundations of Western thought and civilization. {xxx} The ancient Greeks were producing philosophy, literature, geometry and architecture at a time when other Europeans tended to lag further behind the Greeks in cultural and technological development the farther away from Greece they were located. As a scholarly study of the evolution of Europe put it, in the fifth century B.C., “in the Baltic and Scandinavian regions and on the outermost fringes of the British Isles, Stone Age peoples were beginning to learn the rudiments of agriculture.” Even farther north, “hunters and herders still practiced a culture which had ended ten thousand years earlier in southern Europe.”{896} #70 | | |
In a later era, people located in Western Europe received the benefits of Roman civilization that people in various other parts of Europe did not. Roman letters, for example, enabled Western European languages to develop written versions, centuries before the languages of Eastern Europe did the same. In other parts of the world as well, the happenstance of being located near an advanced civilization, such as that of ancient China, enabled some races or nations to advance far beyond other races or nations not situated near comparable sources of progress. Thus Koreans and Japanese were able to adapt Chinese writing to their own languages, becoming literate long before other Asian peoples who lived in regions remote from China. Literacy obviously opens up wider economic and other prospects denied to those who remain illiterate. #71 | | |
The happenstance of being in the right place at the right time has made a huge difference in the economic fate of whole peoples. Moreover, what was the right place has varied greatly at different periods of history. After many centuries, the peoples of northern Europe would eventually surpass the peoples of southern Europe economically and technologically—as the people of Japan would likewise surpass the people of China who had for centuries been far more advanced than the Japanese. Economic inequalities between peoples or nations have been pervasive in both ancient times and modern times, though the particular patterns of those inequalities have changed drastically over the centuries. #72 | | |
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Whether human beings are divided into countries, tribes, races or other categories, geography is just one of the reasons why they have never had either the same direct economic benefits or the same opportunities to develop their own human capital. Cultures are another reason. Places blessed with beneficial climates, waterways and other natural advantages can nevertheless remain poverty-stricken if the culture of the people living there presents many obstacles to their developing the resources that nature has provided. What has sometimes been called “living in harmony with nature” can also be called stagnating in poverty amid potential wealth. Other peoples from other cultures often move into the same geographic setting and thrive by developing its resources. #74 | | |
Cultures that promote the rule of law, rather than arbitrary powers exercised by leaders, have increasingly been recognized as major factors promoting economic development. So too are cultures where honesty is highly valued in both principle and practice. International studies of nations ranked high and low in honesty repeatedly show that the most corrupt nations are almost invariably ranked among the poorest, even when they have rich natural resources, because pervasive corruption can make it too risky to make the large investments required to develop natural resources. #75 | | |
Cultural attitudes toward work also affect economic development, and these attitudes have also varied, for centuries, even within the same European civilization, where the attitudes of the elite in England during the reign of the Tudors differed considerably from the attitudes among the elites in continental European nations at that time: #76 | | |
The younger son of the Tudor gentleman was not permitted to hang idle about the manor-house, a drain on the family income like the empoverished nobles of the Continent who were too proud to work. He was away making money in trade or in law.{897} #77 | | |
Sometimes economic progress depends on whether people in a particular culture are seeking progress, rather than being contented with doing things the way things have always been done. The proportions of the population who seek progress and the proportions who are satisfied with doing things in familiar ways can differ between societies and within societies, thereby affecting economic differences among regions and nations. In the United States, for example, the antebellum South tended not to advance as fast as other parts of the country: #78 | | |
Techniques of Southern agriculture changed slowly, or not at all. So elementary a machine as the plow was adopted only gradually and only in scattered places; as late as 1856, many small farmers in South Carolina were still using the crude colonial hoe. There was little change in the cotton gin, gin house, or baling screw between 1820 and the Civil War.{898} #79 | | |
The cotton gin, a crucial economic factor in the antebellum South, was invented by a Northerner. When it came to inventions, only 8 percent of the U.S. patents issued in 1851 went to residents of the Southern states, whose white population was approximately one-third of the white population of the country. Even in agriculture, the main economic activity of the region, only 9 out of 62 patents for agricultural implements went to Southerners.{899} Differences in habits and attitudes are differences in human capital, which can mean differences in economic outcomes. As of the Civil War era, the North produced 14 times as much textiles as the South, despite the South’s virtual monopoly of growing cotton, and the North also produced 15 times as much iron as the South, 25 times the merchant ship tonnage and 32 times as many firearms.{900} #80 | | |
The advantages of a larger cultural universe do not end with the particular products, technologies or ideas that come from other cultures. Repeatedly seeing how things are done differently in other societies, with better results in particular cases, not only brings those particular foreign products, technologies and ideas, but also counters the normal human tendency toward inertia that keeps individuals and societies doing things in the same old familiar ways. In other words, a particular culture may develop its own original new ways of doing things, as a result of seeing repeatedly how others have done other things differently. Conversely, a society isolated from the outside world has fewer spurs toward rethinking their own traditional ways. #81 | | |
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Physical wealth may be highly visible, but human capital, invisible inside people’s heads, is often more crucial to the long-run prosperity of a nation or a people. John Stuart Mill used this fact to explain why nations often recover, with surprising speed, from the physical devastations of war: “What the enemy have destroyed, would have been destroyed in a little time by the inhabitants themselves” in the normal course of their consumption, and would require replenishing. Given the wear and tear on capital equipment, constant reproduction of new equipment would likewise be required.{901} What the war does not destroy is the human capital that created the physical capital in the first place. #83 | | |
Even the massive physical devastations of World War II, from bombings and widely destructive ground battles, were followed by a rapid economic recovery in postwar Western Europe. Aid from the United States under the Marshall Plan has often been credited with this recovery, but the later sending of foreign aid to many Third World countries produced no such dramatic economic growth. #84 | | |
The difference is that industrialized Western Europe had already developed the human capital which had produced modern industrial societies there before the war began, but Third World countries had yet to develop that human capital, without which the physical capital was often of little or no use when it was donated as foreign aid. The Marshall Plan eased the transition to peacetime economic recovery in Western Europe, but foreign aid could not create the necessary scale of human capital where that human capital did not already exist. #85 | | |
Confiscations of physical capital have likewise seldom produced any major or lasting enrichment of those who do the confiscating—whether these are Third World governments confiscating (“nationalizing”) foreign investments or urban rioters looting stores in their neighborhoods. What they cannot confiscate is the human capital that created the physical things that are taken. However serious the losses suffered by those who have been robbed, whether by governments or by mobs, the physical things have a limited duration. Without the human capital required to create their replacements, the robbers are unlikely to prosper in future years as well as those who were robbed. #86 | | |
Human capital may also play a role in the fact that has often been pointed out, that many of the poorest societies have been located in the tropics, and many of the most prosperous have been located in temperate zones. Yet many peoples from temperate zones who have gone to live in the tropics have often prospered there, as the Chinese have in Malaysia and the Lebanese have in West Africa, far more so than people indigenous to those regions. Here, as elsewhere, the effects of a particular geographic setting can be both direct and indirect—presenting objective opportunities and either extending or restricting the development of the human capital necessary to make the most of those opportunities. #87 | | |
Sometimes the very advantages of a given geographic setting can make it unnecessary for the people indigenous in that setting to have to develop their human capital to the fullest. For example, a tropical land capable of producing crops the year round can make it unnecessary for the people there to develop the same sense of urgency about time, and the resulting habits of economic self-discipline, that are necessary for sheer physical survival in a climate where people must begin plowing the land soon after it thaws in the spring, if they are to raise a crop during the limited growing season in the temperate zone that will enable them to feed themselves throughout the long winter months. This was especially so during the millennia before modern transportation made it economically feasible to draw vast amounts of food from other lands around the world. #88 | | |
The unavoidable necessity of storing food to live on during the winter means that, for centuries, ingrained habits of saving were also essential for survival among peoples in the temperate zones. But, in the tropics, the development of such habits is by no means always so urgent. Moreover, the ability to store grain or potatoes to eat during the winter is much greater in temperate climates than the ability to store bananas, pineapples or other tropical foods in hot climates. {xxxi} Human capital includes not only information but habits, and the habits necessary for survival in some geographic settings are by no means the same as in other geographic settings. #89 | | |
Like many other things, natural abundance can have both positive and negative effects. The saying among the Thais, “Rice on the land and fish in the water”{902} expressed a confidence in the abundance of nature that was foreign to people struggling to survive in the very different geographic setting of southern China, where hunger and starvation were perils for centuries, forcing the people there to become frugal, hard-working and resourceful, under threat of extinction. When people from southern China migrated into more promising geographic environments in Thailand, Malaysia or the United States, these qualities—these habits, this human capital—enabled them to thrive, even when they began as destitute immigrants and later became more prosperous than the people who were living in the same environment before them. #90 | | |
Much the same story could be told of the Lebanese, the Jews and others who arrived in many places around the world as immigrants with very little money, but with much human capital that they had developed in other, more challenging settings. Many other groups have had similar patterns as migrants within their own countries: #91 | | |
Conspicuous among advanced groups are some whose home region is infertile and overpopulated. The Tamils of Sri Lanka, the Bamiléké of Cameroon, the Kabyle Berbers of Algeria, the Kikuyu of Kenya, the Toba Batak of Indonesia, the Ilocano of the Philippines, the Malayalees of Kerala in India, and the Ibo of Nigeria all come from regions too poor to support their populations, and all have unusually high rates of migration to areas outside their home regions, where they have taken up a variety of opportunities in the modern sector.{903} #92 | | |
The era of European colonialism put Western education and Western industrial, commercial and administrative skills within reach for groups previously among the poorer indigenous people such as the Ibos in Nigeria and the Tamils in Sri Lanka, who then rose to become more prosperous than others who had been more prosperous before. The resentments of their rise, and the politicized polarizations that followed, led to bloody civil wars in both countries. #93 | | |
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One of the aspects of a culture that can be very important in its economic consequences is a willingness, or unwillingness, to learn from other cultures. This can vary greatly from one culture to another. Both Britain and Japan, for example, rose from being island nations lagging economically for centuries behind their respective continental neighbors, before eventually catching up and then surging ahead of them, largely as a result of absorbing the cultural and economic advances of other nations and then carrying these advances further themselves. The otherwise very different cultures of Britain and Japan were alike in their receptivity to incorporating features of other cultures into their own. This receptivity to advances made elsewhere is at least part of the answer to a question about Britain posed by an Italian scholar: “How, in the first place, did a peripheral island rise from primitive squalor to world domination?”{904} #95 | | |
By way of contrast, the Arab Middle East—once a culture more advanced than that in Europe—became resistant to learning from others, lost its lead, and then fell behind other nations that were advancing faster. In today’s Arab world—about 300 million people in 22 countries{905}—the number of books translated from other languages has been just one-fifth of the number translated by Greece alone, for a population of 11 million. A United Nations study showed that the number of books translated in the Arab world during a five-year period was less than one book for every million Arabs, while in Hungary there were 519 books translated for every million people, and in Spain 920 books per million people.{906} #96 | | |
Put differently, Spain translates as many books into Spanish annually as the Arabs have translated into Arabic in a thousand years.{907} Cultural isolation can be a factor in wealth differences among nations, just as geographic isolation can be.{xxxii} While highly educated people in the Arab world may not require translations to be able to understand what is written in other languages, the same is not true for the less fortunate masses of people. #97 | | |
Sometimes cultural isolation has been the result of a government decision, as in fifteenth-century China, when that country was far more advanced than many other nations. China’s rulers deliberately chose to isolate China from what they saw as foreign barbarians. In the seventeenth century, the rulers of Japan likewise chose to isolate their country from the rest of the world. In later centuries, both countries were shocked to discover that some other nations had far surpassed them technologically, economically and militarily during their self-imposed isolation. #98 | | |
Among the other ways in which cultures handicap themselves is in limiting which segments of their populations are allowed to play which roles in the economy or society. If only people from certain pre-selected groups—whether defined by class, caste, tribe, race, religion or sex—are allowed to have particular careers, this cultural distribution of economic roles can differ greatly from the individual distribution of inborn talents. The net result can be that, by forfeiting the potentialities of many of its own people, such a society ends up with a less productive economy than in other societies without such self-imposed restrictions on the development and use of their people’s talents and potentialities. #99 | | |
History is full of examples of societies whose cultural norms confined particular segments of their population to particular roles, or even drove some of their most productive groups out of the country, because the prosperity of those groups made them targets of resentments that resulted in persecution, mob violence or outright expulsions. Other societies whose cultures were less restrictive or repressive often benefitted economically from the arrival of refugees with valuable skills and talents, even if these refugees had little money with them when they arrived. #100 | | |
