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I believe the conventionally accepted explanation for this is Acemoglu's, and it's that GDP is an Nth-order effect of climate. Warm weather -> highly productive

I believe the conventionally accepted explanation for this is Acemoglu's, and it's that GDP is an Nth-order effect of climate. Warm weather -> highly productive agriculture -> landholders become extremely wealthy -> oligarchic government -> low GDP. Think of the American North and South before the Civil War, where slavery and inequality took hold in the highly agriculturally productive South but never in the North. The North wound up poor and more egalitarian, but eventually industrialized and overtook the South. Edit: warm weather also happens to correlate with another natural resource: oil. Oil tends to produce a similar dynamic -- whoever owns the oil owns the government and badly mismanages the government for their own benefit. The exceptions prove the rule: Alaska and Norway were both established, egalitarian societies before the oil was found, in contrast with Middle Eastern petrostates, Russia and Venezuela.

oblio 7y ago
Counter-point : Russia.
- jdm2212 7y ago
  > The exceptions prove the rule: Alaska and Norway were both established, egalitarian societies before the oil was found, in contrast with Middle Eastern petrostates, Russia and Venezuela.
cambalache 7y ago
Is Alaska a big outlier inside the US regarding equality? Because the US as a whole is nowhere near the level of Norway in terms of equality. As a matter of fact Russia has a lower Gini coefficient. Even in the Americas US is below Canada, Uruguay, Argentina among other and almost parity with Venezuela. The problem in Venezuela is that the state has been weak and ineffective. Weak != Small, you have this suffocating bureaucracy which does nothing.
- jdm2212 7y ago
  Oil today, or fertile agricultural land 150 years ago, doesn't make government big or small. It just frees whoever controls the natural resource from accountability to others and lets them do whatever they want to do. Putin wants to run a superpower, so he pours the oil money into a bigger defense budget than Russia's GDP justifies. Maduro is (notionally) a socialist and pours the oil money into a bloated bureaucracy.

oblio 7y ago

Counter-point : Russia.

jdm2212 7y ago
> The exceptions prove the rule: Alaska and Norway were both established, egalitarian societies before the oil was found, in contrast with Middle Eastern petrostates, Russia and Venezuela.

cambalache 7y ago

Is Alaska a big outlier inside the US regarding equality? Because the US as a whole is nowhere near the level of Norway in terms of equality. As a matter of fact Russia has a lower Gini coefficient. Even in the Americas US is below Canada, Uruguay, Argentina among other and almost parity with Venezuela. The problem in Venezuela is that the state has been weak and ineffective. Weak != Small, you have this suffocating bureaucracy which does nothing.

jdm2212 7y ago
Oil today, or fertile agricultural land 150 years ago, doesn't make government big or small. It just frees whoever controls the natural resource from accountability to others and lets them do whatever they want to do. Putin wants to run a superpower, so he pours the oil money into a bigger defense budget than Russia's GDP justifies. Maduro is (notionally) a socialist and pours the oil money into a bloated bureaucracy.