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Guns, Germs, and Steel is a super compelling read. It addresses productivity in the large (not in the small), but not laziness I think. I'm not sure how relevan
by famousactress 13y ago
Guns, Germs, and Steel is a super compelling read. It addresses productivity in the large (not in the small), but not laziness I think. I'm not sure how relevant it is to exploring individuals in a population as it is to looking at productivity of larger populations throughout history.
Spoiler: GG&S ends up arguing that the answer to why some countries are more productive than others is historical geographical circumstance, particularly because of access to large grains and domesticate-able animals which propelled some early cultures into agriculture and the rest is history.
- potatolicious 13y agoIndeed, GG&S is very much focused on the macroscopic outcomes, but I do believe they two topics are interrelated, at least traditionally where they're discussed. The question of why Africa was largely technologically undeveloped was of some importance to Europeans during the slave trade. The predispositional argument was made to justify the practice of slavery, and post-slavery to justify continued discrimination. Similarly, if you go to East Asia today (see: Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong) you will still see today continued mistreatment of Southeast Asian migrant workers under the guise of predispositional and environment inferiority ("tropical climates breed simple minds" and such nonsense), justified by macro-scale outcomes ("look at all the tropical countries, all of them are a mess, clearly non-tropical climates breed harder workers"). These attitudes are depressingly common. The macro-scale differences in countries is often used as justification for odd micro-scale beliefs.