Why is wealth skewed towards “colder” countries?
This is as cultural as it is geographic. Almost all the rich countries are either in Europe or are European settlements, like the U.S., Canada, Australia. As late as 1400 it was not at all clear that Europeans would soon dominate the planet. A variety of factors unique to Europe forced them outwards (short list: they had only intermittent access to luxury goods like spices and silk and needed a new route that wasn’t across the Islamic world, they developed double-entry bookkeeping and joint stock companies, they adopted technology like lanteen ails and compasses from the Arabs, etc.) Once Europe expanded along the African coast and across the Atlantic, the surge of wealth and knowledge jump started European civilization and encouraged further expansion. Add to this the dramatic disease imbalance between Europe and the New World, where the natives died in heaps before the invaders could unsheath their swords. The wealth of the New World encouraged European expansion elsewhere, even wher
There’s a difference between temperature and climate. You’re right, but there are actual, insane theories that the colder temperatures in Europe make people work harder. As if rice harvesting in tropical heat were a walk in the park. Diamond is the best straight-forward discussion of the basic advantages Eurasia (Europe and Asia) held over Africa and North and South America, in terms of crops spreading, agricultural variety, etc. The warm areas of Eurasia have done very well in the past – it’s just in the last 200 years that a little coal-filled island, and its neighbours and colonies have done well. (Including the biggest colony, which one couldn’t really describe as “cold” since much of it, including the areas with the highest recent population growth, never even gets snow on the ground. I wouldn’t say that California, the Sun Belt or any of the South counts as a “colder” climate.) Actually, I thought the bulk of that book dealt with El Niño’s effects on south-eastern Asia and how it
