Highlights from “Guns, Germs, and Steel”
Attached are the best excerpts (and summarized texts from yours truly) from the book “Guns, Germs, and Steel” by Jared Diamond
Peoples of Eurasian origin, especially those still living in Europe and eastern Asia, plus those transplanted to North American, dominate the modern world in wealth and power. Other peoples, including most Africans, have thrown off European colonial domination but remain far behind in wealth and power. Still other peoples, such as the aboriginal inhabitants of Australia, the Americas, and southern-most Africa, are no longer even masters of their own lands but have been decimated, subjugated, and in some cases even exterminated by European colonialists.
Thus questions about inequality in the modern world can be reformulated as follows. Why did wealth and power become distributed as they now are, rather than in some other way? For instance, why weren’t native Americans, Africans, and Aboriginal Australians the ones who decimated, subjugated, or exterminated Europeans and Asians?
We’ve assured that the seemingly transparent biological explanation for the world’s inequalities as of A.D. 1500 is wrong, but we’re not told what the correct explanation is.
Human history , as something separate from the history of animals, began about 7 million years ago.Around that time, a population of African apes broke up into several populations, out of which one proceeded into the gorillas, a second into the two modern chimps, and a third into humans. Fossils indicate a substantially upright posture by around 4 million years ago, then began to increase in body size and relative brain size around 2.5 millionyears ago. Stone tools came into being at this time as well.
Australaopitchecus africanus, Homo habilus, Homo erectus > Home sapiens > Home neanderthalensis (Neanderthals).
The Neanderthals (between 130,000 and 40,000 years ago) were the first humans to bury their dead and care for their sick.
Human history took off around 50,000 years ago with standardized stone tools and the first preserved jewelry (ostrich-shell beads). Cro-Magnons (people of Near East and in Sotuheastern Europe) produced needles, awls, engraving tools, harpoons, spear-throwers, and eventually bows and arrows. Houses and sewn clothing follow, with nets, lines, and snares. Cave paintings, statues, and musical instruments were produced at this time.
The oldest unquestioned human remains in the Americas are at sites in Alaska dated around 12,000 B.C., followed by a profusion of sites south of the Canadian border and in Mexico in the centuries just before 11,000 B.C. The latter sites are called Clovis sites [named after the town Clovis in New Mexico].
In Australia and New Guinea, the [animal] extinctions took place 30,000 years ago. In the Americas, they occurred around 17,000 to 20,000 years ago. The America’s big animals had already survived the ends of the 22 previous Ice Ages. Why did most of them pick the 23rd to expire in concert, in the presence of all those supposedly harmless humans?
The most dramatic moment in subsequent European-Native American relations was the first encounter between the first Inca emperor Atahuallpa and the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro at the Peruvian highland town of Cajamarca on November 16, 1532.
Depsite having only 168 Spanish soldiers in the middle of an army of 80,000 soldiers, Pizarro caputred Atahuallpa within a few minutes after the leaders set sight on each other. Pizarro proceeded to hold his prisoner for eight months, while extracting history’s largest ranson in return for a promise to free him. After the ranson — enough gold to fill a room 22 feet by 17 feet wide to a height of over 8 feet — was delivered, Pizarro reneged on his promise and executed Atahuallpa.
Pizarro’s capture of Atahuallpa illustrates the set of proximate factors that resulted in Europeans’ colonizing the New World instead of Native Americans’ colonizing Europe. Immediate reasons for Pizarro’s success include military technology based on guns, steel weapons, and horses; infectious diseases endemic in Eurasi; European maritime technology; the centralized political organization of European states; and writing [the first published report of Pizarro’s exploits, by his companion Captain Cristonal de Mena, was printed in Seville in April 1534 became a best-seller].
By selecting and growing those few species of plants and animals that we can eat, so that they constitute 90 percent rather than 0.1 percent of the biomass on an acre of land, we obtain far more edible calories per acre. As a result, one acre can feed many more herders and farmers — typically, 10 to 100 times more — than hunter-gatherers. That strength of brute numbers was the first of many military advantages that food-producing tribes gained over hunter-gatherer tribes.
Still another factor is compatibility with vested interests. This book, like probably every other typed document you have ever read, was typed with a QWERTY keyboard, named for the left-most six letters in its upper row. Unbelievable as it may now sound, that keyboard layout was designed in 1873 as a feat of anti-engineering. It employs a whole series of perverse tricks designed to force typists to type as slowly as possible, such as scattering the commonest letters over all keyboard rows and concentrating them on the left side (where right-handed people have to use their weaker hand). The reason behind all of those seemingly counterproductive features is that the typewriters of 1873 jammed if adjacent keys were struck in quick succession, so that manufacturers had to slow down typists. When improvements in typewriters eliminated the problem of jamming, trials in 1932 with an efficiently laid-out keyboard showed that it would let us double our typing speed and reduce our typing effort by 95 percent. But QWERTY keyboards were solidly entrenched by then. The vested interests of hundreds of millions of QWERTY typists, typing teachers, typewriter and computer salespeople, and manufacturers have crushed all moves toward keyboard efficiency for over 60 years.
While the story of the QWERTY keyboard may sound funny, many similar cases have involved much heavier economic consequences. Why does Japan now dominate the world market for transistorized electronic consumer products, to a degree that damages the United States’ balance of payments with Japan, even though transistors were invented and patented in the United States? Because Sony bought transistor licensing rights from Western Electric at a time when the American electronics consumer industry was churning out vacuum tube models and reluctant to compete with its own products.
Nowadays, Islamic societies in the Middle East are relatively conservative and not at the forefront of technology. But medieval Islam in the same region was technologically advanced and open to innovation. It achieved far higher literacy rates than contemporary Europe, it assimilated the legacy of classical Greek civilization to such a degree that many classical Greek books are not known to us only through Arabic copies; it invented or elaborated windmills, tidal mills, trigonometry, and lateen sails; it made major advances in metallurgy, mechanical and chemical engineering, and irrigation methods; and it adopted paper and gunpowder from China and transmitted them to Europe. In the Middle Ages the flow of technology was overwhelmingly from Islam to Europe, rather from Europe to Islam as it is today. Only after A.D. 1500 did the net direction of flow begin to reverse.
Besides justifying the transfer of wealth to kleptocrats, institutionalized religion brings two other important benefits to centralized societies. First, shared ideology or religion helps solve the problem of how unrelated individuals are to live together without killing each other by providing them with a bond not based on kinship. Second, it gives people a motive, other than genetic self-interest, for sacrificing their lives on behalf of others. At the cost of a few society members who die in battle as soldiers, the whole society becomes much more effective at conquering other societies or resisting attacks.
Until 1946, Japanese schools taught a myth of Japanese history based on the earliest Japanese chronicles of A.D. 712 and 720. Those chronicles describe how the sun goddess Amaterasu, born from the left eye of the creator god Izanagi, sent her grandson Ninigi to earth on the Japanese island of Kyushu to wed an earthly deity. Ninigi’s great-grandson Jimmu, aided by a dazzling sacred bird that rendered his enemies helpless, became the first emperor of Japan in 660 B.C. To fill the gap between 660 B.C and the earliest historically documented Japanese monarchs, the chronicles invented 13 other, equally fictitious emperors. Before the end of World War Il, when Emperor Hirohito finally told the Japanese people that he was not of divine descent, Japanese archaeologists and historians had to make their interpretations conform to this account. Although they have more freedom of interpretation today, constraints remain. Japan’s most important archaeological monuments — the 158 gigantic kofun tombs constructed between A.D. 300 and 686, and thought to contain the remains of ancestral emperors and their families are still the property of the Imperial Household Agency. Excavation of the tombs is forbidden because it would constitute desecration — and it might also shed undesired light on where Japan’s imperial family really came from (e.g., perhaps Korea?).
The histories of the Fertile Crescent and China also hold a salutary lesson for the modern world: circumstances change, and past primacy is no guarantee of future primacy. One might even wonder whether the geographical reasoning employed throughout this book has at last become wholly irrelevant in the modern world, now that ideas diffuse everywhere instantly on the Internet and cargo is routinely airfreighted overnight between continents. It might seem that entirely new rules apply to competition between the world’s peoples, and that as a result new powers are emerging such as Taiwan, Korea, Malaysia, and especially Japan. On reflection, though, we see that the supposedly new rules are just variations on the old ones. Yes, the transistor, invented at Bell Labs in the eastern United States in 1947, lept 8,000 miles to launch an electronics industry in Japan — but it did not make the shorter leap to found new industries in Zaire or Paraguay. The nations rising to new power are still ones that were incorporated thousands of years ago into the old centers of dominance based on food production, or that have been repopulated by peoples from those centers. Unlike Zaire or Paraguay, Japan, and the other new powers were able to exploit the transistor quickly because their populations already had a long history of literacy, metal machinery, and centralized government. The world’s two earliest centers of food production, the Fertile Crescent and China, still dominate the modern world, either through their immediate successor states (modern China), or through states situated in neighboring regions influenced early by those two centers (Japan, Korea, Malaysia, and Europe), or through states repopulated or ruled by their overseas emigrants (the United States, Australia, Brazil). Prospects for world dominance of sub-Saharan Africans, Aboriginal Australians, and Native Americans remain dim. The hand of history’s course at 8000 B.c. lies heavily on us.
Some economists attribute national wealth to what are called human institutions: i.e., the laws, codes of behavior, and operating principles of our societies, governments, and economies. Some human institutions are especially effective at motivating citizens to produce, and thereby at promoting national wealth. Other institutions are especially effective at discouraging people from producing, and hence those factors promote national poverty.
When economists talk specifically about what they term “good institutions,” they mean those economic, social, and political institutions that motivate people as individuals to work in ways leading to the buildup of national wealth. At least a dozen different so-called good institutions have been identified. Without attempting to rank them in order of importance, but just listing them alphabetically, they include: control of inflation, educational opportunities, effectiveness of government, enforcement of contracts, freedom from trade barriers, incentives and opportunities for investment of capital, lack of corruption, low risk of assassination, open currency exchange, protection of private property rights, rule of law, and unimpeded flow of capital.
