May 4, 2024 02:48 AM
(This post was last modified: May 4, 2024 09:16 PM by C C.)
https://youtu.be/JvVZNuazKSQ
VIDEO EXCERPTS: Even poor people in this country have smartphones, televisions, cars, and so forth. We tend to assume that our conditions are normal, and conditions that differ from ours are the anomaly. [...] Virtually everything that goes into the production of income varies enormously between groups, between nations, between people on the flat lands, and the people in the mountains. You name it, it varies.
[...] It's hard to know where to begin when a reviewer misses the whole point [...] One of the major findings throughout the book is that isolation almost invariably means poverty and backwardness.
In the mountains, if you lived in Eastern Europe or Russia, you were cut off from the rest of the world. Isolation seems to even have an effect on cognitive ability. You're not aware of how the basic things of life are done differently in other parts of the world. And so people who were isolated kept doing the same things for centuries or thousands of years.
For example, when the British landed in Australia, they found the Australian aborigines living really at a stone-age level. They had no idea of iron in Australia. Similarly, when people from Europe came to the Canary Islands.
Geography, again, is one of the themes that runs through the book. Some people happen to be born in Western Europe where the rivers lead to the sea; and some people happen to be born in Russia, where some rivers lead to the frozen Arctic, and some rivers lead to the Black Sea. It's nobody's fault.
Yes, it's luck, or sheer happenstance. It's not the result of robbery. As one economic historian said, the [physiographical] world has never been a level playing field...
Wealth, poverty, and politics ... https://youtu.be/JvVZNuazKSQ
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/JvVZNuazKSQ
VIDEO EXCERPTS: Even poor people in this country have smartphones, televisions, cars, and so forth. We tend to assume that our conditions are normal, and conditions that differ from ours are the anomaly. [...] Virtually everything that goes into the production of income varies enormously between groups, between nations, between people on the flat lands, and the people in the mountains. You name it, it varies.
[...] It's hard to know where to begin when a reviewer misses the whole point [...] One of the major findings throughout the book is that isolation almost invariably means poverty and backwardness.
In the mountains, if you lived in Eastern Europe or Russia, you were cut off from the rest of the world. Isolation seems to even have an effect on cognitive ability. You're not aware of how the basic things of life are done differently in other parts of the world. And so people who were isolated kept doing the same things for centuries or thousands of years.
For example, when the British landed in Australia, they found the Australian aborigines living really at a stone-age level. They had no idea of iron in Australia. Similarly, when people from Europe came to the Canary Islands.
Geography, again, is one of the themes that runs through the book. Some people happen to be born in Western Europe where the rivers lead to the sea; and some people happen to be born in Russia, where some rivers lead to the frozen Arctic, and some rivers lead to the Black Sea. It's nobody's fault.
Yes, it's luck, or sheer happenstance. It's not the result of robbery. As one economic historian said, the [physiographical] world has never been a level playing field...
Wealth, poverty, and politics ... https://youtu.be/JvVZNuazKSQ