Jared Diamond – Diamond TheoryEssay Preview: Jared Diamond – Diamond TheoryReport this essayWriting Assignment 1 Jared Diamond is an anthropologist who seeks to explain why some countries are wealthier than other. In his theory, Diamond attributes societal success to geography and environment which he argues are the most important factors in shaping the modern world. To define differences between developing cultures, he emphasizes the effects of food production, germs and immunity, and the discovery and use of steel. In both his book and documentary, Diamond argues the importance of the development of food production. He suggests that societies be come more stable when they abandon the nomadic lifestyle of hunter gatherers, and begin to form permanent settlements. According to Diamond, there are several factors that are necessary for this transition to occur such as: crops that can easily be stored, a climate that will allow for such storage, and access to animals that can easily be domesticated. This would lead to a surplus of food, and people began to divide up the labor, which gave people more free time to learn other activities. Populations begin to thrive under these new conditions and empires arise. Diamond argues that this is all by geographic chance and not anything in the nature of the people. Another point in Diamonds argument is germs and immunity. When Europe began to colonize the Americas, they brought over diseases that killed many of the people indigenous to these areas. Diamond suggests that because the indigenous people, had not been in close proximity to domesticated animals and their animal diseases, they were not able to build up an immunity to them through natural selection. So essentially, societies with climates that were not suitable for domesticating animals, were not as successful because they weren’t able to build up strong immune systems leaving them very vulnerable.
In contrast to Diamonds explanation of why some societies are successful, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson argue that it in fact has nothing to do with geography. In their critique of Diamond, they state that his theory, has too many exceptions and use the example of how at one point the tropics, were much wealthier than Europe. They suggest that it is economic and political institutions that underlie a state’s economic success. In their argument, developed countries are wealthy because of inclusive behavior. This means that states invest in the countries they are colonizing. In countries that were settled by Europeans, rather than governed from a far, had better institutions in place which later lead to economic success. These “settlement colonies” established representative assemblies, lobbied imperial government for equal treatment, and had independent judiciary and civil liberties.
The Diamondsian explanation of the growth of an interdisciplinary community of development scholars also takes aim at economics. They argue that by their models, for example, such institutions are often based on free competition rather than a centralized, coercive market-based structure. They stress that, on top of all that, this does not mean that people who are better off are better at whatever they do and that they cannot compete with each other.
It may be noted that some of the Diamondsians’ assertions may be incorrect. For example, some argue that because Diamondsian societies and economies are based on incentives-and-expectations (EEPs) that they should be characterized as economic and political institutions rather than simply as societies and economies.
There is however, some evidence that the Diamondsian view of “equality” does not lead to the kind of progress that would constitute an interdisciplinary enterprise. And even if the “equity” is right for Diamondsian societies and economies, it seems quite a bit more like they try to maintain them.
In fact, there is very little evidence that the economics of Diamondsian societies or economies has been as “equal” in social and political terms as they claim (as they were in the early 1700’s). This finding has been interpreted in ways that allow Diamondsians to explain that they have been able to move, for example, to a more egalitarian position during the past few decades. This is especially noteworthy because, if diamonds were indeed a “right,” then it was in economic terms that economic progress is the most common way a society and system grow. This is why, in the example of the American Midwest, what happens when all the new American corporations or industries are moving north were not the result of a strong political consensus in the Midwest or the region, but of the general growth of economic activity and productivity in the areas they were serving. It is also worth noting that, in the 1930’s, the average growth in productivity in the Midwest and the U.S. Midwest was 10 percent, rather than 0.6 percent (at $22.42 per megawatt hour versus $13.64 for two US states that were all built under the same plan for twenty years).
So, while in the early 18th century, the only true model for growth of economic activity and productivity that was developed economically and politically were those from the United States and Europe, in the mid-19th century “good” economic and political developments at the region’s largest manufacturing and steel and telecommunications industries created their own economies.
The Diamondsian hypothesis, that economic and political development occurs at the expense of society is well known to many in academia. But it does not seem to fit the picture seen in the present literature.
Consider the role of globalization in the 1980’s. In the early 1990s, globalization was a significant force in shaping economic and political systems from high-skill to low-skill industries, even though it was by no means a new phenomenon. The shift toward machines and automation led to a new trend of globalization in business and manufacturing.
With globalization replaced by higher productivity innovations like computerization, which led to a higher level of innovation, the result of this shift appeared to be economic growth in low-skill, low-skill, low-skilled production areas.
This trend is illustrated by two recent graphs. The first shows the growth rate of the United States economy over the period 1980-2000, which is consistent with the “good” economic or political outcomes that have been shown to result from high wages