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Comment by danwee | Hacker News Reader

I have the (weak) theory that non-developed countries were such because of the weather. I love reading and thinking... but in summer I cannot do any of that at home, it's just impossible for me to sit and study without sweating and feeling umcomfortable. So, my theory goes like this:

For the people who like thinking/studying: hot weather does not invite you to stay at home and study/think, so you are forced to do something else.

I imagine that as summers get longer and hotter, we'll see a diminishing in new ideas and the like because the people who like to think will be forced to do something else (laying on the cold floor to pass by the day).

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This completely ignores many of the major empires in history.

The Roman Empire, the Greek Empire, Babylon, the Egyptian empire, the Persian empire, all were in relatively hot weather.

Needless to say some of these empire are famous for studying and thinking (e.g. Ancient Greece?).

I agree with this view that Homo sapiens is smart because of natural selection in the ice age. However, the earlier primitive people in the tropics had easy access to food, which hindered the development of social civilization.

> theory that non-developed countries were such because of the weather

Don’t tell me you actually subscribe to the theory of undeveloped countries are so because of the heat, not colonialism or global exploitation. Your theory is beyond weak, its kindergarten level nonsense.

Yes, of course, colonialism was a curse for many countries, but we need to see further. Colonialism only works if a side has a much better technology than the other.

And the fact is that Europe (subjected to harsh winters, global empires and constant wars) had a much better technology. Period.

And that advances in war and travel, were based in lots and lots of solid science, created much before colonialism. You can't build a big ship or a bridge that stands 1000 years without solid math and skills.

Being subjected to a strong religion that is against science o pro-science also played a huge part.

The idea that when in danger of overheating or freeze our brain stop all machines and concentrates only in how to keep our body alive for one hour more is totally reasonable.

> Colonialism only works if a side has a much better technology than the other.

> You can't build a big ship or a bridge that stands 1000 years without solid math and skills.

I refuse to engage with someone so woefully misinformed about the non West world. I’ll leave it to you to read and learn more. Open your mind…

I'd say it was more like Europe had world class technology and much better growth. In Asia you could find pretty good technology too, it's the growth mindset that didn't take over there as much as in Europe.

Anyway too few data points and too much speculation to be able to say that advancement of civilization is casually dependent on the climate.

We have agriculture/cities/empires/writing/some technology that developed independently in many parts of the world, and the rise of Europe from the Reinessance. Very few data point for "civilization advancement events"

> Europe had world class technology and much better growth. In Asia you could find pretty good technology

The irony in this view is that almost everything tech and otherwise is manufactured by developing countries. And in places like Shenzhen, they innovate at an unimaginably rapid pace.

But sure, Europe has “world class” tech and Asia has “pretty good” tech…

Had, not has. I spoke of the '500s more or less. The exponential spike in innovation from that century until these days was something unprecedented in human history and started in Europe.

Of course today Europe is not the central point for technology anymore. Still they have a legacy of good schools, accumulated wealth and a middle class, something that is less radicated (for now) in the East

> legacy of good schools, accumulated wealth and a middle class

Where do you get the notion that developing countries don’t have “good schools”? They’ve had formalised education for millennia.

Unless you are measuring wealth purely in post colonial USD/EUR, every single country (developing or developed) clearly has an accumulated wealth class, middle class, and poor class. It’s absurd that you think isn’t the case?

Look at a high level journal and top published papers. Most papers come from certain institutions, mostly from developed countries. Those institutions don't live in a vacuum but have a big cultural and economical environment around them that would take decades to build from scratch.

I want to clarify that this is a tangential point to by our previous comment and my reply, which you did not address.

Regardless, I don’t have the energy to debate your random points and why there are issues with your understanding of them.

I’d like to end with the fact that “developed” countries don’t have the ability to actually manufacture most of their “genius” inventions, so…

There are all sorts of different ideas about why Europe developed before the rest of the world- maybe it was because of the scientific method, maybe it was finance capitalism, maybe it was wealth looted from other countries. But I’ve never heard it attributed to a “growth mindset”, whatever that means. That sounds like magical thinking, honestly.

I probably meant what you name as "finance capitalism" - the expectation that if you invest money you get a return on the investment, so you are encouraged to invest more money.

I tried researching “finance capitalism” but it is unclear to me what the innovation is.

It’s wild to me that the definition and your viewpoint presume that somehow non-European countries never considered making profit on investments? That’s… I don’t know what to say. Maybe read a book about history.

I think maybe part of the problem is that for idealogical reasons people lump a lot of things together and call it "capitalism" like the invention of calculus or the steam engine, but those are really separate things. They like to just put anything useful that people do and label it "capitalism" even though communist and other non-capitalist countries have created a lot of science. I don't know a lot about eastern financial structures. What I meant was the way that everything in Europe after a certain point becomes financed with debt, which then has to be paid back with interest, and you get these huge amounts of money owed by everyone, creating this requirement to expand or die, and you see all these expeditions launching and pillaging the rest of the world, and you see the commons privatized and the people living on agriculture are forced into the cities where they are packed together and put to work 16 hours a day, and all of it is to service debts that are instantly flipped around and used as collateral to obtain more debt, and so on. It's sort of a monster that has to grow or die, so maybe that has something to do with it. I don't know.

Really.... how do you explain the cultural differences in work productivity between south Europe (Greece, Italy, Spain) versus North Europe (Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland) ?

Protestant work ethic.

What exactly drove the apparition of this work ethic ? or of Protestantism in general ?

Go the 5 whys route and you'll end up at the environment.

You do realise that Italy was previously Rome, and along with Greece, they kickstarted European democracy and governance? And they had (surprise) hot climates?

Do you realise that the fall of the Roman empire (west side) was mainly triggered by climate change?

Perhaps the climates 2000 years ago were not as hot as we might think.

You literally didn’t even try to research this hot take, did you? Climate change is not the same as global warming, though related.

TL;DR - Warm weather good, cold weather bad. Plague much worse.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-climate-ch...

> the characteristic warm, wet and stable weather was conducive to economic productivity in an agrarian society

> violent sequence of eruptions triggered what is now called the ‘Late Antique Little Ice Age,’ when much colder temperatures endured for at least 150 years.

> This phase of climate deterioration had decisive effects in Rome’s unravelling. It was also intimately linked to a catastrophe of even greater moment: the outbreak of the first pandemic of bubonic plague.

It was warmer actually if we compare e.g. 0 AD to the 19th and early 20th centuries. Climate change you’re talking about resulted in a decrease in temperatures when the “Roman warm period” ended.

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