Hacker News Reader

Comment by ren_engineer | Hacker News Reader

the irony is that I've seen Guns, Germs, and Steel get trashed by people on the right for downplaying the idea that Western culture was/is special and the key to success/wealth/innovation and attacking Diamond for saying it was only due to geography and other random factors rather than Western culture itself

Universities and academics have shifted so far left that they are increasingly eating their own, the entire point of the book was to try and say that race and Western culture wasn't a factor. It's a pretty obvious argument against most right wing talking points, but apparently that isn't enough anymore in academia

View on HN

Yep. It said Europe's balkanized geography (islands, peninsulas) begat literal balkanization, which begat competition, which begat innovation, which begat exploration and technology which dominated the world despite all other European failings.

Meanwhile, Asia's geography lent itself to unifying monopolization, which begat immense totalitarian states which were more complacent.

Both geographies fostered dense cities with draft animals, creating plagues and immunity to those plagues, which let the Old World dominate the New in numbers, technology, and immunology (nevermind that they had a few thousand years' head start in technology since they didn't have to switch continents).

And note that totalitarian states tend to become anti-science because it might upset their applecart. China was the dominant power, it didn't need innovation so why take the risk?

>Universities and academics have shifted so far left that they are increasingly eating their own, the entire point of the book was to try and say that race and Western culture wasn't a factor. It's a pretty obvious argument against most right wing talking points, but apparently that isn't enough anymore in academia

Is there any evidence that any actual 'eating' is happening here? I can't find any instances of it being banned or removed from curriculum. Jared Diamond continues to teach at UCLA.

Is the 'eating' the fact that people critiqued a pop anthropology? The author of the article is creating strawmen and then defeating them.

I was left with, who actually is the author of the article referencing and what is their actual argument.

Free markets are a big deal. They are indeed the key to success/wealth/innovation.

And part of Diamond's book was about how geography helped form free markets.

Sorry, free markets are not dependent on geography. Any country/civilization can adopt them any time they want to.

And the point of the book is that Balkanized geography makes countries more likely to want to adopt free markets whereas big continents will be more likely to adopt authoritarian state control.

Sounds like nonsense - the US straddles an entire continent. At the opposite geographical extreme we have Taiwan and Japan, both highly successful free markets.

The US was colonized, it didn't spring forth from pre-history this way. Diamond's theory is about the foundations of civilization and how they led to the broad strokes of history, not about modern events.

South America was colonized at the same time, but they didn't recognize rights and never amounted to much economically.

South America was pretty much entirely a jungle-covered mineral colony. Resource curse theory applies.

I'm not buying those excuses. SA failed to prosper because they had unfree economies. Chile has prospered when it went more free market, and regressed when it turned away from them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com