This is a deeply imperialist, Euro/Anglo-centric viewpoint, similar to the points in 'Guns, Germs, and Steel'. And this is despite the author being of Indian origin. There are so many flaws in his argument, and not least because the author looks only at the present. He conveniently overlooks the fact that Europe was—for lack of a better word—a broken collection of barbarian states for the majority of civilisation beginning at 3500 BCE. Only during the Greek and Roman empires from about 500 BCE to about 400 CE, and after the Renaissance at about 1450 CE—did Europe gain any sort of prominence. And funnily enough just before the Renaissance, the Black Death ripped through most of Europe because it was an unsanitary hell hole, with sewage and manure openly flowing at the surface level, and all Greco-Roman engineering mostly forgotten or left to rot.

Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indo-Gangetic plains, and the Yangtze are all in decidedly warmer climes than much of Europe, and the civilisations they birthed still endure.

In cold climates you can do fuck all during winter, and frankly, most of the year. Cash crops don't grow at all. All the water is frozen solid for months on end. There is hardly any sunlight. This means no plants. No plants means no animals. No plants and animals means no food. There's a reason why Antarctica, Greenland, Alaska, much of Canada, Siberia, the Tibetan plateau, and Patagonia remain completely undeveloped.

Many tropical and sub-tropical countries were extremely wealthy until at least the 1600s. India was amongst the richest countries in the world until the British colonised it, squeezed every last drop out of it, and then dropped it like a hot potato once Britain itself was nearly bankrupted and its infrastructure in smithereens following WW2 (and sliced it in half for good measure, setting the stage for an infinite casus belli between the Islamic Pakistan and the secular India). Belgium did something similar in the Congo, and there's probably a cathedral full of Congolese hands and legs somewhere in Brussels.

The early American colonists arrived to see most of the native Americans ravaged by smallpox and the plague, foreign diseases the latter had no immunity to. They saw open land for the taking, and called it manifest destiny in their race from Virginia to California and Oregon. They sequestered the remaining native Americans (who to this date are misnamed as 'Indians', another facet to the enduring racism and prejudice in the US) into 'reservations' and 'nations'. Likewise for Canada.

In central and south America the violently evangelical Catholic Spaniards and Portuguese took advantage of the fractious rivalries, and picked them off one-by-one usually allying with one empire against another, rinse and repeat—from the Aztecs, Maya, and Toltec to the Inca.

The large majority of modern European countries have built their current wealth on the backs (and blood) of exploited and colonised peoples from Central and South America, to almost all of Africa and the Middle East, to South Asia, Southeast Asia, and East Asia.

In a just world, Spain, Portugal, the UK, France, the US, and the Benelux countries would collectively be forced to pay reparations amounting to about five to ten trillion euros/pounds/dollars per annum to their ex-colonies, slaves, and exploited peoples until the latter returned to a semblance of development with everyone above the poverty line, and with reliable electricity, sanitation, food supply, housing, and Internet access.