Hello everyone, this is Development Economics by Tyler Cowen and Alex Tobruk
I'm Alex Tobruk, today we're going to be talking about guns, Guns, Germs, and Steel
which is Jared Diamond's really big think book key book everyone should read
about the really big questions about development. Diamond is asking, you
know why are some regions and countries rich while others are poor, and in
particular he's asking why is it that Eurasia developed first, rather than
South America, Africa, or Australia very exciting opening of Guns, Germs, and Steel
has Pizarro, you know, with the hundred soldiers, sixty horses, and some steel and
guns, of course taken over the entire Incan Empire with 80,000 soldiers. How is
this possible, why did this happen? Well very briefly Diamond argues that there are
surprisingly few domesticable animals and crops and regions of the world which
had these animals and crops which were capable of being domesticated. This led
to agriculture, which led to cities, and civilization, that led to guns and to
steel, and agriculture and domesticated animals also led to an even more potent
weapon than guns, the most destructive weapon ever used on earth: germs. So let's
take a look in a little bit more detail about argument. First of all why are
domesticable animals important? Well they're so important because all their
many uses so a domesticated animal, like a cow, can be used
for milk, for meat, for clothing, for leather, and so forth. Can also be used
to plow, as a source of power, a source of power allowing humans to do what they
otherwise could not. Could even be used as a military vehicle to help take over
and protect and defend. Now these domesticated domesticable
animals were not evenly distributed across the globe. In fact there are
surprisingly few of them in the world today there's really only five major
cases sheep, goats, cows, pigs, and horses there's a few lesser cases the Arabian
camel, the bactrian camel, donkeys, and reindeers, llamas, and alpacas, Mithan,
which I had never even heard of before I'd read Diamond and maybe a few others,
the Yak. Well the wild ancestors of these animals were not spread evenly across
the globe.
None of the ancestors was indigenous to sub-saharan Africa. Only the llama and
the alpaca had a wild ancestor which was indigenous to South or North America. 13
of the 14 were indigenous to Eurasia so Eurasia began with a major element in
its favor. It had these animals, these wild ancestors of animals which could
and which did later become domesticated. Without having these domesticated
domesticable animals it's much harder to develop mass agriculture. Think about
growing rice without plow, and from there it's much harder to get cities, of course,
and civilizations. By the way, this is a picture I took in a Peruvian Museum
I believe it shows how you're supposed to ride a llama, you can see where llamas
are not as good as alpacas, allotted not as good as horses there may be other
some other interpretations of what's going on here but that at least was my
interpretation. Now this raises a question of course. Diamond shows that
the wild ancestors of the animals which are currently domesticated they're
almost all native to Eurasia now his argument is that these animals were
basically the only ones which were capable of being domesticated. How does
he get there? How does he show that these are the only ones which were capable
of being domesticated? Well he's got a bunch of varied arguments for this
none of them are sort of drop-dead definitive but I do think in total
they're quite, they're quite convincing more than one might expect. First of all,
the domesticated animals have been domesticated on several different
occasions independently. So it seems like there is a demand for domestication and
if the supply is there it's going to happen it's happened several times
several times independently so it seems that there's
forces pushing towards domestication if it's possible. Also we know that when
these animals are induced, introduced to non-indigenous areas the natives figure
out hey this is great we need to use these this is a good idea so think about
the Native Americans and that you know wild that horse culture you know the
Apaches and the horse culture. Of course, horses didn't even come to North America,
South America, until the 1500s. Before that they were unknown, but once the
natives saw horses they knew this was a good thing, suggesting once again, that if
it had been possible for them to domesticate some of their own indigenous
species that they would have done so. There's also many animals are excluded
from domestication by a variety of their characteristics. So some of them are just
too fierce. Grizzly bears, African Buffalo is really hard to domesticate. How
come you've never seen a zebra rodeo? Well zebras are just mean beasts, they're
just very difficult to ride don't try and ride a zebra that's why we don't see
them. Then there's the diet issue some the diet is too limited, like the koalas just
eating the eucalyptus, others their diet to growth ratio is not fast enough to
make domestication worthwhile. So you don't want to really domesticate a
carnivore, you've got to grow an animal to eat other animals, it's it's really
not gonna work, you want to have an animal which eats grasses and grains and
so forth and grows really big on that. Then there's animals which are difficult
to herd the you've heard how difficult it is to herd cats well there you go so
cats have sort of been domesticated some people think that cats have domesticated
people rather than the other way around but certainly you don't get a group of
them together. Antelopes and so forth are hard to herd. Finally there's some
animals which actually don't like to have sex when people are watching.
Pandas are like this, they're a little bit embarrassed, this is why the
Washington zoo has spent millions of dollars trying to get their pandas to have
sex even showing them panda porn but not much seems to. So what about crops? So the
case for crops is similar to that of animals Diamond argues that the
domesticable crops again were central to Eurasia, were not found elsewhere. A
little bit harder to make here, because there are more animals which were more
crops, which were capable of being domesticated than there are animals.
There's probably several thousand plants which are capable of being domesticated.
Nevertheless, the basic facts are really rather striking. Even today, two
cereals, wheat and rice account for 41% of all total calories consumed in the
world, suggesting that if you didn't have wheat and you didn't have rice these
crops, which were so important to human civilization, probably you're not going
to get civilization either or certainly you're going to get it more
difficultly, or slower. Wheat is native to just the Fertile Crescent around
modern Turkey and Iraq. Rice of course from... from China.
The other major cereals in addition to wheat and rice, we have a corn barley and
sorghum. Four or five of these are from Eurasia. Sorghum is from North Africa,
which is clearly more, really part of Eurasia rather than Africa, it's probably
easier to get there because of the Sahara. The indigenous versions of wheat,
rice, and barley, and sorghum are very similar to the domesticated versions.
Corn from Mesoamerica and its wild version is very different. Those baby
corns which you can buy in the store in a can, that's actually closer to what
wild corn, you know, once looked like. So it took a lot longer to domesticate corn
than it did to domesticate wheat, rice, barley, or sorghum. It also turns out
that a lot of plants are surprisingly difficult to domesticate. You know for
example, just to give one example, we think we know how to grow apples because
of Johnny Appleseed, and you know, throwing the seeds, but we're wrong.
That's not how you grow apples. Apples grown from seeds actually don't taste
very good. Plants don't grow that well, the way to get delicious apples is
grafting, not seeding, not at all obvious not at all obvious. So a lot of plants
are more difficult to domesticate than you might imagine.
Put all this together, we have an uneven distribution of these domesticable
plants and animals led some parts of the world, Eurasia in particular to develop
develop agriculture. Agriculture and other ideas in Eurasia also spread
faster because the major axis of the continent is East-West rather than
North-South. This meant that since climate is similar along lines of
latitude along these East-West lines of latitude that a good idea developed in
one part of the world could transmit horizontally, as it
were, to a large area. So this meant that scale was actually bigger. While in
Africa the North-South, you know you can go several hundred miles north or
several hundred miles south and your crops and animals will simply not do as
well in that different climate. So Eurasia, in a sense, had a larger market.
We're going to talk a lot more about scale elsewhere in the class but even at
the very beginnings of modern of civilization we have the importance of
scale having a lot of people working on the same problem, being able to transmit
their ideas all over the world to a large area so this just this even the
placement of the axes of the continents, Diamond argues, has implications. All
right, well even with all of these advantages, of guns, steel, and horses the
conquest of North and South America might have been a close call had it not
been for germs. The major infectious diseases in humans all evolved from
diseases of animals. Smallpox, flu, tuberculosis, malaria, plague and so forth
they all come from animals. And Europeans you know they live next door
often in the same barn as the animals this meant on the negative side they
were repeatedly decimated by these plagues but for that very same reason
Europeans developed some immunity so this is Darwinism in action.
The humans would survived these repeated attacks by these germs. They grew
stronger and they developed some immunity. On the other hand, in 1520 it
took just one sick person to bring smallpox to South America, where it may
have killed 90%. 90% of the population. It's possible. This is a young girl with
in Bangladesh. She was infected with smallpox in 1973. You can see what an
absolutely devastating, debilitating, horrible disease it is. 1977 we
eliminated smallpox from the world, the first time this has ever been done. Well
in 1520 without this developed immunity, millions of South Americans, of the
indigenous population were wiped out. So this explains how Pizarro, who came 1530
1535 to the Incan Empire. So the Incan Empire was in disarray, okay, millions of
these people had died from the smallpox, from these plagues, which had come over,
and then you have arriving on your shores these guys on horses never before
seen looking like gods with their steel, their guns, bringing down death from far
away and their steel armor and their steel uh, swords, so this explains why with
this culture and disarray dying from these diseases, these incredibly advanced
people with their technology you've never seen before. How 100 soldiers, 60 horses
were able to take over the entire Incan Empire. You see, actually the same story
a little bit later in North America or very similar, so when the pilgrims come
to North America they actually find empty villages prepared for them as
if by Providence. In fact, the pilgrims were quickly drawing these conclusions so
John Winthrop, who is governor of Massachusetts, he thought the plague was
great, was miraculous. He said "but for the natives in these
parts God hath so pursued them as for 300 miles space, the greatest part of
them are swept away by the smallpox which still continues among them so God
hath thereby cleared our title to this place. Those who remain in these parts
being in all not 50 have put themselves under our protection." So God has cleared
the title, God has done his is basically a genocide according to John Winthrop
and has done this on behalf of the pilgrims. King James said the same thing,
he said "Almighty God in his great goodness and bounty towards us is to be
thanked for sending this wonderful plague among the savages." So let's
summarize the Diamond argument, this is from a picture in his book. So the
ultimate factors at the top of the, uh, diagram the East-West axis of Eurasia
this led to the ease of species spreading many suitable wild species. You put these
two things together, you got a lot of domesticated plants and animal species.
These domesticated plant and animal species meant you had food surpluses,
and storage so you were able to create scale, you were able to create a lot of
people in dense sedentary societies, this led to, uh, specialization and this
led to technology, creating things like guns and steel and swords, creating
ocean-going ships, having some wealth there having some scientists class if
you like, some research and developer class, some people who were there to
think not just to produce food this led to political organization, the ability to
gather a lot of resources together. Put all these things together you can see
why the North, why the Europeans, you know, sent out the ships rather than
the other way. And of course with them they brought
these epidemic diseases, which also had come from the domesticated plants and
particularly the domesticated animals. And one of them being the horses, so you
put all this together and you understand why Pizarro was able to take over
the Incan civilization and earlier slightly earlier of Cortes had done the
same thing with the Aztecs and how in North America, again, were able to wipe
out the native populations. Okay, so Diamond gives us a really big, really
important story, it really takes us up to sort of 1500, 1600 you might say, but
what then? You know France and China, they're both in Eurasia, but today the
former is rich and the latter is poor, despite the fact that they share most of
these factors that Diamond focuses on. So 1500 France and China about equal, maybe
even China a little bit richer perhaps, but since then everything has changed,
and geography hasn't changed, so geography can explain only so much. In
fact, we can say a little bit more there's been a reversal of fortune. The
rich places in 1500 actually tend not to be the rich places today.
So China and India, fabulously wealthy in some sense in 1500 or you go and you
look a little bit later in Peru, fabulously wealthy there while there's
nothing but a few shacks and teepees in North America. South America is where all
the money is, okay, richest country in South America, perhaps Haiti from Central
America. Today, the one of the poorest countries in this area. So why is this?
Clearly geography can't explain why some countries are rich today while others
are poor cannot explain it on the Eurasian continent at least. So I think
we do know something about the answer to that question. You know, rich countries
have good institutions, things like protection of private property and the
rule of law, limited government, some form of capitalism, just to say that
capitalism may be necessary or some form of it is necessary, certainly not
sufficient, but of course we're going to be talking about all of these things a lot
more as the class goes on. So Diamond, great argument, takes us to about 1500,
1600. We're gonna be dealing with a lot of these other things later on in the
course. Thank you.