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Postcards from Hell
Sunday, June 27th, 2010Terrifying photo essay from Foreign Policy on the world’s failed states. Note that with just a few exceptions, the 60 or so states the magazine had determined to be “failed” are located in tropical climates.
Someone recently sent me this fascinating video related to the new book by sociologist Philip Zimbardo (of the Stanford prison experiments fame–or infamy, I guess). The theme of Zimbardo’s new book is the way time is perceived among different cultures. Of relevance to the Foreign Policy essay is the idea that populations and cultures in northern climes have adopted a future-oriented timeframe, likely because it’s necessary for their survival. You have to stock food, fortify shelter, and so on to prepare for the winter months or you’re going to starve. Or freeze. Tropical populations have a more present-oriented concept of time. Food is available year round. There’s no winter for which they need to prepare. I’ve read some interesting commentary on how these differing concepts of time might explain why warmer countries have been slower to develop than cooler ones.
I don’t know nearly enough about developmental economics or sociology to gauge the validity of the theory. I just find it interesting. Would be interested to hear what readers with some specialized knowledge in this stuff think.
RE:PIC
Whatever happened to Sesame Street or the Wiggles? Geesh, this looks like a scene from the movie Major Payne.
I grew up in the Amazon jungle and I would say that there is some truth in that theory.If you were hungry at daybreak you could find food with a little work by mid afternoon. Very little refrigeration so food didn’t keep long. Saving up for hard times didn’t make much sense.
On timeframes….don’t want to try and speak to the North/tropical thing (although would note that indigenous Southern Hemisphere societies which faced Northern like seasons don’t seem to have had the Northern type timeframes) but rather to something which is generally agreed, among economists, to be true.
Development and longer time frames are mutually-reinforcing. Development leads to longer life spans, longer lifespans mean being able to (or perhaps desiring to) plan as you might well be around to get the fruits of the plan. Development leads to lower child mortality, meaning more possible investment in each child….investment is a form of planning for the future of course. Something you only do if you’ve got the timeframe to do it. Lower child mortality also means fewer children required in order to have some that themselves go on to breed. Thus women do not need (as they pretty much do in a poor agrarian society) to be continually pumping out a new one every two years. This, with lower maternal mortality in child birth leads to greater investment in the education of women: why do so if they’ve a one in five (I think that’s the right number) chance of death in childbirth?
All of these things, fewer children, greater female education, longer lifespans, when they get started, lead to ever greater development as education levels increase, more is invested etc, thus accelerating both the education of women etcetcetc and development itself.
It’s a self-reinforcing circle.
A few points:
1) If such a thing exists, it’s cultural, not genetic.
2) Until the last 200 years or so, Europe didn’t look any different than the rest of the world in this regard. Think the horrors of “Candide”. Europe didn’t break free because of different agricultural techniques, but rather because they “escaped” agriculture altogether as the basis of their civilizations in favor of industrialization.
3) The pattern also holds true in the Americas, both North and far-South (Argentina, Chile vs. Venezuela, Cuba), but these places were of course recently populated by immigrants, not (for the most part) those whose cultural evolution was based on millenia of local adaptation. Also, the exact opposite was true pre-Columbus- the flourishing Native civilizations straddled the equator- the Aztecs, the Maya, the Inca. Ditto with the earliest Old World civilizations- Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, China. Earth’s dominant cultures being towards the North is a recent phenomenon.
4) Similar climate-based arguments were the foundation of psuedo-scientific racism. Not that geography no doubt plays a huge role, but I’m wary of such a deterministic theory. I think the trend you’re talking about is more a result of the disaster of imperial colonialism. Not in the usual they-took-all-the-resources way, but rather in the legacy of poor governance. There’s a reason ex-British colonies did so much better than ex-French, etc. colonies, and it’s based in the (relative) British disposition towards the rule of law.
The only thing “terrifying” about the article is its dishonesty. Just exactly what is the author’s definition of a failed state? At least half of the countries in the article are no less corrupt than the good ol’ USofA.
You don’t need specialized knowledge to see what’s wrong with that claim. Just because there’s no winter doesn’t mean there are no seasons–in tropical climates it’s usually dry/rainy instead of winter/summer. For another thing, there was only one Carribean nation (Haiti), two continental South American nations (Colombia and Bolivia), and no Central American nations on that failed states list. Are they not tropical?
And even if you go with the assumption that tropical climates are a year-round paradise, and that being an impediment for “future-oriented timeframes,” were the Aztecs, Mayans, and Incas not future-oriented? What about the Kingdom of Mali? Ethiopia? The Harappan civilization? Egypt? The Gupta or Mughal Empires? The Umayyads, the Abbasids, the Ottomans? The idea is contradicted by centuries, if not millenia, of history.
Andy:
Just asking a question. No need to be so dismissive.
In any case, I’m not sure I find your response convincing. I posited that tropical climate and the mindset it inspires may serve as an impediment to development. To support that theory, I noted that the overwhelming majority of failed states on the FP list are located in tropical climates. The fact that there are other countries in tropical climates that didn’t make the list doesn’t disprove the theory. For one, FP only chose 60 countries. They may not be Chad or Nigeria, but you’d be hard pressed to call most of the states in Central and equatorial South America “successes” when compared to North America, Europe, and the temperate regions of Asia. And even the existence of some outlier successful states in tropical regions doesn’t necessarily disprove the theory, they only suggest that the impediment can be overcome.
I don’t know enough about the various dynasties you list to make any conclusive statement about all of them, other than that none of them are with us today. And I do know that at least a few of them died out due to an inability to adjust to changes in climate and weather.
But I’m curious, what’s your explanation for the discrepancy in development between tropical countries and temperate ones? Is climate merely coincidental?
And to answer an earlier comment, no, I’m not making any genetic argument here. Immigrants from tropical climates, for example, have been extremely successful in the U.S. and elsewhere.
But clearly something has hampered development in warmer regions. I’m not convinced by Zimbardo’s argument. But I think it’s interesting.
The only good state is a failed state.
I would have to say that the tropical idea is somewhat belied by the dominance of Greece and Rome, both “southern” climes by any European standards. Just going on Europe itself, it was in fact the warmer areas that became advanced far sooner than the colder.
Most cultures are “failed states” in these terms. But it’s the non-failed cultures that tend to succeed and expand, well, because they’re successful.
It may be best to consider HOW states are defined as failing. One of the leading indicators is described as follows:
“PUBLIC SERVICES
Niger: 9.7
Niger may well be the poorest country in the world. The government lacks any ability to provide services such as education and health care; rampant illiteracy and high rates of infant mortality are the abysmal result.”
So, this would seem that the type of state advocated here would be inherently failed. Are we sure we are okay with these forms of assessment? They come from a pretty specific world view, one largely cultivated among the “Western world”. Is it any surprise that most of the failed nations come from elsewhere?
Well, let’s see if Mr. Balko keeps this one up. Not betting on it — libertarian types can be very PC when it comes down to it.
Future time orientation is highly correlated with cognitive ability. It’s about IQ.
[...] Postcards from Hell Someone recently sent me this fascinating video related to the new book by sociologist Philip Zimbardo (of the Stanford prison experiments fame–or infamy, I guess). The theme of Zimbardo’s new book is the way time is perceived among different cultures. Of relevance to the Foreign Policy essay is the idea that populations and cultures in northern climes have adopted a future-oriented timeframe, likely because it’s necessary for their survival. You have to stock food, fortify shelter, and so on to prepare for the winter months or you’re going to starve. Or freeze. Tropical populations have a more present-oriented concept of time. Food is available year round. There’s no winter for which they need to prepare. I’ve read some interesting commentary on how these differing concepts of time might explain why warmer countries have been slower to develop than cooler ones. [...]
Thanks, Zippy, but introducing racism to the conversation. Is it your contention that people from tropical locales are of inferior intelligence? Don’t dance around it, just come out and say it if you really hold such ridiculous views.
@Radley
Sorry about that, I didn’t intend to be dismissive.
To clarify and elaborate, I think climate is coincidental and the geographical layout of failed states is the product of their specific history. Most of the failed states are in tropical climates, yes, but it’s not convincing to me that this one thing they have in common is THE thing they have in common, if you know what I mean. Especially since there are more recent and direct factors that the failed states for the most part share.
For instance, most of these states are young, less than a century old, and coming out of prolonged periods of colonial/imperial rule.
I think it has more to do with that, the legacy of imperial rule and exploitation than any kind of inherent cultural problem with living in a tropical climate. Craig explained it better than I can in the latter part of his 4th point, I’d just go on to say that many countries are still under a sort of corporate neocolonialism. It’s just more convincing to me, an Occam’s Razor thing.
Because certainly, the failed states have harsh histories with empires. Sub-Saharan Africa bore the brunt of European colonialism and suffers continued economic exploitation by Western powers, though now privatized and corporate. The Middle East underwent the centuries-long corrosion and collapse of the Ottoman Empire and then had roughly a few decades to half a century of either direct European occupation as in Egypt or colonialism-by-proxy as in Iran. Central Asia has been conquered and reconquered over and over, from the Mongols until, most recently, the USSR. South Asia was sandwiched between the great Indian empires and China, then subject to European colonialism for a long time. Korea spent most of its history under Chinese or Japanese rule. South America and the Carribean have the long legacy of European colonialism and after that severe economic exploitation from Western powers that continues to this day.
Histories of interference from imperial powers seems a much more convincing unifying thread for failed states of the past half century, especially given the older history of tropically-based civilizations.
On a side note, if one were to take into account the people it colonized, I’d bet the British Empire was the largest failed state in history according to the standards of this list.
BSK, it would be really nice if whites, Asians, Jews, and black Africans all had the same innate intelligence. And I don’t doubt that at least some of the observed differences are the result of environmental factors (malnutrition, etc.).
But there is no black-run polity in the world that is successful, honest, and prosperous. None. From Detroit to Newark to the Congo to the rapidly-declining South Africa, the pattern is quite clear.
I strongly suggest reading Guns, Germs & Steel, if you’re really interested. Jarod Diamond has a fascinating theory on this exact question. There’s also a very good National Geographic video series on the book & theory as well.
Successful and prosperous mean the same thing.
Zippy, you are a racist. You don’t even know what you are talking about. There is no evidence that race (or religion for that matter, an even more preposterous claim given that it is mutable) impacts intelligence or brain capacity. Zero. None. Adhering to that argument is essentially denying fact. Offer some scientific fact or stop peddling your racist nonsense. Way to embrace ignorance, idiocy, and racism.
I suppose since no nation of brown folks developed or used a nuclear bomb, or engaged in race-based slavery, or committed systematic genocide, it is also safe to say that their capacity for evil is far less, right? Oh no, the argument never runs in THAT direction, does it?
I think a lot of former colonies of the world still feel the affects of being a colony. That probably has the most to with third world corruption.
A colony existed so the governing nation could pull as many resources as they could from that colony. They didn’t extract resources to invest in the local economy beyond creating high living standards for the governing body. That kind of controlled and systematic “rape and pillage” scheme was taken over by local governments as the colonial powers left since that was their only example. Colonial powers setup the corruption culture a long time ago. Buying off tribal leaders, getting bribes from from people they down their noses at. You can also look at Russia as “industrialized” example of this, even though there wasn’t a colonization aspect to their recent history.
It’s really hard to overcome that kind of ingrained culture. Hell, we won’t even switch to the metric system. Do we really think that these failed states are going to suddenly get their shit together over night? The only option is just to let them fight it out and do it on their own.
Colonization had the effect of exporting all of the valuable resources of an area while importing only the negative aspects of “progress”.
Let’s look at the “development” of the America, for instance. Is America REALLY a more successful state now than it was 600 years ago or 1600 years ago? Indigenous groups didn’t have warfare the way we know it now, generally enjoyed greater rights and freedoms without a centralized nanny state, and were largely self-sufficient. But they didn’t have the interwebs, so I guess they were simply destined by inferior genes to be failures as a people.
BSK, I suppose you think it’s a coincidence that 99 of the top 100 times in the hundred meter dash belong to blacks of West African descent. Or that blacks dominate the position of running back and cornerback in the NFL.
The Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study provides fairly compelling evidence that the black-white IQ gap in the United States is genetic rather than environmental. As does the fact that, on standardized tests, the children of lower class whites outperform the children of upper class high IQ blacks.
Your other claims are also seriously flawed. For example, you say that brown folks never engaged in “race-based slavery.” Possibly not, depending on how you define “race-based.” But slavery was (and is) common in Africa, and of course Africans were the ones who sold their fellow Africans to Europeans and Arabs. As for never committing systemic genocide — what do you call Rwanda?
In fact, I don’t claim that Europeans are morally superior by nature — of course not! They did invent concepts like human rights and constitutional government, but they also perpetuated the Holocaust and various Communist atrocities. Westerners are capable of doing some awful stuff, as well as amazing generosity.
As for the claim that I am “racist,” well, it depends on what you mean by the word. I have reluctantly concluded that different racial groups have different innate endowments. If that makes me a “racist” by your definition, then so be it. But I don’t have any hatred or animosity toward any particular group. Human biodiversity appears to be a fact of reality, and I think we need to deal with the world as it is, not as we’d like it to be.
And I have read Guns, Germs, and Steel. A very interesting book by a very intelligent author, but ultimately not convincing.
BSK,
Native American still had war and killed each other. Enslaved one another. Took each others women. They weren’t much different than the Romans or any other group of people throughout history. I think its a stretch to say that amounts to greater freedom. Of course we’ll never know what a modern majority Native American culture would look like now. I’m sure it’d be pretty successful though.
But Zippy is a fucker. It’d be nice to chalk up failure to genetics, but that continent was devastated by a long history of oppression population reduction.
Also, let me remind everyone that the internet is tubes. You can’t just dump things on it. And you can’t hyperlink with firefox. Tubes Tubes Tubes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtOoQFa5ug8
@Andy
I’m not so sure that ongoing foreign exploitation is nearly as big a problem as poor governance. In general, trade and foreign investment are the best things possible for these countries. To the degree that you see Western corporate interests “exploiting” locals today, it’s because of corruption of a state that doesn’t protect the property and other rights of their citizens. If, say, MegaCorp is stripping the locals of their much-needed hunting grounds in order to mine uranium, then the problem is less that MegaCorp is doing business in the country per se than it is the government not applying the rule of law to them (and itself) by making MegaCorp first obtain the compensation-induced consent (or accept the refusal of consent) of the people who have the just property rights. This is because the state has usurped the local ownership rights unto itself, and presumes it rather than the actual people who live there have the right to consent.
It’s the same thing with the BP spill. Before drilling, BP shouldn’t have had to obtain the consent of the Federal government, it should have obtained the consent of the fisherman, etc. whose unrecognized property rights were at stake.
@Radley
I understand you weren’t meaning to imply a genetic argument. That the question is being approached from a non-racist, non-genetic angle *should* go without saying these days, but unfortunately I don’t think it can be left unsaid due to the history of the argument. It’s important to have such a disclaimer in any discussion of the question, and you left that out in your post. The same way Rand Paul felt compelled (before he backed down) to explain his libertarian position on the Civil Rights Act by always prefacing that he abhored racism and discrimination.
One additional point, re: foreign exploitation. The exact same usurped-property-rights, public-choice-theory dynamic plays out just as much if not moreso with domestic interests ‘exploiting’ the poor as it does with foreign corporations, because the latter has to worry about reputation and even possible liability back home.
Zippy-
You were not convinced because you are unconvinceable. You have decided the conclusion and find data that fits it. You mention the Minnesota study, ignoring A) the conflicting conclusions drawn from it and B) the countless other studies that replicated the process with much different and far more consistent results. Cherry pick much? You are useless to debate because your mind is made up. You are a racist of the highest order and one of the most dangerous types, because you attempt to justify irrational hatred as a legitimate point of view, disavowing yourself of the true responsibility of such a position and implying that such nonsense should be taking seriously. It shouldn’t be and won’t be, not from me from hear on out.
If you truly believe what you say here, I hope you share these believes with others when you don’t have the anonymity of the internet to protect you. Otherwise you couple racism with it’s most common companion… cowardice.
While I agree that many of the nations listed are not credibly described as “failed”, I also don’t think this is dishonest. It’s just a poor way to describe the range presented in the photo journal. Conflating nations like Egypt, Bolivia, etc with the US is silly as well, however. They are not failed states by any reasonable definition of the term, but they sure are more corrupt than the United States and other nations. Lets not pretend everyone is the same and we cannot see any differences at all.
Regardless, corruption isn’t the prime factor of a failed state. According to the site, they used “a battery of indicators to determine how stable — or unstable — a country is.” I assume corruption plays into categories like “public services” and “economic decline”. I think we can admit that there are plenty of stable (ergo, not failed) but heavily corrupt nations.
Does Zimbardo control for the natural resource curse? I am guessing that failed states correlate well with the presence of rubber or diamonds.
@Craig
Economic exploitation and poor governance go hand in hand, mutually reinforcing each other. It’s a chicken and egg thing. If your country has poor governance, you are extremely vulnerable to economic exploitation and probably are already undergoing it. If your country has a history of economic exploitation, it will be very difficult to get good governance because powerful, monied interests are heavily invested in your country’s status quo and need to continue exploiting you to preserve their bottom line.
And anyway, I don’t believe that corporations should be given a free pass to exploit people just because their government doesn’t protect them. Corporations are more like governments than not–both are powerful institutions run by human beings, and must be held accountable. The problem is as much the corporation doing exploitative business as the government’s neglect of its citizens’ rights. They are equally at fault.
Most of these states did not seek “statehood”, in the way that it is defined in the Western, white world, until it was forced upon them by colonialism. Lines were drawn somewhat arbitrarily, forcing together groups of people who wanted nothing to do with each other because it served the interests of the imperialist nations. We are only beginning to see that sorted out, often through bloody, bloody civil war. At the risk of romancing what these areas were like BEFORE European intervention, I would still suffice it to say that these states became far MORE failed as a result of colonialism than they were before. Was life perfect in Africa or the Middle East or in Central or South America before colonialism? No. But it is certainly worse off in MOST situations and enough time has not been given to allow for self-correction especially since the exploitation hasn’t really stopped.
I agree with #6 Guns, germs and steel is a good primer regarding these questions. It is also available on Netflix (use to be streaming but not any more) for those of us who can’ t find time (or are not able) to read a book.
“I think a lot of former colonies of the world still feel the affects of being a colony. That probably has the most to with third world corruption.”
I’d venture to say the fact that they became a colony may indicate the state was already having a problem in the first place. Certainly the withdrawal of the colonizing state is traumatic and probably does lead to the turmoil that is there today, but it doesn’t really explain why they were the ones colonized in the first place.
I suspect climate does play a large role, but the food gathering/planning seems a little simplistic to be the whole reason. We certainly don’t think about saving for the I’d wonder if the disease epidemics causes more problems in tropical climates which made cultural decentralization a better path in tropical climes. When your drinking water supply is always at 70+ degrees I bet that really helps the cholera/dysentery organisms. If your in a northern clime and your water supply is 50 degrees perhaps that helps.
If we read the comments here, most of the reasons are listed. (as well as some absurd denier-nonsense.)
1) disease gradients are higher (safer) in the cold and lower in the warm.
2) physical effort is difficult in hot weather, which hampers the creation of built capital. (core body temp also affects iq during exertion)
3) agrarian cycles in the north encourage cottage industry in winter, farming in spring and fall and war in summer. This creates certain social orders that foster human, built and technical capital accumulation. Compare to the brutal survival farming of the Chinese and their rice.
4) rivers or seas, but rivers in particular provide safe, easy and low cost product transport. The opposite is true: some areas are simply geographically resistant to trade.
5) unequal distribution of useful plants and animals favors certain regions. As well as agrarian productivity.
6) access to trade means access to knowledge, and greater availability of resources and technology. This increases the probability of innovation, and the development of ‘virtues’ as we understand our commercial and moral code.
7) The abstract thing we refer to as society, that is embodied in the accumulated habits that we call social order, are the most important and expensive forms of human capital. These habits define the unspoken normative goals that define cooperation and coordination. (The set of things that we don’t do: the opportunities we do not sieze. We pay for social institutions by forgoing opportunity, we pay for infrastructure and governance with the results of trade.) These institutions include our different definitions of public and private property, manners, ethics, morals and rituals. These require political institutions that perpetuate them one adopted.
8) general technical knowledge. (how to craft things) General systemic knowledge (how the natural world operates). We often confuse education with practical knowledge and scientific knowledge. ( the Muslim world is full of Islamic studies which do nothing except persist in resisting ignorance. the sub Saharan world is still in the embrace of magical thinking. ). Commerce not education (imitation of practice) is the primary means of knowledge transfer.
9) concordant technologies. Civilizations need to accumulate a greatdeal of human capital in order to adopt certain technologies before they can adopt others, else these technologies are not disruptive, and do not increase the division of knowledge and labor. Otherwise tyrants simply use it to institutionalize corruption and profiteering. This isn’t any different from children but on a larger scale. If people do not forgo the opportunity to misuse a technology, they will never be able to gain its productive benefits. You don’t give a child a gun.
10) social orders. The west was built by fraternal orders of city/market joint stockholders, partly because of the high cost of equipment and training. This is the source of our republican sentiments, as well as our tools of argument,reason and science. Other societies have not been so lucky.
Now we get to how westerners hurt some cultures:
1) creating political boundaries across tribes destroys their ability to create human capital because it over stimulates the need for group persistence and impedes the development of common market habits. Thievery and tribal banditry is much easier and cheaper than creating trade and infrastructure. Even today, there is no small sentiment among males that suggests civilization has limited their potential access to mates.
2) colonialism under England was effective. In creating stability. In fact the hallmark of the Anglo model is stability and stability fosters the accumulation of all forms of capital. If you were colonized by someone else, then you will suffer for it. Anglo social technology is as important as the development of Greek science and reason. That technology, unbenknownst to most of us, is the development of abstract principles that allow calculation and coordination. ( this is a very complex topic.). French colonies are a disaster.
3) economic interference, and in particular charity. Ths is a hotly debated problem. But individual and locals assistance by devoted people seems to make a difference, while insertion of capital is extremely harmful to developing economies that must transform from tribal to market economies.
Unpleasant realities :
And the one factual reality that the vast body of people will fail to accept in the face of universal, overwhelming and scientifically evidence: that iqs are unequally distributed in different races, and in clases within those races. And that all people are racist in that they prefer acting within and with their race. And this will never change simply because the imitative nature of man, his need to learn, and his desire to learn from those he most easily can imitate. And the conesequential Idea of, and need for, conceptions of status in order to choose who to imitate. When the hard reality is that women are hypergamic (marry up), while men have a wider iq variance than women, it presents men with the need to compete for mate selection. And this system requires a diverse economy of status symbols within each race and class that guarantee the eternal search for demonstrable differences in status in order to pursue both mates and opportunities for alliances.. Racism is permanent as is classism.The dirty secret of the human genome project is that class is genetically determinant. While economic classes are semi randomly plastic, social classes (which are readily evidenced in the postings on this and other blogs) are decidedly inelastic. (spoken as a member of the upper middle class).
Furthermore iqs are different in consequence between groups. A white, Jew or east Asian with a sixty iq is perceptibly broken. A sub saharan African is not – he or she just has a higher barrier to the learning of abstractions.
In general, To maintain machines requires a 105iq. To get a liberal education requires an iq of 110. To design machines requires an iq of 122 . To design abstractions requires an iq above 130. To innovate upon a system of thought requires, it appears, above 140. Everyone else simply uses the tools created by others. It is demonstrably true that the top quintile has more influence on productivity of the society than all the rest combined.
Since all societies are run by minority elites (even ours) the composition of elites in government, intelligence in the middle classes, and capable mechanics in the proletariat determine the competitive rates of innovation and change in a society.
There are also ways to manufacture ignorance. Some religions are regressive. In fact it could be reasonably argued that many are simply dangerous. The reason one is out gunned out germed and out steeled, so to speak, is a function of a culture’s willingness to adapt disruptive technologies. Luddites perish. Most of the scriptural religions are Luddite systems of thought.
Despite these iq distribution differences, it does not take a genius to run a market economy. As our pliticians demonstrate daily. What is important is that in any sufficiently large body of people exist sufficient numbers to adopt the rule of law, the intitutions of trade, and some form of capital production. The problem is one of numbers: getting the barbarians and potential corrupt bureaucrats to forgo opportunities for personal gain in order to fund the development of their human capital. The problem of coordinating production in a division of knowledge and labor requires a great deal of sacrifice.
It is the is a sufficient set of principles govern the progress and adaptability of cultures.
As other readers have commented, colonialism is perhaps the greatest determinant today of the relative state of failed nations.
I hope this was helpful in providing food for thought.
The idea plays a major role in Michael H. Hart’s Understanding Human History, which was written in part as a critique of Jared Diamond.
The U.S is most certainly not just as corrupt as any other country. Ask Transparency Internation or other comparative surveys. Walter Block had a great takedown of Paul Craig Roberts along those lines a while back.
[...] This posting is in response to “Postcards From Hell: Images fom the world’s most failed states” and commentary on The Agitator. [...]
Those aren’t failed states, except possibly Somalia. The other 59 are total-government states. Seems to me they’ve succeeded wildly in doing what it is that big government does best. Those are countries where people are conditioned to depend on the state rather than the market, so the state is what they will get: universal conscription, perpetual war, high taxation, corruption and graft, suppression of free speech, and any entrepreneurial spirit crushed.
They’re successful states. And failed markets.
In Toynbee’s “A Study of History” he refers to your question as the challenge of the land. If the challenge posed by climate and geography is too small (tropics, south sea islands), people don’t need to develop civilization to survive. At the opposite extreme, if the challenge is too great (arctic, or mountain environments) then people spend all of their time trying to survive and don’t have time to develop a civilization. People seem to need enough of an environmental challenge to keep them focused on the future in order to develop a successful civilization.
I wonder how much of the difference in development patterns has to do with endemic diseases–harder to get rid of in the tropics and mostly stationary–vs epidemic diseases that can be moved around with the people. (Though a bunch of endemic vector-borne stuff has moved around with people, either in their bodies or by moving mosquitoes with freight.)
Curt-
You made a lot of good points until you wandered down the IQ/Race road.
First off, IQ is a demonstrably failed measure of “intelligence”. It has gotten better from the original tests, but still isn’t an accurate measure of the intellectual capacity of an individual.
Second, no legitimate scientific study has been able to prove that there is a difference in intellectual capacity between the races AND been able to replicate results. Instead what you’ll see is a study aimed at demonstrated a pre-conceived conclusion, succeed in doing so, but never replicated. So you’ll have one study that examines adoption records and one that measures brain size and cobbled together, they SEEM to make a cogent argument. That is, until, you see the dozen other studies examining adoption records that demonstrate opposite results or the further research on brain size that refutes the initial study.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly if you ignore my first two points… if we DO concede that there are minute differences in the range and averages of IQs between different groups, this in no way explains the gulf that we see in “development” between the groups. Studies that DO find a difference existing in IQs find it to be only a matter of points, on average, an that you still have roughly a bell curve distribution. For what you are arguing to be genuinely impactful we’d need to see a HUGE gap exist. Couple that with the Flynn effect, which demonstrates that the average intelligence of ANY group now is higher than the average intelligence of the HIGHER group a few generations ago and we should have seen these groups making the same strides, just a few generations behind. We don’t because the A)IQ/race link is bogus and B) even if it DID exist it is too inconsequential to matter. All of the other reasons you listed, to varying degrees, are what has led to the situation we see now. NOT some hokey nonsense that one race is genetically smarter and superior to another.
“I’d venture to say the fact that they became a colony may indicate the state was already having a problem in the first place. Certainly the withdrawal of the colonizing state is traumatic and probably does lead to the turmoil that is there today, but it doesn’t really explain why they were the ones colonized in the first place.”
The problem with this argument is that there wasn’t necessarily a “state” to begin with. Europeans came in and didn’t see a society that resembled their own and, thus, determined the people to be without a society. So they imposed one. So, it’s not necessarily that the existing state was having problems. It’s simply that most of these areas lacked a centralized state that was recognizable to the Europeans at the time (not that they would have cared… the conquistadors had no problem overrunning large, highly-organized states in the Americas).
It’s also worth noting that much of the conversation surrounding race/IQ centers around the black/white divide, which is generally used to demonstrate why Sub-Saharan Africa is in the state that it is in. But how does that explain South East Asia or Central-South America? Most of the studies that do support the race/IQ link have found Asians to have the highest average IQ… so why isn’t Asia full of successful states? And the results have been most mixed on groups Native to the Americas, but genetically speaking, these groups are most closely related to Asian groups, so we would suspect that they would also probably be smarter than average. Yet, again, we still find a lot of failed states. So, again, even if we concede that there IS a link to race/IQ, clearly there are much bigger factors at play in explaining the varying states in these different areas, since it does not break down along racial lines as clearly as people are purporting.
Radley:
> Tropical populations have a more present-oriented concept of time. Food
> is available year round.
Further to Andy’s comment #6, Tropics != wet tropics. I went through the list and eliminated those nations that I am fairly sure have a distinct growing season limited to part of the year. I’m left with 31 that may have good growing conditions year round, but some of those would probably be eliminated by someone with more knowledge.
Looking at the map, the “critical” states are largely in central Africa (but not limited to the wet tropics), with relatively few “critical” states in other tropical regions. That suggests a reason other than climate. They’re mostly land-locked, artificial nations cobbled together after more-or-less brutal colonial regimes.
If you widen your view to “in Danger”, then you have most of the world outside of Western Europe, Australia, Argentina, and North America. That includes a huge swath of desert and monsoonal climates in the tropics, and well as temperate Asia, and relatively few regions with year round food production.
So, IMO even a cursory glance at the map indicates only a very weak correlation between “failed state” and “tropics” or “year-round food production.
@BSK: ‘IQ is a demonstrably failed measure of “intelligence”’
Is it? Maybe you’d like to cite some other measure that correlates with job performance, national GDP, academic performance, safe driving and other outcomes too numerous to mention. Putting intelligence in quotes, by the way, suggests that you want to have your cake and eat it too: talk about intelligence while dancing away from actually acknowledging that such a thing exists.
‘until, you see the dozen other studies examining adoption records that demonstrate opposite results’
Offer cites. I am familiar with the research and no such studies exist. The closest I can come is the study of mixed black/white children born to black US soldiers and German mothers following WWII (the Eyferth study). They did indeed score the same as whites on IQ tests. But that isn’t an adoption study, and it’s only fair to point out that the black soldiers were a selected group.
‘Studies that DO find a difference existing in IQs find it to be only a matter of points, on average, an that you still have roughly a bell curve distribution. For what you are arguing to be genuinely impactful we’d need to see a HUGE gap exist.’
No, studies find various gaps that (at least so long as we’re discussing the black/white stats) average about 15 points. There is a graphic in The Bell Curve that summarizes the results of about 700 studies in visual form: it shows a bell curve (of measured differences) with a nice normal distribution and a peak at around 15 points.
I recommend the Wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence for those further interested in the topic. Even if you don’t like the summary there, it has 120+ citations you can use for followup research.
I never thought I’d use the epithet “denialist,” but BSK sure fits the bill.
I can certainly offer cites, if people are interested, but didn’t want to turn this into a list of links.
Call me a denialist all you want. The majority of sound science in this area supports my position. I suppose you’ll join the flat-earthers and birthers who think they know the REAL truth.
I put “intelligence” in quotes not because I deny its existence, but because there is not an objective standard of intelligence. Intellectual capacity, which is really what we are talking about, is not measurable in the same way that height or weight or blood type are. So any attempt to measure “intellect” is not going to be as comprehensive as it likely presents itself as.
We are also ignoring the fact that race is a social construct with no basis in biology. The idea that “Africans” or “blacks” are a monolithic group distinct from “Europeans” or “whites” is simply flawed. Within Africa, you have numerous groups, and not just cultural or ethnically, but with wide variety of genetic variation. The idea that genes that code for skin color ALSO somehow code for “intelligence”, however you define it, again, is not supported by science.
I’m not saying that there isn’t variation in the results of IQ tests taking by whites and blacks or Europeans and Africans. I’m just saying this isn’t indicative that one “race” is smarter/stupider than another.
I suppose you’ll join the flat-earthers and birthers who think they know the REAL truth.
Oh, BSK, it says so much about the desperation of your position that you would even throw out a statement like this.
I can certainly offer cites, if people are interested, but [excuses, excuses]
Yes, please do. Even just a little.
The majority of sound science in this area supports my position.
Yes, so you keep asserting. Can you offer any actual support for that? In particular, I’d like to know why “IQ is a demonstrably failed measure of ‘intelligence.’” And any refutation of the idea of gaps in average intelligence between groups would also be good. I’m also curious as to what you mean when by the term “racist,” because you seem to be using it in a much broader sense than is commonly accepted.
We are also ignoring the fact that race is a social construct with no basis in biology.
No, race is a rough classification based on skin tone and ancestral geographical origin.
The idea that “Africans” or “blacks” are a monolithic group distinct from “Europeans” or “whites” is simply flawed.
Yes, and that’s probably why no one puts forward such an idea. The argument is over averages, not individuals.
The idea that genes that code for skin color ALSO somehow code for “intelligence”, however you define it, again, is not supported by science.
Another strawman (I hope). You really make me wonder whether, as Zippy put it, “you think it’s a coincidence that 99 of the top 100 times in the hundred meter dash belong to blacks of West African descent. Or that blacks dominate the position of running back and cornerback in the NFL.” If so, the mind boggles, but if not, does this mean that skin color genes also code for athletic abilities?
I’m not saying that there isn’t variation in the results of IQ tests taking by whites and blacks or Europeans and Africans. I’m just saying this isn’t indicative that one “race” is smarter/stupider than another.
Again, you need to grasp the concept of an average. If we choose a black and an Asian at random, there is no reason to believe a priori that the Asian is more intelligent. In fact, there are undoubtedly blacks who are more intelligent than 99% of Asians. However, it is known with supreme confidence (see bbartlog’s references) that the group of all Asians, as generally defined, would receive a higher average score on a reasonable test of intellectual ability than the group of all blacks, as generally defined.
Interestingly, Zippy (a racist…based on what he writes…which is all I can go by) has some valid points. And, I’m making no value-judgement on “racists”.
There are, of course, genetic differences between human races. Likewise, there are genetic differences between each and every human. However; if you overlay two bell graphs (might as well bring up THAT book) that are slightly out of sync…you’ll see that the union covers almost everyone. So, you really have to stop with this nonsense when about 99.9% of the people are the same.
Genetics is only one factor involved in how a human develops. One factor. And, it is not the most important factor in the vast majority of development areas.
However; racists (and those with limited scientific experience) desperately want a reason to justify their beliefs. So, they put massive importance on things like average IQ for specific races. An IQ test! How neanderthal! Let’s test basketball ability based soley on free throws…or slam dunk contests. Let’s IQ test YOUR child and then exclusively target his development based on the test results. Better yet, let’s do this with YOU.
Scientifically speaking, this is poppy-cock. To enhance your historical learning journey, I also suggest “Guns, Germs, and Steel”. As for how to actually improve your scientific methodology? Maybe MIT.
There is no racial superiorty due to there being no unequivocal definition of superior. At least this is what my Taoist overlords tell me.
Racist
1 : a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race
2 : racial prejudice or discrimination
Im not sure…I think the BIG out-lier here would be Russia. It has the harshest winters of pretty much any country and Im pretty sure it would fall into the category of failed state.
However; if you overlay two bell graphs… that are slightly out of sync…you’ll see that the union covers almost everyone.
The “union?” I’m not sure what you think that word means. You seem to be referring to the intersection of the domains of the graphs, but the domain of a bell graph is the set of all real numbers, so what you’ve said is meaningless in any way I can think to read it.
So, you really have to stop with this nonsense when about 99.9% of the people are the same.
Again, what does this mean? I can’t decipher it.
However; racists (and those with limited scientific experience) desperately want a reason to justify their beliefs.
To be honest, I’d really prefer if there weren’t such differences in average intelligence between groups that happen to also have differing visual characteristics. It’s an inconvenient truth, to say the least. I initially had religion-based reasons to reject the idea, but curiosity got the best of me and I eventually found it almost literally painful to try to ignore such a mountain of evidence.
Let’s test basketball ability based soley on free throws…or slam dunk contests.
Do you assert that IQ is meaningless as a measure? If so, do you have some reason you’d care to share?
Let’s IQ test YOUR child and then exclusively target his development based on the test results. Better yet, let’s do this with YOU.
I’m at a loss to determine the relevance of this comment.
There is no racial superior[i]ty due to there being no unequivocal definition of superior.
Not in any general sense, no. And not when comparing groups. One individual could be intellectually superior to another by some criteria, or athletically superior, etc., but only a bigot would claim that one broad group of people is superior to another.
As for your quoted definitions of racism, I don’t believe they apply to Zippy, and they certainly don’t apply to me.
‘We are also ignoring the fact that race is a social construct with no basis in biology. ‘
Color is also a social construct of sorts. There are different ways you can split up the color wheel, depending on what you’re trying to do, and different societies have different schemes (at least lexically) so that as I understand it the Japanese do not distinguish between blue and green (at least in their top-level, simple color words), while Chaucer’s English didn’t have a word for ‘orange’. There are also colors that fall right on the boundary of our categories.
The situation with race is analogous. If you gene sequence a bunch of people, define a metric of genetic distance (relatedness), and then run a clustering algorithm, you find that far from being randomly distributed in the genetic space, people sort into clusters. More to the point, these clusters correspond extremely closely to racial self-classification. Frankly it would be astounding if it were not so. The fact that there are people who fall on the boundaries of these clusters, and that they don’t correspond with 100% accuracy to people’s racial self-classification, does not mean that we are not looking at real population structures.
‘I can certainly offer cites, if people are interested’
I’m just looking for one: an adoption study that shows adopted black and white children raised in similar circumstances with equal performance on IQ tests at an age above (say) three years old. Shouldn’t be hard to find since all the sound science is on your side.
‘The idea that genes that code for skin color ALSO somehow code for “intelligence”’
No one claims this(*). But because of the aforementioned population structure, some genetic variants tend to occur more often in the presence of others.
It should be noted that I’m not trying to deny the existence of environmental handicaps that affect black and especially African intelligence. Malnourishment and disease (Africa), higher levels of lead poisoning (USA), possibly even different rates of breastfeeding (not to open another can of worms) – all of these affect black people in measurable ways.
(*) – however, Mother Nature is a crazy hacker, and there is a gene that seems to affect hair color, pain tolerance, and possibly temperament as well: MC1R. Mechanisms for the non-pigment effects not well elucidated last time I checked. So it is not a priori impossible for some gene to affect a bunch of seemingly unrelated stuff.
As TGGP mentions, Mr. Balko’s winter theory was elaborated in Michael H. Hart’s 2006 book “Understanding Human History:”
Hart writes:
“Throughout history, most of the instances of people from one region attacking and conquering substantial portions of another region have involved ‘northerners’ invading more southerly lands.”
(The biggest exception: the Arabs of the 7th Century A.D. And the Romans conquered in all directions.)
This overall pattern of north conquering south has long been apparent from the historical record—even though northern lands are generally less populous, due to shorter growing seasons.
For example, mighty China, a vast empire with a competent bureaucracy chosen by meritocratic tests, was never much threatened by southerners, but it built the vast Great Wall to keep out its much less numerous northern neighbors.
This pattern has been validated by recent DNA studies. In populations of mixed background, the male line of descent (as seen in the Y-chromosome) tends to derive from north of the homeland of the female line of descent (as seen in the mitochondrial DNA). Implication: men from the north more frequently overcame the men from the south and took their women.
Examples: Latin Americans (white fathers and Indian or black mothers), African-Americans (whites and blacks), Asian Indians (Aryans and Dravidians), and Icelanders (Vikings and Celts). Similarly, the Han Chinese, the world’s largest ethnic group, are more likely to be descended from northern Chinese men and southern Chinese women than vice-versa.
Hart offers a simple, deliberately reductionist model for explaining this (and much else): Foresight is needed to survive cold winters. So harsher, more northerly climates select for higher average intelligence. And intelligence is useful in war.
On the other hand, within continents there often aren’t obvious latitude-related IQ disparities. For instance, the IQ differences among most European countries are too small to worry about.
What about scientific, technological, and artistic contributions?
The most productive centers of cultural innovation have tended to move north over the millennia, for example, from the Fertile Crescent to Ancient Greece to Renaissance Northern Italy to Enlightenment Northern Europe. Hart attributes this to agriculture tending to arise first in low-to-medium latitude locations with long growing seasons, then spreading northward. In hunter-gatherer economies, every man must hunt. But in farming economies, enough food can be produced to support urban sophisticates. Over the ages, farming techniques improved to allow more northerly climes to support large, urbanized populations
Hart assumes, not unreasonably, that higher intelligence has been evolving steadily upward since modern humans first spread out from Africa about 60,000 years ago, under the Darwinian selective pressure of surviving cold winters. But Greg Cochran has proposed that evolution for intelligence and other behavioral traits useful in the modern world is actually accelerating.
Cochran reasons that a large population is more conducive to increases in intelligence than a small population—the more people in a breeding pool, the higher the chance of favorable mutations. Thus, the combination of winter and large populations in Northeast Asia and Europe would explain the high average IQs, and consequent economic dominance, of those two regions. Conversely, while the Arctic climate likely selects strongly for cleverness, the inevitably limited number of Eskimos means they have fewer gene variations to select from.
For more on this topic, see
http://vdare.com/sailer/070812_hart.htm
“David | June 28th, 2010 at 8:23 am
In Toynbee’s “A Study of History” he refers to your question as the challenge of the land. If the challenge posed by climate and geography is too small (tropics, south sea islands), people don’t need to develop civilization to survive. At the opposite extreme, if the challenge is too great (arctic, or mountain environments) then people spend all of their time trying to survive and don’t have time to develop a civilization. People seem to need enough of an environmental challenge to keep them focused on the future in order to develop a successful civilization.”
That is, civilizations originally developed in some warmer climates, such as around the Black and Mediterranean Seas, while residents of colder climates such as northern Eurasia simply struggled to stock enough food and fuel to survive the winters. (Occasionally, a great leader would arise and temporarily bring many tribes together to invade a more inviting land – but innovations came from the warmer lands.) This was not universal; in many tropical regions, either the living was too easy or something was lacking that was needed to advance. (See “Guns, Germs, and Steel” for how a lack of domesticable species kept New Guinea at a hunter-gatherer level, and limited the progress of Native American civilizations.) Civilization arose where suitable plants and animals were available for domestication, living wasn’t so hard that people ate the breeding stock, but there were some challenges such as a need for large scale irrigation projects to improve agricultural yields,
Then with general technological advancement, life became too easy and the original civilations of the Nile and Mesopotamia ceased to advance. But in Greece and Rome, it was now possible to look beyond immediate survival needs, and they (and the Han Chinese) led the way for a thousand years – until barbarians in Germany, Mongolia, etc., picked up enough technology to be able to do more than just survive. And a thousand years after Germanic barbarians sacked Rome, other descendants of Germanic tribes developed a new northern European model of civilization, which was so successful that they conquered most of the world.
Hart’s pattern of invasions trending south is part of this. (Obviously it isn’t universal; Rome invaded Gaul and Britain, the Mongols went west and northwest as well as south.) Until about 1400 AD, most often the barbarians won in the end, and they trended southwards – consider the main branch of the Crusades (Europe invading the Middle East), the Albigensian Crusade (relatively barbarous northern French laying waste to southern France), and finally the British-financed Manchurian conquest of China (I hope this will remain the last successful barbarian invasion). Since then, the general pattern was “civilized” northerners colonizing the rest of the world, which had not kept up in technology nor governmental and military institutions.
But also note this: The early civilizations (Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Han) were centralized tyrannies with partly socialist economies. Future-oriented thinking was imposed from the top, rather than being expected of everyone. E.g., in the Bible Joseph predicted years of bumper crops in Egypt followed by years of famine. He didn’t advise the farmers to store up food against the lean years – instead, the Pharoah collected the surplus and stored it.
Likewise, grain shipments to Rome were arranged by the government, with much of it being doled out rather than sold in a free market. The Roman Republic was effectively an oligarchy rather than a dictatorship, but it was still centrally controlled to a large extent. I’ll also note that it seems to have been extremely corrupt – official positions were bought for large sums, with the expectation of making it up and then some with graft.
But collecting food reserves in the capital didn’t work in northern Europe. The 90% of the population that lived in the farmlands had better have food stored locally, because it wasn’t going to be shipped very far in midwinter with three feet of snow on the ground. And so future-orientation had to spread far deeper into the population, and decentralized control worked better. This decentralization began as feudalism, but it turned into capitalism, even though most European nations kept feudal forms long past the point where the nobility mattered.
[...] Postcards from Hell A terrifying photo essay from Foreign Policy on the world’s failed states. Note that with just a few exceptions, the 60 or so states the magazine had determined to be “failed” are located in tropical climates. [...]