Guns, Germs and Steel Links

by Kerim on July 26th, 2005

The posts that Ozma and I wrote about Guns, Germs and Steel seem to have struck a nerve, and already there is a fair amount of discussion in the blogsphere. In addition to Brad DeLong’s dismissive pot-shots, there is a very good discussion developing in the comments section of this Crooked Timber post. From there I learned that the Science article mentioned by Ozma (and also by Majikthise and Louis Proyect) has been posted online by Louis. I recommend everyone take the time to read it in full. Also, Nomadic Thoughts is collecting links about the debate, and I will try to mirror some of those here, as well as whatever else I come across as I discover them. And stay tuned – our resident New Guinea expert, Rex, is on vacation, but I’m sure he’ll have something to say when he gets back!

UPDATE: For those who want a quick overview of the debate so-far, go take a look at an excellent write-up by Scott Jaschik at Inside Higher Ed.

UPDATE: This is getting very long, so I’m moving everything below the fold.

UPDATE: Stentor Danielson, over at debitage, has some thoughts on GG&S:

As I see it, the main problem with Diamond’s thesis is that he reaches too far back in history to find the roots of Euro-American dominance. He traces the current power imbalance back to the arrangement of continents and biota that prevailed at the dawn of “civilization” some 10,000 years ago. Diamond makes much of Pizarro’s easy victory over the Incas, treating it as the proof in the pudding of the superiority that Europe had achieved. But even as Europe was laying the smackdown on the Americas, it was desperately trying to catch up to the much more advanced civilizations of India, China, and the Middle East. It wasn’t until the the 19th century, when the industrial revolution was in full swing, that we can say with confidence that (western) Europe was the world’s dominant power (see Andre Gunder Frank’s ReOrient). This suggests that a historically contingent explanation is likely to be better than one positing a long-standing inevitability.

UPDATE: Brad De Long has updated his post with a new cheap shot. He deliberately misunderstands me in order to try to make me look foolish. [UPDATE: Yes, I said some things in sloppy ways which facilitated such misrepresentations, but only if you ignore the point I was trying to make in my initial post. Is the point to try to understand each other, or to play "gotcha" - berating someone until they are tired and say something you can use against them? The latter might work in presidential debates (Kerry's "global test" remark), but isn't appropriate for scholarly discourse.] I said:

Addendum: Yes, if the book had been framed in terms of “why, prior to 1600, did the west have more cargo” … fine. But that is not how the book is framed. Nor do I think it would have been as popular if it had been framed in those terms (for the reasons Ozma alludes to).

To which he responds with quotes showing that JD did, indeed say the year 1600 was his ending point, in his book.

All this proves is that Brad is a troll. He deliberately misunderstands and misrepresents what I am saying in order to make me upset (this time it worked). I shouldn’t rise to the bait, but this is too easy….

It is very clear that there are two frames. Yali’s question sets up the larger frame within which the other one is set. I, and I believe Ozma, are arguing that much of the popularity of the book derives from the slippage between these two frames – the fact that answering one question seems to answer another. In my initial post – which was a critique of the TV show, I argued that this slippage begins with Diamond’s setting up this slippage in the book, even though I explicitly acknowledged that he did a better job of it in the prologue than what we see in the TV show. Still, I felt it was important to make it clear that one question does not answer the other, and that in fact Yali’s question was not the one we should be asking in the first place.

Rather than trying to understand all of this, De Long deliberately uses it to dismiss me. If you read our discussion in the forums I think you can see that this derives from the fact that he doesn’t like the implication that capitalism might somehow be at fault for contemporary inequality. But rather than having a civil debate about this issue, he resorts to cheap shots.

The number one rule for dealing with trolls is “don’t feed them.” There are a lot of other people who have contributed interesting points to the threads here, at Crooked Timber, and even on De Long’s post. From now on I will focus any energy I have (I don’t have much these days) on interacting with those who have attempted to make a civil contribution to promoting further dialog rather than trying to prevent reasonable discussion. Don’t feed the trolls!

UPDATE: Our very own Tak is keeping quiet on GG&S (he hasn’t read it) but in a post over at Frog in a Well he has a lot to say about an article Diamond wrote about Japan.

There are also frightening parallels in the history of Japanese fascism to the kind of environmental determinism used by Diamond.

… Instead of reading these simplistic assumptions about race, technology, and stages of civilization, I’d rather wait for the release of Civilization 4, in which the game designers rely on the same assumptions.

UPDATE: Henry Farrell thinks that Tak’s post (together with those on this blog) represent “some underlying deformation of thinking.”

In the comments on that post, Doug, of Fistful of Euros, says:

Maybe Tak et al. are a put-up by the right-ish bits of the academy to make more left-ist bits look silly?

I have to admit – that one cracked me up.

If we anthropologists seem a little to ready to throw around the term “racist” it is not because we are “jealous” of other disciplines (in fact, anthropology is doing better than ever before), it is because we are all too aware of our own history as a discipline. Anthropologists were the foot-soldiers of colonialism, promoting theories of racial superiority to justify colonial expansion. As a result, we are sensitive to the ways in which specific interests can be served in the name of “objective” science.

UPDATE: Now Kevin Drum links to Brad’s Post. Kevin is as thoughtful, polite, and articulate as he always is. I just wish people would stop conflating my comments about the reception and limitations of the book and the TV show with Ozma’s critique of his environmental arguments. And just because people say they aren’t doing something doesn’t mean they aren’t doing it – that’s one of the first things you learn when you do ethnographic fieldwork!

UPDATE: Timothy Burke takes up the discussion at Cliopatria:

It’s a serious mistake to even imply that Diamond is racist, as Henry Farrell properly observes. I would say that he has a stubborn inclination to use racial terms when they don’t serve any empirical or descriptive purpose.

And,

Fourth, on Yali’s question, I have a few problems. Though Brad DeLong insists that Diamond only means his answer to explain the relative imbalance in material wealth and power between many non-Western societies and the West up to 1500 and not afterwards, I think it’s clear that Diamond thinks that post-1500 events are no more than the icing on the cake, that the fundamental explanation of post-1500 inequalities and disparities in the world derive from the grand arc of pre-1500 development, from the luck of the geographical draw. He’s not alone in that: this is a venerable argument which takes on variant forms among world-systems historians and Marxists. But De Long is being a bit unfair to insist somehow that the Savage Minds bloggers have in this respect misread Diamond: he clearly argues that the pre-1500 history is crucially determinant of the post-1500 history.

UPDATE: Brad DeLong responds to Burke’s critique, and Burke responds in the comments. Burke adds this:

It is important to note, though, that Diamond’s latest work makes it clear that he’s not a determinist, not exactly, in that he does think elites can make decisions, that there are multiple pathways a society can travel in relation to its environment.

That book would be Collapse, which I haven’t read.

UPDATE: I missed this one, but De Long seems to have taken Ozma seriously enough to actually read one of the articles she cited, although he ends up ridiculing it. Still, I’m glad he made an effort! That’s all we ask of our readers.

UPDATE: Lawyers, Guns and Money discusses the debate between Ozma and DeLong in ethical terms. (Note: Ozma is a she.) And recommends a few books on egalitarian ethics.

Stentor Danielson has a followup to his own earlier critique.

And John Hawks thinks that “Diamond’s work … is a lot closer to traditional anthropology than some find comfortable” (despite flaws with its historical framework).

UPDATE: Someone over at Crooked Timber posted this link to a review of Collapse by Clifford Geertz.

Also, Tak has an extended reply to Henry in the comments section of his post.

First: I didn’t say that Jared Diamond was racist.

…Yet despite the things I liked about the article, I was disturbed by some of his assumptions, which in my opinion are the kind that help fuel the very racism abound in East Asia today. This is what I meant by him perpetuating racism.

UPDATE: A libertarian take on Collapse by Ronald Bailey.

UPDATE: There has been a significant amount of new discussion on the site. Most of it by Deborah Gewertz and Frederick Errington. You can see all their posts here. Rex also had a post about the nature of anthropological critiques which has some good discussion in the comments. And I have two more posts: One on the third episode of the TV show, in which Diamond discusses malaria in Africa. And another one about a trenchant critique of his new book, Collapse.

P. Kerim Friedman is an assistant professor in the Department of Ethnic Relations and Cultures at National Dong Hwa University, in Taiwan, where he teaches linguistic and visual anthropology. He is co-director of the film Please Don't Beat Me, Sir!, winner of the 2011 Jean Rouch Award from the Society of Visual Anthropology. Follow Kerim on Twitter.

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136 Comments →

Brad DeLong permalink

Do you people really think that in the 1970s Nigeria was “one of the richest countries in the world”?
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Kerim permalink

Brad – do you really think that has anything to do with my main point? It was a bad example, but that’s really quite irrelevant to the larger point I was making. A “pot shot” is when you pick on something minor in order to dismiss a point rather than engaging with it. And what do you mean “you people”? I, and I alone, made that point about Nigeria. (You also might have looked at the update I made to my post before responding to this one.)
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Brad DeLong permalink

OK. We’re making some progress here. Now New Guinea.

In 1780 the average person in Haiti was very poor relative to the general standard of living in the world. The average Haitian was poor not because productivity in Haiti was low–productivity in Haiti was in fact very high compared to other regions at the time–and not because Haiti had lousy terms of trade–Haitian sugar and other plantation crops sold at very healthy and relatively high prices. Average Haitians in 1780 were relatively poor because they were brutally exploited by a rapacious elite of slavemasters.

Do you think that the case of New Guinea today is analogous: that the average inhabitant of New Guinea is poor (relative to people in, say, Australia or the United States) primarily because New Guineans are exploited by a rapacious elite of logging executives? Or is the average inhabitant of New Guinea relatively poor today because labor productivity in New Guinea is very low, because New Guinea’s people do not have the education and skills to make it attractive for bosses to invest the capital in the island on a large enough scale to raise wages to the OECD standard?
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Kerim permalink

The point was that there are some people in New Guinea who are quite wealthy. They might be exploitative, or they might be working in the interests of their own communities – but that inequality within New Guinea is real and is not represented within the T.V. show. I argue that while JD does a better job at representing this complexity in the book, the way he frames the question overlooks the important effects of exploitation (whether from the colonial era, or from current business practices). Do you really think that the shortage of education and skills you allude to necessarily derives from the same forces that led to the development of early technologies in Europe? Your own example from Haiti seems to imply that you understand my point. If I had used Haiti instead of Nigeria as an example, would you still have dismissed it so strongly? Or is it that you simply don’t like my style of argumentation? Is it perhaps that you dislike the vague insinuation that capitalism is part of the problem? I don’t deny that insinuation, but it seems that we might agree more than you care to admit with regard to the limits of JD’s question.
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Kerim permalink

Let me rephrase. There were two points I was trying to make. The first was that the show mischaracterized people in New Guinea – including Yami himself. The second was that poor people in the US may be worse off (e.g. have shorter life expectancies) than objectively poorer people in developing countries that are (a) more equitable, or (b) who are higher up the ladder in an inequitable society. Thus “cargo” or the bundle of goods people have may be less important than the kind of society they live in.

Brad, do you think that inequality in America is unimportant just because we have a higher standard of living?
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Andrew permalink

Kerim, your second point is valid but is irrelevant to GG&S itself (as I think one of the early commenters on your post noted), and it seems unfair to Diamond to criticize him for writing a book about something other than the topic you are more interested in (i.e., writing about inequality between broad regions of the world, instead of inequality within a country). Not every book can be about inequality within a country – the publishing world would be quite boring if that were the case!
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Kerim permalink

Andrew … are you saying I’m asking the wrong question? Not every blog post can be about things in their own terms – the blogsphere would be a quite boring place if that were the case!
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Andrew permalink

Kerim, I think in fact you are asking a very good question! (that is, the question on Amartya Sen’s argument about inequality within countries, which I agree with – or should I say, being a non-expert in economics, I find very plausible) What I am criticizing is the very idea of a “wrong” question (as in, “no offense to Yali, but his question should be…”). I just think it’s unfair to say that someone is asking the “wrong” question just because it’s not the question one finds the most interesting. It’s as if I were to say, “Well, anthropology’s all very well and good, but it fails to address how cultural influences on behavior are instantiated at the neuronal level.” Of course it does, but that’s not the point. Now, if you had said, “GG&S tries to answer this question, but I think this other question here is more interesting,” I would have no problem with that.

Can you clarify what you mean by “not every blog post can be about things in their own terms” – I think I know what you mean but do not want to criticize a strawman.
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Louis Proyect permalink

Just received this note this morning from an African-American attorney who studied anthropology at U. of Michigan:

“Diamond is like the voice of the Bourgeoisie personified, making a confession of how they did it. That’s what it is. It bears the truth of a Confession.”
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Louis Proyect permalink

Relevant to the question of economic development in New Guinea:

One wonders how trustworthy a corporation can be in protecting the environment when it is handing out money to this rogue’s gallery. The answer is not very much, except for Jared Diamond. At the start of his encomium to Chevron, Diamond says, “Like much of the public, I loved to hate the oil industry, and I deeply suspected the credibility of anybody who dared to report anything positive about the industry’s performance or its contribution to society.” If a Potemkin Village like the Chevron oil field in Papua New Guinea can assuage him, then perhaps one understands his reluctance to provide a complete accounting of the corporation’s behavior elsewhere.

Whatever improvements Chevron has made in the USA, where vigilance against pollution remains relatively strong, they are offset by its practices in a developing world so highly susceptible to “brownmailing.” For example, while Chevron was responsible for spilling “only” 252,000 gallons of oil in the USA in 1990, Karliner reports that a Caltex spill in the Philippines was twice that amount. (Caltex was a joint operation between Chevron and Texaco; the two companies have since merged.)

In Sumatra, Chevron operates within a 32,000 square kilometer concession that has very little in common with the bucolic picture Diamond paints in Papua New Guinea. The November 1993 Multinational Monitor reported that Chevron has completely ruined the area in pursuit of profit. Trees died and fish disappeared from local rivers. A local resident complained, “I relied on the trees for wood for my roof and for food, but now there are only a few trees left.” Since most of “Collapse” is concerned with deforestation, you’d think that Diamond’s antennae would have detected this fact.

Villagers also reported that the local river often smelled of oil and that the river water was no longer safe to drink. Not surprisingly, Chevron excused itself with the explanation that “heavily organic jungle streams are not a good source of drinking water.” Somehow the fish managed to flourish in such heavily organic jungle streams in the past but went belly up shortly after Caltex began releasing its contaminants. A coincidence, one supposes.

Although Shell has the well-earned reputation of being the dirtiest oil company operating in Nigeria, Chevron is no slouch. Notwithstanding Diamond’s assurances that Chevron CEO Kenneth Derr has “been personally concerned about environmental issues” and that Chevron employees receive monthly emails from him about the state of the planet, some ingrates from the more radical wing of the environmental movement threw cream pies in his face back in 1999. They were angry over Chevron’s involvement with human rights abuses in the Niger Delta, where 90 percent of Nigeria’s crude oil is produced.

According to the June 1999 Earth Times:

“Members of the Ijaw tribe, native to the Delta, say they have lost as much as 70 percent of their ancestral lands to Nigeria’s oil operations. Ijaws who protest the environmental degradation of their lands and ask for greater economic returns for their communities have been killed by government troops, their women and children raped and run off, say human rights groups.”

Chevron, it seems, made its helicopters available to Nigerian troops who were summoned to deal with angry protestors. In 1998, after 200 demonstrators took over a Chevron oil platform for three days, the manager called in Nigerian troops, who, Chevron representatives admit, were transported to the platform in the company’s helicopters by company pilots. Two demonstrators were killed. In the second incident, which occurred two months later, four people were killed and 67 left missing when Nigerian forces attacked two small villages, reportedly once again using Chevron helicopters and boats.

Chevron blandly denied any wrongdoing. It said that any equipment, including helicopters, that is leased to its joint venture company in Nigeria is free to be used by its majority partner. That joint venture company just happens to be the blood-soaked Nigerian government.

Perhaps the Ijaws should have picked up and moved to Papua New Guinea where they would have been looked over properly by the good Chevron twin. As it turns out, things were not all they were cracked up to be over there.

In an article titled “Drilling Papua New Guinea: Chevron Comes to Lake Kutubu” that appeared in the March 1996 Multinational Monitor, Project Underground executive director Danny Kennedy describes a less than beneficent impact of development on the local population.

According to Kennedy, a human blockade on the pipeline construction site was broken up by a riot squad flown into the area on company choppers on May 1992. Apparently Chevron is very resourceful when it comes to shuttling in troops on company assets. The indigenous people felt that they were not being properly compensated for Chevron’s land grab. (Of course, the birds might have been less upset. This is in keeping with WWF’s preference for virgin forest as opposed to pesky human beings.) Sasoro Hewago, a leader of the local Fasu clan, told the Wall Street Journal in June 1992 that “The people say problems have come here because Chevron has come here, and so it is Chevron that must take care of them. … If we’re not satisfied there will be no oil. We have pledged to die. …”

Eighteen months later he seemed worn down by constant confrontations with the oil giant. He confessed, “You must chew before you swallow. My people have been exposed to Western civilization for five years, and are expected to deal with it. We are like we are in a dream and when, one day, we wake up it will be gone. We’re choking.”

The 5,000 supposed local beneficiaries of the project, members of the Fasu, Foe and Kikori clans, became increasingly unhappy after oil began being shipped in late 1992. In December 1993, 60 Foe men were arrested for protesting over inadequate royalty payments and were carried off in Chevron helicopters to a nearby jail. Once again Diamond’s favorite capitalist corporation was relying on helicopters to deal with the restless natives.

In December 1995, confrontations deepened further. Indigenous people threatened to blow up the pipeline, prompting Chevron to remove non-essential staff. Although Chevron eventually placated them with handouts, there is little doubt that a culture of dependency was created. Few of them actually work for Chevron but rely on the dole. When Chevron exhausts the local oil supplies, it is doubtful that native Papuans will be able to fend for themselves.

According to Kennedy, “the mining and petroleum sector is based on the degradation of natural capital and produces few human-made assets for PNG. It employs less than 2 percent of the population and does not add value to the raw materials. And in those boom years, the national government ran up an enormous foreign debt, causing it to bow to the strictures of a major structural adjustment program administered by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, in conjunction with its old colonial master Australia, in order to avert a cash-flow crisis.”

Even Diamond’s beloved birds seem less chipper than portrayed in “Collapse.” Stephen Feld, a University of Texas expert on birds in the local rainforests, states that much of the area game has been scared away by air traffic, especially by Chevron’s omnipresent helicopters.

Even the handouts create problems. With 90 percent of royalties going to the Fasu and only 10 percent to the Foe, rivalries have developed. This pattern can also be seen with the Navaho and Hopi in New Mexico, who have been played off against each other by a coal company.

But here’s the clincher. Kennedy reports that the World Wildlife Fund has a $3 million contract with Chevron to implement an “Integrated Conservation and Development Project” for the oil project area. The oil giant saw its ties with WWF as critical to its long term interests. A virtual conspiracy existed, according to Kennedy:

“A leaked 1993 confidential evaluation of the potential impacts of a Kutubu oil spill and the clean-up capacity of the joint venture, written after a practice exercise conducted by the joint-venture partners, expressed concern ‘as to whether a policy exists to control media and interest groups (Greenpeace) at Kopi area should a spill of this magnitude occur.’ Other documents concluded that the joint venture partners could rest easy, however, because ‘WWF will act as a buffer for the joint venture against environmentally damaging activities in the region, and against international environmental criticism.’”

Finally, despite Diamond’s assurances that Chevron has learned the painful lessons of oil spills, there is evidence that it has minimized the threat of exactly such a threat in its Papua New Guinea showcase. Before Chevron started piping oil, a tanker ran aground on pipe over the Kikori River bed. Environmental management experts Michael Kondolf and Richard Chaney concluded: “We are particularly concerned about potential impacts of catastrophic oil spills from pipeline breakage. Given the proximity to active faulting and subduction, and given the nature of deltaic sediments, pipeline failure at multiple points can be expected due to seismic shaking and liquefaction.”

Kennedy writes: “These dangers were graphically demonstrated in May 1993, when several sections of the riverbed underlying 110 kilometers of pipeline shifted and threatened to rupture. When divers checked the pipeline’s condition, they found more than one kilometer of pipe unsupported. Workers involved said that such a freespan could easily have flexed in the strong tidal currents of this stretch of the Kikori River until the pipe broke. The loss of any crude would likely be an ecological disaster, because Chevron would at best be able to clean up 25 percent of any spill, according to the company’s own oil-spill evaluation.”

If Chevron in Papua New Guinea is supposed to be a model for enlightened corporate management, then perhaps the fate of the earth is that which befell the Mayans and Easter Islanders. Contrary to Jared Diamond, the best hope for humanity is in the youth who threw a cream pie in the face of the Chevron CEO and the indigenous people of Nigeria, Papua New Guinea and elsewhere who are resisting the incursions of mining and drilling companies. With their efforts and the efforts of working people in the industrialized world, a global struggle against capitalism has the potential to remove the greatest obstacle to environmental sustainability: the private ownership of the means of production.

full: http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/ecology/JaredDiamond4.htm
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Ozma permalink

arrggghhhh!!!! I haven’t read any of the new posts, but wanted to pop in to say that after today I’m going to have to drop out of this conversation for a while (just as it is hotting up!) (curses!) because I’m moving to Canada. I’ll try and pop a foot in every chance I get over the next couple of weeks, but it’s going to be erratic.
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Brad DeLong permalink

Inequality within the United States is a very important topic. Inequality within New Guinea is a very important topic. Diamond, however, isn’t writing about the unequal distribution of class, status, and power within societies. He’s writing about Yali’s question: why is America–as a whole, and on average–so rich, and why is New Guinea–as a whole, and on average–so poor?

Your beef with Diamond is that Yali shouldn’t have asked and that Diamond shouldn’t have answered that question, but should have asked and answered another one instead: “Why is cargo distributed so unequally both within and between our societies?” You imply that this question has the answer “capitalism” when you write “While the show does show the hubub of urban New Guinea at the end, one would hardly know that there is internet access in the country. This gets to the fundamental problem I have with JD’s question… it overlooks a fundamental issue: the inequality within countries as well as between them. I assure you that logging industry executives in New Guinea live better than you or I do!”

Do you really believe that if not for “capitalism” the average New Guinean would have roughly today’s OECD standard of living?

And do you really believe that “[income] inequality throughout the world is increasing more rapidly now than every before”?

Everything I’ve looked at leads me to believe that income inequality in the world peaked around 1970, after the triple disasters of Maoist collectivization of agriculture, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution had greatly depressed standards of living in rural China. Since then–with the roughly tripling of rural China’s degree of prosperity, the extraordinarily-rapid industrialization of China’s coasts, and the post-1985 boom in India which has carried with it truly marvelous reductions in Indian absolute rural poverty–the world’s relative income distribution appears to have been strongly moving in a positive direction.
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Ozma permalink

oh god. Professor DeLong, all of your points suggest that what this debate is really about is worldviews; just as I am unpersuaded by Diamond, I don’t view China’s and India’s recent political economic histories in the same light you do. In fact I’m starting to feel that being called a thug and a hack by you was high praise indeed.
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Andrew permalink

Brad, it seems that your last paragraph misses Kerim’s point. Kerim is making (or I think he is making) Amartya Sen’s argument, i.e. that income inequality within countries may sometimes be more important for quality of life issues like life expectancy, even if overall standards of living are rising absolutely. For example, China is clearly getting wealthier, but its domestic income distribution is also clearly getting more unequal. It is plausible to suggest that those “left behind” are worse off today than they were 30 years ago, even if their incomes are objectively higher.

Omza, what do you disagree with Brad DeLong about? that China and India are not getting richer in an objective sense? or that the increase in domestic inequality outweighs the increase in overall economic increase? or something else entirely that I’m not getting because we have different worldviews?
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Brad DeLong permalink

Re: “I don’t view China’s and India’s recent political economic histories in the same light you do.”

Perhaps you should talk to some people–especially those living in China–who have lived through its recent political and economic history. “Seek truth from facts” as opposed to ideology, as it were.

Mao Zedong himself viewed steel production as a *very* important indicator of economic health and development: a successful China would be a steel-making China–that was, after all, the point of the disastrous Great Leap Forward.

Some statistics on Chinese steel production:

1952: 1.35 million tons
1958: 19 million tons
1961: 8 million tons
1973: 25.5 million tons
1976: 21 million tons
2005: 340 million tons (projected)

Defenders of Mao’s disasters–the collectivization of agriculture, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution–are rare, especially in China. Defenders of the License Raj of the Nehru Dynasty are not that common anymore. Are you one of them?
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Brad DeLong permalink

Re: “Contrary to Jared Diamond, the best hope for humanity is in the youth who threw a cream pie in the face of the Chevron CEO and the indigenous people of Nigeria, Papua New Guinea and elsewhere who are resisting the incursions of mining and drilling companies. With their efforts and the efforts of working people in the industrialized world, a global struggle against capitalism has the potential to remove the greatest obstacle to environmental sustainability: the private ownership of the means of production.”

Are we supposed to forget that those states that had public ownership of the means of production were much worse environmental stewards and had much, much worse environmental quality? The degree of Doublethink exhibited here is truly marvelous.
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maniaku permalink

Absolute steel production is evidence of reduced (or static) income inequality since 1970? How?

Also, ‘the Perhaps you should talk to some people—especially those living in China—who have lived through its recent political and economic history. “Seek truth from facts” as opposed to ideology, as it were.’ is an interesting idea. You mean, do ethnographic research instead of read off steel production statistics? Yes, perhaps.

Not to say that worldwide income inequality HAS increased from 1970, necessarily. I don’t really have facts to go on. But considering you are the one who is trying to play the “evidence game”…
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Andrew permalink

I think Brad DeLong and Kerim are talking past each other. Kerim’s primary concern, I think, is income inequality *within* countries, on the basis that quality of life can sometimes be worse for someone who is *relatively* poor in a country that is rich *on average* than for someone who is *relatively* rich in a country that is poor *on average*, even if the “poor” person in the rich country is objectively richer than the “rich” person in the poor country. Whereas Brad is making the point that China is becoming objectively richer, even though (I assume he will agree with this) it is also becoming more domestically unequal. Brad’s point is relevant to a discussion of income inequality *between* countries, insofar as China’s per capital GDP is catching up with that of the U.S. These two claims are not necessarily contradictory.
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Louis Proyect permalink

While it is correct that the USSR was a major polluter, it is a mistake to blame this on a planned economy. Until Stalin took over, the USSR was the most ecologically far-sighted country in the history of the world.

Ecology in the former Soviet Union

Polluted rivers, deforestation, noxious smokestack emissions and Chernobyl. That is what comes to mind when we think of the former Soviet Union. Like much of the history of the former Soviet Union, there is another side to the story. Just as there were political alternatives to Stalin, there were alternative possibilities to the way that the planned economy dealt with nature. Douglas R. Weiner’s “Models of Nature: Ecology, Conservation, and Cultural Revolution in Soviet Union” (Indiana Univ., 1988) is, as far as I know, the most detailed account of the efforts of the Russian government to implement a “green” policy.

This story starts, as you would expect, with the Bolshevik revolution. While Lenin has the reputation of being a crude “productivist,” the actual record was quite the opposite. Although Lenin wanted to increase Soviet Russia’s productive power, he thought that nature had to be respected.

The Communist Party issued a decree “On Land” in 1918. It declared all forests, waters, and minerals to be the property of the state, a prerequisite to rational use. When the journal “Forests of the Republic” complained that trees were being chopped down wantonly, the Soviet government issued a stern decree “On Forests” at a meeting chaired by Lenin in May of 1918. From then on, forests would be divided into an exploitable sector and a protected one. The purpose of the protected zones would specifically be to control erosion, protect water basins and the “preservation of monuments of nature.” This last stipulation is very interesting when you compare it to the damage that is about to take place in China as a result of the Yangtze dam. The beautiful landscapes which inspired Chinese artists and poets for millennia is about to disappear, all in the name of heightened “productiveness.”

What’s surprising is that the Soviet government was just as protective of game animals as the forests, this despite the revenue-earning possibilities of fur. The decree “On Hunting Seasons and the Right to Possess Hunting Weapons” was approved by Lenin in May 1919. It banned the hunting of moose and wild goats and brought the open seasons in spring and summer to an end. These were some of the main demands of the conservationists prior to the revolution and the Communists satisfied them completely. The rules over hunting were considered so important to Lenin that he took time out from deliberations over how to stop the White Armies in order to meet with the agronomist Podiapolski.

Podialpolski urged the creation of “zapovedniki”, roughly translatable as “nature preserves.” Russian conservationists had pressed this long before the revolution. In such places, there would be no shooting, clearing, harvesting, mowing, sowing or even the gathering of fruit. The argument was that nature must be left alone. These were not even intended to be tourist meccas. They were intended as ecological havens where all species, flora and fauna would maintain the “natural equilibrium [that] is a crucial factor in the life of nature.”

Podiapolski recalls the outcome of the meeting with Lenin:

“Having asked me some questions about the military and political situation in the Astrakhan’ region, Vladimir Ilich expressed his approval for all of our initiatives and in particular the one concerning the project for the zapovednik. He stated that the cause of conservation was important not only for the Astrakhan krai, but for the whole republic as well.”

Podiapolski sat down and drafted a resolution that eventually was approved by the Soviet government in September 1921 with the title “On the Protection of Nature, Gardens, and Parks.” A commission was established to oversee implementation of the new laws. It included a geographer-anthropologist, a mineralogist, two zoologists, an ecologist. Heading it was Vagran Ter-Oganesov, a Bolshevik astronomer who enjoyed great prestige.

The commission first established a forest zapovednik in Astrakhan, according to Podiapolski’s desires Next it created the Ilmenski zapovednik, a region which included precious minerals. Despite this, the Soviet government thought that Miass deposits located there were much more valuable for what they could teach scientists about geological processes. Scientific understanding took priority over the accumulation of capital. The proposal was endorsed by Lenin himself who thought that pure scientific research had to be encouraged. And this was at a time when the Soviet Union was desperate for foreign currency.

full: http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/ecology/ussr_ecology.htm
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Kerim permalink

There are lots of links to debates over whether inequality is increasing or decreasing over on my wiki. After reading through it, I feel inclined to come down on the increasing side – but I’m no economist. See here about how deceptive it is to pay too much attention to the data from China and India as most “decreasing” folk do. Also, Sen recently argued that life expectancy increases in China peaked some time ago, and are now suffering from the lack of democracy and the government’s abandonment of the welfare state.

These are complex questions, but I feel strongly that the questions of inequality within countries and between countries are questions that can’t be separated. I’ll aknowledge that my initial post didn’t make this argument as strongly as I would have liked, and I’m happy to debate it further. My point was that these are the issues that need to be debated – and I feel that GG&S is so popular partially because it allows people to comfortably ignore these questions (whether or not JD can be blamed for that is another question). Besides, I felt that Ozma has done a good job of pointing out many of the “internal” critiques already (DeLong notwithstanding).

DeLong wants to turn this into a debate over the merits of capitalism. I find that difficult because I don’t aknowledge that there is only one form of capitalism. I believe that the Indian, Chinese, and American varieties are quite different, and some are better than others. I do think that Europeans and states like Kerela in India have done a better job at mitigating the negative effects of capitalism than has the US government. I would like to talk about those issues rather than simply jumping into our “marxist” and “neoliberal” outfits and start namecalling.
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Brad DeLong permalink

Re: “DeLong wants to turn this into a debate over the merits of capitalism.”

I do? I thought I wanted to make six points:

1. “Yali’s question”–why did technological, organizational, etc. ‘development’ proceed so much more rapidly in Eurasia than elsewhere?–is a very good question, and Jared Diamond has written a very good book that proposed plausible evidence-based answers to it. (There are subquestions–why, within Eurasia, Europe? why, within Europe, Britain?–that I don’t think Diamond (or anybody else) answers particularly well.)

2. To say that Nigeria is relatively poor today because its mammoth oil wealth has been stolen by corrupt capitalist elites aided by western international bankers and oil companies is simply wrong. Nigeria’s per-capita oil wealth is not and never was that mammoth. Corrupt elites (albeit largely clientalist, not capitalist), yes; western bankers, yes; oil companies, yes (read Terry Karl); but (most of) the roots of Nigeria’s present poverty have other roots than capitalism and colonialism.

3. To imply that most New Guineans today are relatively poor because New Guinea’s ample wealth is being stolen by rich logging executives is false. It is true to say that most Haitians in 1780 were relatively poor because they were being exploited and oppressed by their slavemasters. But New Guinea’s relative poverty today is primarily the result of low productivity–that its people lack the skills, education, and infrastructure you need to attract large-scale investment from the world’s post-industrial core. And Diamond gives us plausible and thoughtful answers as to why New Guinea’s skills, education, and infrastructure were poorly developed as of, say, 1850 or so. (What has happened since–how we can possibly have a world in which communication, trade, and transport are so cheap and easy and yet international income differences yawn so wide–is another and very complicated story.

4. We do in fact have good reasons–a lot of them set out by Diamond–for believing that “the inhabitants of this Eurasian landmass started off with a better array of potentially domesticable plants than did prehistoric humans living elsewhere on the planet,” in, say, New Guinea. To give only one reason, trade and contact across Eurasia was relatively easy, and Eurasia is much bigger and hence had much more variation in plant life.

5. We do have good reason to believe–after the original wave of human hunting-driven megafauna extinctions in the Americas, at least–that “the Eurasian landmass offered a uniquely amenable population of potentially-domesticable proto-livestock” compared to other regions of the world. And we have very good reason to believe that close human contact with domestic animals bred the diseases that did so much more than decimate American populations in the first centuries after the European invasion.

6. There is no reason to condemn macro-structural explanations on the grounds that they have an elective affinity for a certain passivity. The statement that: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like an nightmare on the brains of the living…” is the beginning of a very impressive macro-structural explanation of why the prospects for social-democratic democracy were poor in France in 1850. It is not a call for passivity.

As best as I can see, Kerim and Ozma have made only one good point: that an (internally) grossly unequal society is highly likely to be a dysfunctional society, and an unhappy society (see, among many others, Robert J. Waldmann (1992), “Income Distribution and Infant Morality,” _Quarterly Journal of Economics_ 107:4, pp. 1283-1302: “Comparing two countries in which the poor have equal real incomes, the one in which the rich are wealthier is likely to have a higher infant mortality rate. This anomalous result does not appear to spring from measurement error in estimating the income of the poor, and the association between high infant mortality and income inequality is still present after controlling for other factors such as education, medical personnel, and fertility. The positive association of infant mortality and the income of the rich suggests that measured real incomes may be a poor measure of social welfare.”
http://ideas.repec.org/a/tpr/qjecon/v107y1992i4p1283-302.html).
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Kerim permalink

Well, we’ve gone from being hacks to having “one good point” so I assume that’s progress.

Are “the roots of Nigeria’s present poverty… [other] than capitalism and colonialism”?

After reading books like Mamdani’s Citizen and Subject and Global Rift by Stavrianos, I would find it hard to agree with that statement. In fact, I think one has to be profoundly ignorant of history (or have read lots of Niall Ferguson – which amounts to the same thing) in order to come to such a conclusion.

I think what Diamond does, in effect, is say that colonialism itself can be blamed on the unequal position these societies found themselves in at the point of contact. But this misses the point – colonial contact was a part of capitalist expansion. There is a reason why the British cut the thumbs off of Bengali weavers and forced them to grow indigo…

Capitalism may have its merits, but we shouldn’t deny its history either.
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david permalink

There was that seventh point too, where people who disagreed with you or were wrong on a minor point about Nigeria or who thought Diamond’s book (on the basis of evidence) was not all that wonderful were practicing doublethink or and charging thought crimes and were thugs and hacks. I remember that point pretty well.
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Brad DeLong permalink

This “capitalism” you keep speaking of…

It’s not Diamond’s subject. It’s not what Diamond talks about. Diamond sits almost exclusively before 1600. He’s interested in the extraordinary imbalance of power–organizational, technological, military, economic–at the point of contact, where expanding Eurasians first invade the lands of others. As of 1600 the beast of “capitalism” had not been born.

So why can’t you allow him his own subject? Why is it wrong for him to have written about it?
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Kerim permalink

Brad. Come on. You are now deliberately misunderstanding the question at hand….

Yali’s question is about contemporary inequality. Suddenly you are saying that it is “exclusively before 1600″.

Sheesh.
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Kerim permalink

Addendum: Yes, if the book had been framed in terms of “why, prior to 1600, did the west have more cargo” … fine. But that is not how the book is framed. Nor do I think it would have been as popular if it had been framed in those terms (for the reasons Ozma alludes to).
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Andrew permalink

Here is a perhaps more helpful way to look at this issue of proximal v. distal explanations / post-1600 v. pre-1600 explanations: Diamond’s book is the answer to a very, very long series of “But why did…” questions. Yali’s question is the most immediate one; a proximal answer might be, “because Europe underwent the Industrial Revolution, whereas Papua New Guinea did not.” But why did… “because Europe had a sufficient technical, infrastructural, and social basis on which to build the Industrial Revolution, whereas PNG did not.” But why did… and so on and so on until you finally get back to the question that Diamond answers, “But why did Eurasia start agriculture before Papua New Guinea?”

So in a way, Diamond answers a very distal question *motivated by* a very proximal question. That is, he answers the question of why Eurasia at 1600 had this enormous power advantage *motivated by* the knowledge that this imbalance is crucial for any understanding of all the further power imbalances that developed after 1600. And I do not think it can be denied that any explanation of modern power imbalances – including ones involving exploitation, oppression, racism, colonialism, and so on – must ultimately rest on the power imbalance that already existed circa 1600. [Of course, the important caveat is that Diamond's explanation works best for Eurasia v. Americas/Africa/Australia, and not quite so well for India, China, and the Middle East.]

Ozma brought up evo-devo before – here’s a (rather strained) analogy. Suppose someone asked “why does this fruitfly have a head and a tail?” You might say, “because during development, there was a pattern of gene expression laid down with genes at one end specifying ‘head’ organs and genes at the other end specifying ‘tail’ organs.” But why did… and so on, until you have to say “because the ovary injected a bit of head-making factor into one end of the egg.” (No joke, this is actually what happens.) There has to be a symmetry-breaking event somewhere, and Diamond is interested in tracing it all the way back to the original symmetry-breaking event: uneven distribution of easily-domesticable plants and animals.
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Brad DeLong permalink

Kerim of Savage Minds writes:

“Addendum: Yes, if [Jared Diamond's] book [_Guns, Germs, and Steel_] had been framed in terms of “why, prior to 1600, did the west have more cargo” … fine. But that is not how the book is framed. Nor do I think it would have been as popular if it had been framed in those terms (for the reasons Ozma alludes to).”

But the book *was* *explicitly* framed in terms of “why, prior to 1600, did the west have more cargo?” You cannot read the prologue and think otherwise:

“We all know that history has proceeded very differently from peoples from different parts of the globe. In the 13000 years since the end of the last Ice Age, some parts of the world developed literate industrial societies with metal toolsk other parts developed only nonliterate farming societies, and still others remained societies of hunter-gatherers with stone tools. Those historical inequalities hae cast long shadows on the modern world, because the literate societies with metal tools have conquered or exterminated the other societies…. [T]hese differences constitute the most basic fact of world history….

“In July 1972 I was walking along a beach…. I had already heard about a remarkable local politician named Yali…. [H]e asked me, “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?”…

“I didn’t have an answer then…. This book, written twenty-five years later, attempts to answer Yali….

“People of Eurasian origin… dominate the modern world in wealth and power. Other peoples, including most Africans, have thrown off European colonial domination but remain far behind in wealth and power. Still other peoples… are no longer even masters of their own lands but have been decimated, subjugated, and in some cases even exterminated by European colonialists…. Why did wealth and power become distributed as they now are, rather than in some other way?…

“We can easily push this question back one step. As of the year A.D. 1500… [m]uch of Europe, Asia, and North Africa was the site of metal-equipped states or empires, some of them on the threshold of industrialization. Two Native American peoples, the Aztecs and the Incas, ruled over empires with stone tools. Parts of sub-Saharan Africa… iron tools… Australia and New Guinea, many Pacific islands, much of the Americas, and small parts of sub-Saharan Africa… farming tribes… hunter-gatherer bands using stone tools….

“[T]hose technological and political differences of A.D. 1500 were the immediate cause of the modern world’s inequalities. Empires with steel weapons were able to conquer or exterminate tribes with weapons of stone and wood. How, though, did the world get to be the way it was in 1500?… Until the end of the last Ice Age, around 11000 B.C., all peoples on all continents were still hunter-gatherers. Different rates of development on different continents, from 11000 BC to AD 1500, were what led to the technological and political inequlities of AD 1500….

“Thus we can finally rephrase the question about the modern world’s inequalities as follows: why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents? Those disparate rates constitute history’s broadest pattern and my book’s subject….

“The history of interaction among disparate peoples is what shaped the modern world through conquest, epidemics, and genocide. Those collisions created reverberations that have still not died down after many centuries…. [M]uch of Africa is still struggling with its legacies from colonialism. In other regions… civil unrest or guerrilla warfare pits still-numerous indigenous populations against governments dominated by descendants of invading conquerers. Many other indigenous populations… so reduced in numbers by genocide and disease that they are now greatly outnumbered by the descendants of invaders… they are nevertheless increasingly asserting their rights…”

Seems to me that you Savage Minds owe it to yourselves to at least read the “Prologue” to _Guns, Germs, and Steel_.
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Clem Powell permalink

PNG post-1600 development is hardly independent of it’s pre-1600 development. So Diamond’s thesis does have some weight on why the West has far more cargo than PNG today. Technology and trade has reduced the effects of geography, but this doesn’t negate its effects. Had PNG rapidly developed and spread its influence all over the world, it would probably be the worlds powerhouses today.

Besides, as has been pointed out on this site before, Yali’s question was simply a launching point for Diamonds hypothesises. To base so much criticism on it misses the forest for the trees.
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Kerim permalink

Brad. We’ve read the book. I’ve even quoted the prologue in my post – so stop being so snide. You can quibble all you want – but the question still is whether you can get away with framing Yali’s question the way he does. I argue that it is not a legitimate way to reframe the question. Its a bit late for it now, but please start trying to argue in good faith.
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Brad DeLong permalink

You said that you would have no objection to Diamond if Diamond framed his book by saying he was focusing on what happened up to 1600. Now you’re saying that Diamond isn’t allowed to focus only on what happened up to 1600 because that isn’t a good answer to Yali’s question. That makes little sense.

Diamond does have a story for what happens after 1600–and why Yali’s people are still poor in 2000. His story is that by 1600 the Eurasians are aggressive, expansionist, and strong. Diamond thinks that thereafter the story is clear: conquest, genocide, enslavement, extermination–the strong do what they want, and the weak suffer what they must.

I have beefs with Diamond’s post-1600 story. But I don’t understand what your beefs with Diamond’s post-1600 story are.
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eb permalink

Brad DeLong writes, in his helpfully numbered comment above:

But New Guinea’s relative poverty today is primarily the result of low productivity—that its people lack the skills, education, and infrastructure you need to attract large-scale investment from the world’s post-industrial core. And Diamond gives us plausible and thoughtful answers as to why New Guinea’s skills, education, and infrastructure were poorly developed as of, say, 1850 or so. (What has happened since—how we can possibly have a world in which communication, trade, and transport are so cheap and easy and yet international income differences yawn so wide—is another and very complicated story. (emphasis added)

How well can this be reconciled with the following passage from Diamond’s book?:

The histories of the Fertile Crescent and China also hold a salutary lesson for the modern world: circumstances change, and past primacy is no guarantee of future primacy. One might even wonder whether the geographical reasoning employed throughout this book has at last become wholly irrelevant in the modern world, now that ideas diffuse everywhere instantly on the Internet and cargo is routinely airfreighted overnight between continents. It might seem that entirely new rules apply to competition between the world’s peoples, and that as a result new powers are emerging—such as Taiwan, Korea, Malaysia, and especially Japan.

On reflection, though, we see that the supposedly new rules are just variations on the old ones. Yes, the transistor, invented at Bell Labs in the eastern United States in 1947, leapt 8,000 miles to launch an electronics industry in Japan—but it did not make the shorter leap to found new industries in Zaire or Paraguay. The nations rising to new power are still ones that were incorporated thousands of years ago into the old centers of dominance based on food production, or that have been repopulated by peoples from those centers. Unlike Zaire or Paraguay, Japan and the other new powers were able to exploit the transistor quickly because their populations already had a long history or literacy, metal machinery, and centralized government. The world’s two earliest centers of food production, the Fertile Crescent and China, still dominate the modern world, either through their immediate successor states (modern China), or through states situated in neighboring regions influenced early by those two centers (Japan, Korea, Malaysia, and Europe), or through states situated in neighboring regions influenced early by those two centers (Japan, Korea, Malaysia, and Europe), or through states repopulated or ruled by their overseas emigrants (the United States, Australia, Brazil). Prospects for world dominance of sub-Saharan Africans, Aboriginal Australians, and Native Americans remain dim. The hand of history’s course at 8000 B.C. lies heavily on us. (417)

I wonder if Brad DeLong has read the epilogue?

Diamond doesn’t shy away from asserting his book’s explanatory power beyond the magical year of 1600.
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eb permalink

I posted too soon; I just saw this comment re: epilogue over here
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Kerim permalink

EB – Thanks. All this is very similar to the debates over E.O. Wilson’s work. He was very good on insects, but then felt compelled to add something about humans. He became famous for that last bit – and it was that last bit that Anthropologists attacked him for – but his defenders kept pointing to the solid scholarship in the rest of the book. Sure, but the popularity of a book has to do with more than whether it is well written or good scholarhip. I’m sure that without the chapter on humans it would not have done as well – and I believe that the framing of JD’s book in terms of contemporary inequality is why it is selling so well – and why they made it into a TV show. As such, I think it is both legitimate and important to respond to these sections, no matter how few pages they occupy in the book.
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Kerim permalink

Andrew: I think your characterization is a good one of JD’s psychological and methodological approach; however, as a social scientist, I’m more interested in the book as a social phenomenon. I think the reception of this book has much to do with the slippage I talk about in the latest update to my post – as well as in my previous comment. I imply that JD is partially responsible for this slippage – and eb’s quote above reinforces this perception. However, JD’s culpability is ultimately less interesting to me than why this book is a bestseller, and I don’t think it just because of his writing. I think people want an explanation of inequality that makes them feel better able to sleep at night.

Does this answer your previous questions as well?
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Andrew permalink

Kerim, I still disagree with you about whether one properly can say that we “should” be asking a different question from Yali’s question, but we can let that lie…

We’re making some progress here: this idea of slippage between frames is interesting. However, I think that your criticism of the slippage extends too far to be useful. It seems to me – correct me if I am misunderstanding – that you are saying that one frame (modern power imbalances) correctly motivates inquiry into another frame (power imbalances in 1500) but that the latter “slips” into the former and people start (unconsciously? incorrectly?) taking an explanation of the latter as a direct explanation of the former. But everyone does this. Biologists are constantly studying obscure aspects of cellular biology to cure diseases – one frame (why do people get Alzheimer’s disease?) motivates another frame (how do those weird beta-amyloid plaques form?) even though there are clearly many mediating factors between the plaques and the Alzheimer’s. But in their grant applications and paper introductions, they always say, “Our research into random gene X helps illuminate the causes of Alzheimer’s disease.” They would never get funded and no one care about their research if they didn’t emphasize the larger implications of their work – even though this requires slippage between the big and small frames. If even careful academic writing does this, is it surprising that a popular science-cum-history book will do it more? I don’t think it is illegitimate to do that.

A second point: The reception of GG&S is indeed an interesting question, but it seems to me logically independent of whether Diamond’s book is correct. That is, to criticize the fact that lots of people love this book because it helps them sleep at night (if it is indeed true) does not rely on criticizing Diamond’s argument. Even if Diamond’s argument is perfectly valid, it might still be true that people love the book because it helps them sleep at night. And it seems to me – a non-anthropologist – that the proper way to investigate this would be to study people’s reactions to the book, not the book itself – a close reading of book reviews, comments made about GG&S made at cocktail parties, and so on. (I mean, obviously you have to study the book to make sense of the reactions, but the focus of the study would be the reactions and their cultural links, not the details of Diamond’s argument.)
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Kerim permalink

Andrew,

I disagree that the two questions are logically independent. At some level we can, of course say: you biologists use these (biological, deterministic) frameworks for your science, and we anthropologists use these (social, historical) for ours – but part of the overall argument being made on this blog is that the biological deterministic one is necessarily wrong because of limitations deriving from its premise.

However, I myself am not making this argument – Ozma did. I focused my critique on the wider issue of reception and framing. I didn’t feel the need to tackle every aspect of this critique myself – and I think it is legitimate in a short blog post (as opposed to a published book review) to have such a narrow focus. Expecially if I’ve already arranged for someone else to tackle the other issues in the same blog!

I agree that the question of reception could be studied empirically, and perhaps it should be. But it is wrong to say that I’m going on little more than cocktail parties here. I’ve looked at the history of reception of biologically deterministic arguments in our culture: from the “bell curve” to E.O. Wilson’s work, etc. I feel fairly confident arguing that there is a general trend in American society to promote books that naturalize social inequalities. Both Ozma and I see GG&S’s critique of racism as deceptive, because it seems to set the book apart from these other studies – when, in fact it replaces race with environment.

Now, I am prepared to admit that the substance of the book is more complex than that. And its been some time since I read the whole thing closely (which is why I didn’t deal with the particulars of the biological argument) but the fact that things need to be framed in a certain way to be popular – or get funding, is an important social phenomenon, and is well worth our attention.

I am not (like some people) trying to play “gotcha” with Diamond – catching him saying something he didn’t mean. I think he did mean to imply what he implied in his larger frame – I just think he is a good enough scientist to know what he can get away with claiming based on his own evidence.
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Louis Proyect permalink

This post from Suresh showed up this morning on the listserv I moderate at http://www.marxmail.org:

I feel many of these criticisms of Jared Diamond miss
the mark, which is unfortunate since there is already
enough to disapprove of, not so much in his theories
per se, but in how they’re used to legitimize the
contemporary neo-liberal, capitalist order, even while
apologizing for its inequities. But since the latter
issues have already been addressed at length, I’ll
focus on rebutting the radical critique made thus far.

(Read More)

[Please don't paste long articles in the comments, but post a summary with a link instead. Thanks! - Kerim]
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Marc permalink

Kerim: your post 27 makes an explicit claim that is directly contradicted by the quotes that Brad provided from the introduction to the book. The book really is overwhelmingly focused on understanding why the distribution of resources and technology was so unequal prior to the colonial era. There are parts at the end that tangentially, and tentatively, link these early developments to the contemporary world. It is not uncommon for authors to toss off bits, like JD does in the epilog, that can be basically summarized as

“Although my main thesis is elsewhere, it does in fact have some bearing on issues x, y, and z. Here are a few speculations on what those implications are”.

I really do hope that you understand this; I’ve searched in vain for evidence that you and your fellow SM posters get that this is a primary reason why you’re catching so much heat. The casual accusations of racism in others by you and your fellow website probably haven’t helped either, of course. But I’d disagree with you and Ozma, root and branch, even without them.
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Kerim permalink

Marc,

A claim contradicted by Brad? If you read post 27 out of context – yes. But not if you read the original post and the whole thread that followed. This isn’t a game of “gatcha” – we should try to understand what each other is trying to say rather than just playing word games. Just as you are trying to explain what you think JD is trying to say. (Although I disagree that these are just throw-away lines. I think there is a clear trend.)
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Kerim permalink

Louis,

Thanks for all your contributions. Please be advised, however, that it is against our still-unposted comments policy (I was going to post one this week – before I got so distracted) to reproduce articles in full in the comments section. We encourage people to post summaries with links elsewhere. You can even link to the individual archives in the listserv you manage. Here is a link to the message you posted. This makes the comments threads much easier to read!
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Andrew permalink

part of the overall argument being made on this blog is that the biological deterministic one is necessarily wrong because of limitations deriving from its premise.

Did you really just say that my entire discipline is “wrong”? I’m not really sure what to do with that. Of course biology is limited, but how does that make it “wrong”? (I accept that you’re not making that argument right now, but I gather that you agree with it.) Of course I’m willing to leave the issue aside for now, but I’ll look forward to seeing a more fleshed out form of this argument later on…

But it is wrong to say that I’m going on little more than cocktail parties here.

I didn’t say that, and I’m sorry if something I said implied that. (In fact, – again, as a non-anthropologist – I suspect that a systematic study of cocktail party reactions to GGS might be fruitful, though I guess methodologically that would be quite difficult.) I would like to hear more about the study of the history of the reception of books like E.O. Wilson’s that you’re referring to – links, brief outlines of argument…?

the fact that things need to be framed in a certain way to be popular – or get funding, is an important social phenomenon, and is well worth our attention.

I certainly won’t argue with that! As I said, though, I think this question is independent of the truth value of the arguments being framed – that is, if people love GGS because it helps them sleep at night, that would be true regardless of whether Diamond is right, wrong, or somewhere in between. If people only want to fund basic research that claims to have medical applications, that would be true regardless of whether the research actually does have medical applications. You’ve said you disagree, but I am curious to know why.
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Ozma permalink

Okay, at this point I am sitting on the floor of my empty apartment as the movers take stuff at the door but I can’t stay away. I haven’t read all of these posts in detail, but I have been thinking about the viciousness of the response over the past few days. It is *fascinating* that Professor DeLong is now adding increasing doses of “oh, but I have problems with Diamond’s argument, too, just not the same ones you thuggish morons do” caveats to his posts.

Here’s what I think has happened: we posted some critiques of Diamond that, within our universe, are well understood and sort of taken for granted. But we didn’t realize they would take so many people out there by surprise. Those people, who had basically taken for granted that Diamond had written a landmark work — a work, incidentally, they personally had found to be an enormously satisfying read — suddenly felt wrong-footed. they felt especially wrong-footed by the suggestion that Diamond’s work was not only not brilliant, but in fact a bit silly, and appealed to people’s standing prejudices rather than to their intellects. We have wounded many people in a tender spot indeed: their pointy-headed amor propre.

The reaction has been that we MUST BE PROVEN WRONG AT ALL COSTS. If we are the teensiest bit correct, having thought Diamond had a good (nay, brilliant) point makes one a bit of a gump. heaven forfend. therefore, we must be proven criminally insanse, or, barring that, irredeemably stupid. Professor DeLong seems to be realizing at least that it’s time to stop digging the hole that we have — rather gently I believe — suggested he may be in.

Look, if we are wrong, we will be covered in ignominy in the end. Surely that is reassurance enough? But all of the name-calling fury to which we have been subject suggests that there is not a lot of confidence out there that we are in fact wrong. Rather, it’s the tantrum thrown by folks who have been unexpectedly made to feel credulous when they pride themselves on their critical faculties. But shooting the messenger is not going to help.
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Walt Pohl permalink

Ozma: You have disgraced yourself utterly and in public. The fury you’ve induced in others is solely a result of your own unwillingness to engage with the ideas of others and your lack of intellectual standards. When Brad called you “a thug and a hack”, I thought he was way out of line, but reading your comments has convinced me that he’s half-right. You are a hack.

A bunch of people, most of whom you do not know, like a book. Somehow you have been graced with such a keen discernment into the character of others that you can safely ignore every reason they give you for why they liked it? You possess a moral blamelessness that guarantees people solely disagree with you because of their own failings?

I have close to no opinion on GG&S. I read it and I liked it, but I’m familiar enough with the gap between pop science and real science to know that it could be totally wrong. When I first clicked over here, I was ready to be convinced that it was wrong. Brad’s initial comments were so mean that I was already inclined to read whatever Savage Minds said on the subject sympathetically. Reading your comments here and at Crooked Timber, I learned a little bit about why Diamond might be wrong, and a lot on your inability to convince anyone of anything other than yourself on the subject of your greatness as a human being and the pettiness of anyone who wasn’t born agreeing with you.

Kerim: I read the book the exact same way that Brad and others have read it: as a book whose main point is to explain the world as of 1600. Maybe your reading is right and ours is wrong, but blithely reducing our reading of the book to our own secret desires is hackery indeed.
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Francis permalink

Prof. DeLong’s claim that you and Ozma are thugs may be heightened rhetoric, but the two of you are certainly guilty of extremely poor scholarship, and poor conduct.

starting w/ Ozma’s first post, we get the first substantive line: “Diamond showily positions GG&S as the definitive anti-racist take on human history.”

well, no. that’s simply false. Anthropologists may interpret the book that way, but that’s not at all what the book says.

second, Ozma purports to destroy Diamond’s principal environmental thesis. But as the comments on that thread and elsewhere show, she’s a long way from doing so.

third, in comments on her own post, Ozma likens JD to a stopped clock, right twice a day, and accuses the author of “crypto-racism”. [and she wonders why she is getting attacked!]

next, she makes the suppression of dissent comment which starts the Crooked Timber thread: “It helps make impossible the kinds of thinking about race, power, and history that sociological/anthropological scholarship indicate are necessary to bring about (1) genuine causal understanding and (2) change. It obviates what we take to be the all-important “middle part” between human origins and human psyches.” [what does this sentence mean? how does a book help make a kind of thinking impossible?]

next, Ozma stands behind the aspersions she casts on those who like GG&S: “I think what explains their enthusiasm is a kind of structural predisposition to “anti-racist” accounts that allow individuals to feel let off the social-responsibility hook.” [how the hell does she know what explains my enthusiasm for the book? Calling me a pseudo-racists is CLASSIC thuggish behavior.]

next, ozma makes an evo-devo claim, even though she’s not a biologist. A link to the arguments at, say, Pharyngula or Panda’s Thumb would have been appropriate.

next, ozma says (a) she thinks that JD is wrong, because if he’s right he’s the Galileo of his age and (b) his book is unserious. [but there's no recognition of the cognitive dissonance needed to write those two sentences within an hour.]

over in Crooked Timber, we get Ozma saying the following: “a considerable body of accumulating literature is demonstrating his argument to be wrong” [This statement is unsourced] and “So why are people so angrily insistent that we must think as Diamond suggests?” [but no one is; what we are angry about is OZMA's manner of discussion.] We also see a blunt refusal to address in a substantive manner those who believe, and argue, that GG&S is not telling only a Just-So story.

after all, it is indubitably the case that Pizarro arrived in Peru long before Peruvians landed in force in Europe. Why? Just luck / happenstance? If Superman spun the world back to the end of the last Ice Age a thousand times, would the invasionary forces be flipped the other way 1/2 the time?

now, over in Kerim’s first thread, we get a series of comments along the following lines: “again, again, we disagree on Diamond’s basic question.” but again JD’s basic question is WHY the europeans landed in South America and not vice versa. Is Ozma’s claim that the question is meaningless? If so, then she’s just wrong; it’s not her province to decide what historical questions are worth asking.

notably, in this thread Ozma gets substantially more snide: “what if I wrote a book called “why I am cooler than you, explained”?”

Kerim, you haven’t exactly covered yourself in glory either. But since BdL’s thug post was directed at Ozma and since there’s ample evidence to show that she is in fact acting like one, i’ll leave this overlong post here.
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Louis Proyect permalink

Comments on PBS series, part 2:

http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/ecology/pbs_diamond2.htm
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oneman permalink

Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t all the people insisting on a 1500 AD “cut-off” for the relevance of Diamond’s argument acting in, at best, bad faith. The PBS series that is the occasion for Ozma’s original post explicitly covers the last 500 years — as far as I can tell from the website(yeah, like I’m going to *watch* a PBS pop-science show!), only the first episode covers the pre-1500 secene.

Part two, “Conquest,” explores the impact of weapons and disease in shaping the conquest of the New World.

The final episode, “Into the Tropics,” examines the development and colonization of Africa by South Africans and Europeans, and explains why geography is still a factor in forming the divide between those with money and resources and those without.

The conquest of the Americas brings us into the 17th century, and the colonization of Africa brings us well into the 20th century. If Diamond’s argument cannot be extended into the colonial era, why is the PBS series primarily focused on the colonial era?
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oneman permalink

I’ve been staying out of this thread until today, not having read GG&S myself and not much caring. But I have been following along, and it seems to me that there’s a set of themes developing that are exactly why Ozma’s investigation of the *reception* of the book are warranted. The first is the pre-1600 argument I discussed above — clearly Diamond thinks his argument has a direct bearing on what happens post-1600, and is willing to bring his argument almost all the way to the present. The second is the argument expressed by Francis, above:

…again JD’s basic question is WHY the europeans landed in South America and not vice versa.

Ozma’s contention, as I read it, is that this is not an argument supported by JD. JD’s work supports the argument that, as of the dawn of the colonial era, the European powers were *more materially prepared* than the residents of either the Americas, Africa, or South and East Asia to embark on a wave of conquest and win. You can buy his argument or not — I happen to think that there is something comelling to it, although it remains true that Africa has had steel for almost as long as Europe, China has had gunpowder for longer, etc. Still, we’ve seen how the more or less happenstance co-occurence of severla factors can have radical material effects on a cultural lifeway — consider the more or less random confluence of guns and horses in the Midwest and the rapid rise of the horse cultures this sparked. But, while several commenters have said the same thing I just did — that JD is only concerned with the material wherewithal, not the political/social/etc forces that set the conquest in motion — Ozma’s argument (as I read it) is that all too often this material wherewithal is taken as the “Why” itself, as in Francis’ comments — “JD’s basic question is WHY the europeans landed in South America…”. But JD’s argument is, in itself, wholly insufficient to answer this question — to answer it, you havew to know an awful lot about the history of both Europe and South America, about the sociocultural and political systems that had emerged in each area, about the ideologies that informed their response to otherness, and so on. For my money, Tzvetan Todorov’s explanation of the Conquest of the America’s comes a lot closer to explaining WHY the Conquistadores were successful than the argument that they were successful because they had guns, germs, and steel. For that matter, there is more explanatory content in Columbus’ journal entry on the Arawaks — “They would make fine servants…. With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want” — than in what I’m hearing of Diamond’s argument.

This is not to say that Diamond’s work might not be an important part of the story, but the problem is that it is so often taken for the *whole* story — I’ve gotten enough GG&S “blowback” from both peers and students to see quite clearly where Ozma is coming from. Blaming this on the “necessary gap” between pop-science and “real” science, as if we anthros should accept the misunderstanding as an inevitable product of popularization, seems disingenuous to me — if the work is making people falsely comfortable with their (pseudo?) non-racism, I think an anti-racist response is warranted. Is this the *only* reason Diamond’s work is popular? Probably not — a lot of the dissent in these comments seems based on the disconnect between what Ozma (and myself) makes of the reasons people who accost us with GG&S seem to have for liking the work and the reasons that some of the commenters here liked the work. Fine — Ozma’s argument isn’t universally valid. I’m sure there’s people who find in Darwin’s work good reasons to appreciate it — that doesn’t mean that we cannot meaningfully bemoan the fact that a lot of people appreciate it because it reassures them of the unfitness of unsuccessful peoples.
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beowulf888 permalink

Question (for anyone who wishes to comment): Would you describe a person as being racist for promulgating spurious beliefs about a culture; or would you only label a person racist if that person *maliciously* promulgated spurious beliefs about a culture? I tend to label people racist for the latter reason instead of the former. And I tend to label the former as just “misguided”. To my mind, if everyone who had a misinformed view of another culture (any culture) was racist, then I would have guess the entire population of this planet would fall within this category.

Anyway, I’ve always categorized Jared Diamond’s arguments as little better than Marvin Harris’ cultural just-so stories. There seems to be a yearning by some within the field of Anthropology to explain away cultural differences using historical, technological, and economic arguments. I won’t deny that these factors may and do contribute to the evolution of culture, but I doubt if these factors are the entire story. I suspect those who argue the case of materialistic determinism are just looking for a simple answer (but I will entertain the notion that, depending on the proponent, they may have a racist, imperialist, religious or Marxist ax to grind).

But if someone wants to argue that the modern American taboo against nose-picking is based on a cultural selection against the behaviors that facilitate the transmission of disease, I won’t label them racist. I’ll just label them silly ;-)

best regards,
–Beo
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david permalink

Francis,

Ozma’s original post offered sources on Diamond’s weaknesses. You could read them.

Now Tak is in for it because he too suffers, says Henry of Crooked Timber, from some strange anthropological malady.

Would somebody who is going on about how great Diamond is and how his book is so wonderful about the pre-1600 story please explain or at least acknowledge the picture of him weeping in an orphanage in Africa (in the TV series, the subject of the original post)? At least admit it’s not unreasonable to find that a twisted picture?
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