Guns, Germs, and Stealing
From Unlucky Prehistoric Geography to Unfortunate Institutions Today
Gregory Rehmke
Presented at APEE Session: “Cultural and Geographic Links to Economic Growth.” April 8, 2002
Until very recently the only way people could get to Argentina was by foot or boat. And until the 19th Century too few came. Most of Jared Diamond’s fascinating book, Guns, Germs, and Steel presents diverse arguments on how biological and geographic factors limited economic development through most of history. He poses “Yali’s Question” to his readers. Why did Europeans have so much cargo to bring to poor countries like New Guinea, and native New Guineans have so little cargo of their own?
In the book’s Epilogue Diamond acknowledges the role of individuals and culture: “Among other factors relevant to answering Yali’s Question, cultural factors and influences of individual people loom large.” (p. 416). Unfortunately they don’t loom large in most the stories and science Diamond presents earlier in the book. But it is not Diamond’s fault that we don’t know much about inventions among prehistoric cultures or by prehistoric individuals.
Diamond focuses on plant and animal resources available to prehistoric societies. Economist Julian Simon argued that man is the ultimate resource. Again, near the end of Guns, Germs, and Steel, Diamond makes a similar point: “A larger area or population means more potential inventors, more competing societies, more innovations available to adopt—and more pressure to adopt and retain innovations, because societies failing to do so will tend to be eliminated by competing societies.” (p 407)
Through recorded history and the millennia before the tools were invented to record history, people gradually accumulated the knowledge and skills to turn the plants, animals, and rocks around them into resources. But early hunters and gatherers across the prehistoric world found themselves surrounded by different plants and animals.
In 1532, the Old World clashed with the New as 168 Spanish troops under Governor Pizarro faced 80,000 Incas under their god-king Atahuallpa. It was ultimately the Spanish guns and horses that gave the Spanish the winning hand. More widely in the Americas, Old World germs wiped out 95% of the inhabitants of the New World.
Europeans gained relative immunity to the germs they brought to the New World though centuries of living and dying in cities, which allowed to survive only Europeans whose immune system could deal with these disease-causing microbes (thus transforming them “childhood diseases”). Higher population densities were possible in the first place only after hunting and gathering societies discovered and gradually enhanced various plants and animals. Eventually higher-yielding varieties produced more food energy than the human energy it took to gather them. The next step was fertilization and irrigation so farmers and orchardists could support a growing population and specialized craftsmen to create tools and weapons.
The surplus energy from these crops allowed early tribes to domesticate dogs, wild cattle, pigs, sheep, goats and other animals. The mixed blessing of living in close quarters with domesticated mammals were the various microbes crossing species to infect people, killing many at first but giving the rest a powerful weapon to overcome societies without the hard-won resistance.
The New World had, Diamond argues, too few plant species with the right potentials to be nudged into civilization-supporting crops. And the New World had too-few large mammals: no oxen or cattle to pull plows and no horses to ride into war. (Most large New World mammals were wiped out soon after early hunters and gatherers crossed the land-bridge to North America. Unlike large mammals in Eurasia and Africa, these mammals never faced men and never had the opportunity to be gradually selected by improving human hunting skills. So probably early Americans killed them all after arriving.)
Diamond’s schematic “Factors Underlying the Broadest Pattern of History” (p. 87), shows how these factors, absent in most of the world, enabled people of the Fertile Crescent, and later the Mediterranean and still later Western Europe, ultimately to conquer the rest of the world. At the top of the chart, the ultimate factor, is a wide “east/west axis” which Diamond argues is key for the ease of spreading species valuable to humans. Oceans, deserts and mountains isolated the New World from an east/west axis that might have served like the regions around the Fertile Crescent.
Having “many suitable wild species” is in Diamond’s schematic, an outside factor that adds to the value of the “east/west axis” and the “ease of species spreading.” From there we have “many domesticated plant and animal species” leading to “food surpluses and food storage” and to “large, dense, sedentary, stratified societies” which enabled and could encourage technologies to strengthened these societies further. From these factors come the huge food surpluses that enabled so many Europeans to devote their energies to guns, steel swords, and ocean-going ships.
Similar advances begin much later in the New World notes Diamond: “Mexican crops finally began to reach the eastern United States by trade routes after A.D. 1. Corn arrived around A.D. 200, but its role remained very minor for many centuries. Finally, around A.D. 900 a new variety of corn adapted to North America’s short summers appeared, and the arrival of beans around A.D. 1100” (p. 151)
So Native Americans did develop agriculture-based societies, but “nearly 9,000 years after the rise of village living in the Fertile Crescent.” (p. 152) This left 9000 fewer years for the development of guns, germs and steel in the New World.
The Old World accumulated the improvements tens of millions more people made through their lives over thousands of extra years. People could devote more time looking for better plants, animals and tools. Just as, Diamond notes, the hunter and gatherer tribes do in New Guinea, ancients in the early Fertile Crescent looked for plants slightly different and better than those they knew to be good, and favored and bred animals they deemed better behaved.
Compounding the late start for agriculture in the New World, Diamond argues, was the lack of large mammals suitable for domestication. Without large domesticated mammals for food, to pull plows, for fertilizer, and also horses or camels for riding, the New World was deprived of a key ingredient for civilization. Even Africa lacked large mammals with the right traits for domestication. Diamond explains why domestication of wild animals turns out to be much more rare than one might guess. Candidates need the right kind of herding instincts. Gazelles don’t, for example. When frightened they bolt off in 30 foot leaps and at up to 50 miles per hour. Zebras are too cranky (he says they bite hard and cause more injuries in zoos than lions). And interestingly, according to Diamond, they are hard to catch: “Zebras are also virtually impossible to lasso with a rope…because of their unfailing ability to watch the rope noose fly toward them and then to duck their head out of the way.”
Are these zebra traits completely inflexible? In is not clear though how many zoo staff are looking to breed the occasional slightly more-friendly zebra (or are they all exactly as cranky?) Without cold winters Zebras had less incentive to gather around and take food from tribes who might have offered some (how did wild horses survive harsh winters?) How many people tried to lasso Zebras over thousands of years? Isn’t it possible some in each generation would have been less capable of dodging lassos?
Diamond notes that English aristocrats tried to domesticate the Zebra over a few decades and failed. But that would be too short a time to see results.
Fascinating Science but Little Mention of Trade or Institutions
Diamond’s well-written presentation of such a broad range of factors influencing the development of early society, from plants, animals, and microbes to language and many other topics, makes Guns, Germs, and Steel well worth reading. The difficulties come when Diamond strays from his survey of various scientific disciplines into topics in political economy where he tries to apply lessons from bio-geographic development in prehistory to current and recent economic development.
Diamond sketches the changing natures of societies as they grow larger. He notes the difficulty of resolving conflicts as societies grow from bands to tribes to chiefdoms to states. In the chapter titled “From Egalitarianism to Kleptocracy” he claims larger centralized governments are needed as population densities rise, and that once states have the power to provide defense and resolve disputes, they become kleptocracies. But consider the way he words his “third reason” why “all existing large societies have complex centralized governments”:
“A third reason involves economic considerations. Any society requires means to transfer goods between its members. One individual may happen to acquire more of some essential commodity on one day and less on another. Because individuals have different talents, one individual consistently tends to wind up with an excess of some essentials and a deficit of others. … Large societies can function economically only if they have a redistributive economy in addition to a reciprocal economy. Goods in excess of an individual’s needs must be transferred from the individual to a centralized authority, which then redistributes the goods to individuals with deficits.” (p.287)
Diamond here displays a deficit of economic understanding. As societies develop their trade and commercial relationships develop as well. It is as much an opportunity as a problem that people tend “to wind up with an excess of some essentials and a deficit of others.” Adam Smith, among others, has addressed this topic. After reading about so many fascinating new findings in so many scientific fields few know much about, it is distressing to read this paragraph on a subject at we do know about.
The most of this chapter deals with hunting and gathering societies, which is Diamonds expertise and his analysis seems fine. It is at the level of explaining larger more advanced and literate societies that his discussion does not explain enough.
He argues for the need of centralized government with bureaucracies and elites able to fight wars. Yet clearly the Greeks and the Persians in 500 BC had different governments and different ways of organizing their societies for war. Greek societies around the Mediterranean retained key tribal egalitarian features as their populations increased and their societies grew more complex. As Hayek noted, successful trade required certain cultural characteristics including a tradition of welcoming strangers and some means of empowering ship captains, such as partial ownership.
Throughout Guns, Germs, and Steel there is little discussion of the benefits of trade or the role of market institutions. There is a kind of deterministic view of economic progress similar to the limits he shows geography and bio-geography place on early societies.
Madison Avenue in the Stone Age
Diamond’s chapter on technology, titled “Necessity’s Mother” is problematic. In answer to “necessity is the mother of invention,” Diamond argues most inventions come from enthusiasts and tinkers who invent “in the absence of demand.” (p. 242), and then have to hope their invention catches on. This is sort of a late-night-television view of inventions (the late-night ad begins with a deep businesslike voice asking: “Are you an inventor?” and ends with “Call today for your free Inventors Resource Kit.” As if major corporations are just standing by waiting for people watching late night television to phone in with their ideas). Here is how Diamond describes the process:
“Once a device had been invented, the inventor then had to find an application for it. Only after it had been in use for a considerable time did consumers come to feel that they ‘needed’ it.” (p. 242)
It is of course true that many devices “invented to serve one purpose, eventually found most of their use for other, unanticipated purposes.” (p. 243) His list of “inventions in search of a use” include airplanes, automobiles, the light bulb, phonograph, and transistor. Edison, for example, thought the phonograph would be used for recording words but didn’t expect recorded music to be a major use.
But this is just an aspect of the knowledge problem. A single inventor can’t know all the uses people might have for a new tool or gadget. Each creative mind tries to use the tools at hand for the problems at hand.
Diamond argues that the “heroic theory of invention” is “encouraged by patent law” and not descriptive of how technological innovation really happens now or how it happened through history and prehistory (p. 244). As evidence he cites major inventions like the steam engine that were as much a result of a series on innovations both before and after James Watt’s original steam engine.
His conclusions from a review of modern inventions are that “technology develops cumulatively, rather than in isolated heroic acts, and that it finds most of its uses after it has been invented, rather than being invented to meet a foreseen need.” (p. 245-246) People invent things through trial and error and when they stumble onto something the have to figure out how to persuade others in their society to use it.
This casual discussion of invention and innovation is seriously misleading. Diamond tells his readers: “chemists discarded the most volatile fraction (gasoline) as an unfortunate waste product—until it was found to be an ideal fuel for internal-combustion engines. Who today remembers that gasoline, the fuel of modern civilization, originated as yet another invention in search of a use?” (p.247)
Of course few people today would “remember” events of the 19th Century. They would have to learn these things from their parents, or in school or from books. But the majority of chemical engineers know of gasoline’s early history as a by-product. In fact a significant part of the chemical engineering industry is invested is searching for new uses for by-products and for new chemical processes. Part of the genus of John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil was in systematic development of new uses and new markets for the by-products of their early chemical processes. Rockefeller employed hundreds of chemists to search for new uses of by-products and he employed hundreds more to search for new and more-efficient ways to transform various kinds of crude oil into useful products.
It is true that many inventions are accidental in the sense that new devices and materials are discovered while searching for something else. Probably far more potentially useful inventions don’t get discovered because of a lack of entrepreneurial alertness. Hard work, alertness, and good luck are all important to invention and innovation. Diamond wants to focus on the “good luck” and social capital part of the equation. But it is the diligent pursuit of some hoped for or expected end that encourages the investment of time and money in research projects.
Anyone with a theory of technological innovation can pick their stories to support their view. But against Diamond’s downplaying of the “heroic theory of invention” are as many stories of heroic inventors. Economist John Jewkes writing in the 1950s, argued against the popular conception that only big corporate, government, or university research operations could be expected to turn out major inventions in the 20th Century. His survey of 60 major inventions revealed: “The important twentieth century inventions have arisen in all sorts of ways and through the activity of all the different possible agencies. More than one-half of the cases can be ranked as individual invention in the sense that much of the pioneering work was carried through by men who were working on their own behalf without the backing of research institutions …” (John Jewkes, The Sources of Invention, January 1958, Lloyds Bank Review. Online at; https://economicthinking.org/the-sources-of-invention-by-john-jewkes/ Joel Moyker’s The Lever of Riches is recommended for the history of technological invention and innovation).
Virtually all of the inventions Jewkes reviews were made in countries with market-based economic systems. The institutions of market economies encouraged and supported invention and innovation whereas the huge pro-science and pro-technology centrally-planned regimes of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe proved unable to come up with much.
Institutions and individuals do matter in developing and popularizing new technologies. It is a cultural matter though whether these inventors are considered heroes or troublemakers.
Virginia Postrel in The Future and Its Enemies tells the fascinating story of how contact lenses were invented by a brilliant and passionate Czech researcher who had to beg government authorities for permission to develop contacts, eventually continuing his work on his kitchen counter. The task of persuading people they needed contacts was taken up in market-based economies years later.
Communist leaders were not interested in developing contact lenses. Successful invention and innovation is a bottom-up process not a top-down one. William Easterly in The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (Penguin, 2006) emphasizes the very different modus operandi of planners and searchers. Market institutions rely on searchers to discover and improve the production and delivery of wanted goods and services. State bureaucracies rely on planners who seem to start each day with a set vision of “best” institutions.
Governments and established interests go beyond ignoring new inventions and innovations. New ways of doing things discovered by searchers regularly disrupt the top-down efforts of planners. Planners often actively oppose potentially disruptive innovations. And machinery and processes based on new technologies are a threat to those with investments based upon older technologies. Economists Stephen Parente and Edward Prescott in Barriers to Riches (MIT Press, 2000) ask why new technologies today do not more quickly raise productivity and incomes on poor countries. They present examples of state-enforced barriers to new technologies that have protected entrenched interests but slowed productivity growth. Strikes in India slowed textile mills efforts to improve labor practices, “As a result, from 1920 to 1938 textile productivity rose by only a third as much in India as it did in Japan, which was beginning its climb to prosperity.” (Virginia Postrel, writes on Barriers to Riches in “Economic Scene: The wealth of nations depends on how open they are to international trade,” New York Times, May, 17, 2001, p. C2)
Parente and Prescott note: “The state can and often does discourage entry by firms that use more productive work practices through the subsidization of existing firms.” But governments and special interests only have power within their political borders: “Trade is great for getting rid of these vested interest groups.” (ibid.)
It is political centralization that blocks such innovations. In Ancient Greece dozens then hundreds of separate city-states gave opportunities for steady improvement in plants and animals as well as various crafts, shipping, and even political organization. Centralized nations like Persia or Egypt were unable to tap into the creative power of the vast majority of people living their lives under state planning. Greek citizens enjoyed clear property rights and had strong incentives to improve their property.
Diamond refers to this process in a general way when he notes that societies less able to encourage useful innovations will sooner or later be overrun by neighboring societies with better weapons or higher birth-rates.
China and Europe: The Problem of Political Centralization
This contrast between centralized power and disbursed power helps explain why China failed to build on its early ocean exploration under Zheng He.
From 1405-1431 the Chinese undertook a series of navel expeditions to explore the waters to the south of China, Indonesia and Indian Ocean. The fleets of Zheng He (Cheng-ho) in 1405 were massive: “The first of these fleets consisted of 317 vessels and carried 28,000 men… Over three years the Chinese built or refitted 1,681 ships. Medieval Europe could not have conceived of such an armada.” (Wealth and Poverty of Nations by David Landes, p. 94-95) The biggest ships were 400 feet long and 160 feet wide (Columbus’s Santa Maria was 85 feet long). Later Portuguese ships that launched European expansion were tiny by comparison.
So why did Europe, let by Holland and England, get so rich so fast when China (and India) had such a huge lead in wealth, technology, and population in the 1400s, 1500s and 1600s? Landes argues Europe’s key advantage was in its geographical, political, and religious decentralization. Two thousand years earlier Greece prospered and even defeated militarily the centralized Persians from a diverse and decentralized family-farm based economy. In Europe, religious and political leaders competed for control. Cities and trade developed and expanded and merchants steered clear of local princes who tried to grab too much. European merchants were searchers who enjoyed more choice between political authorities than their counterparts in China. Outside Russia (where the Czar also headed the Church) they could also lobby religious authorities for protection from local princes (and could lobby the local princes for protection from over-zealous priests). In China, political and religious authority was centralized and merchants found it far more difficult to escape political or religious plans and regulations.
Like so many other government-sponsored exploration projects, Chinese ocean exploration was planned from the top down and massively subsidized, then the whole project was condemned as an unworkable failure (lots of money spent to “exchange gifts” and bring back giraffes to show the Emperor). And to save face the Chinese government had to use force to keep merchants from prospering from trading routes, eventually banning ocean-going vessels altogether. Once Chinese leaders made a decision it was made for all of China. But in Europe hundreds of leaders of countries and provinces each could consider sponsoring an ocean voyage. China’s key technologies were shut down in similar ways.
Argentina and Australia: Different Development with Different Institutions
Natives in Argentina and Australia had no chance against invading Europeans. There were not enough people in either country, so not enough scope for specialization and trade. Instead of having thousands of miles of continuous land, Australia was surrounded by oceans and Argentina by an ocean, mountains and a jungle. And even if Argentina had centuries more before the Europeans came, advanced but limited-technology civilizations like Inca and Aztec were more likely. Diamond focuses on the lack of the right plants and animals, but also South American civilizations lacked the stimulating effects of trade, travel, and migration due to the lack of coastlines and islands like the Mediterranean or the vast east/west axis of Eurasia. Both trade and escape were harder.
The geographies of Argentina and Australia are similar, both being in the southern hemisphere at similar latitudes, having rich land for farming as well as sheep and cattle, and being settled mostly by Europeans.
But they were settled by different Europeans with different institutions. Australia benefited from the English common law and other English institutions. Argentina suffered from Spanish mercantilist institutions. Argentina’s first Constitution was based on the U.S. Constitution and clearly emphasized property rights and limits on government, but these institutions did not develop.
Property rights in Argentina are not secure as anyone there with a bank account has confirmed over recent months (years, and decades).
Australia is today wealthy and stable while Argentina, with its similar geography and bio-geography is much poorer and in crisis. We see these differences caused by institutions and culture (and confirmed around the world by research like the various indexes of economic freedom). Why should we assume that things were different in the past?