Comments by "looseycanon" (@looseycanon) on "Why Are Hot Countries Poorer? @visualeconomiken" video.
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@tonycatman I have to disagree with your assessment. Say you steal my sickle. Then I'm not building another one (ignoring the fact, that the sickle can be very easily used as a weapon, eg. an equalizer) I make a scythe and equip it with a mechanism, that would allow me to quickly flip the blade and turn it into a a warscythe (eg. I create dual use item). Or you steal it from me in my sleep? Then I'll wall off my house. You make a ladder to get over the wall, I'll dig a moat and fill it with water around my house to attract predators over night... etc. etc. escalating all the way to forming a state of my own and raising an army to crush you, provided my income permits such a development. What you describe will not prevent generation of capital, it will, however, inform what kind of capital get's created. I don't disupte, that some kind of "law" or equivalent system would eventually develop, but it would develop as result of creation of capital. The only reason, we have law instead of rule of the stronger, is because it creates more predictable environment, but you can only start creating predictible environment, when you have enough food and capital to ensure, that you can free up workforce to specialize for that purpose. Remember, as a species, we had spears, arrows and other weapons long long before we have codified laws and weapons are a type of capital.
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I do have a slightly different angle to it. Just look at what and how we consume! In much simpler economy dominated by agriculture products, hotter areas with large navigable rivers have an advantage. They can trade and reliably grow foodstuffs. The latter part is still very relevant but, because of advances in agricultural technology, the competitive advantage from good soil is lost and then you have to deal with other factors. A farm with worse soil, that knows, how to compensate for the problem by using fertilizers and procedures, that limit pests, will have similar outcomes to a farm in perfect conditions. The new factor that enters the room is iron and steel tools. Capital goods, that those in hotter climate would be harder to use, given until invent of a tractor, you had to use animals like cattle or hroses to power things like plows or carts so large, a human wouldn't even budge with them, and gain fertilizer in the form of manure. The advantage that rises from combination of these factors for colder climate then is, that harvests become equal in volume but more predictable as more and more factors enter the production chain, because each factor other than weather, which is tied to climate, is less and less volatile. In a hotter region, where particularly animals can't be used to power the tools used in agriculture, capital goods have lesser impact on farm productivity and therefore are not so widely adopted, because other options would provide better outcomes, including just not expending the effort. To make things worse, as economies become more complicated, because more kinds of stuff gets traded, the more basic goods become less and less valuable to trade, meaning to maintain income, more and more quantities have to be realized on the market.
So here is my argument. Because of how hotter climates interact with capital (eg. how usable that capital is in these regions), these regions get hit by a double whammy. 1) They don't adopt capital based agriculture model until it becomes sustainable under local conditions, which gives them centuries to millennia worth of developmental delay when compared to colder, temperate regions, more suitable for that kind of agriculture. And 2) because they don't adopt the use of capital goods in agriculture, their agriculture sector cannot support a larger population, that could produce more capital and capital goods than otherwise comparatively weaker temperate regions, compounding the problem.
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