I wouldn’t be so quick to defend catholicism… there is still a lot of that “rich going to heaven like a camel going through a needle’s eye” mentality.
Work ethics isn’t the biggest or an important factor… but its a factor.
Which is, if it exists, not really related to Catholicism. Northern Europe got Capitalism and modern economics. Much of South America languished a quasi-feudal mode because of the power of the landlords. It wasn’t Catholicism which started it, and religion played a pretty small role, if any, in maintaining it (though wicked priests and rejectee priests were involved in starting it). Eastern Europe had similar problems, and no one accuses Catholicism there; it was a legal problem oppressing one group and favoring another. Simply put, the legal and ideological structure did not favor capitalism.
Regarding Spanish america: one custom that probably made things pretty corrupt was the custom of “encomiendas”. Basically, the new governor of a province of New Spain (like New Mexico) would have a reception, where he would sell the choice offices to political hacks. This custom did a lot to destroy the economic growth of the spanish colonies.
I think if anything, the problem with US involvement in Central and South America is the reverse…it was a stabilizing force. The US interest, historically, in Latin America, was to maintain the status quo…to support low labor costs, and free trade, and oppose foreign influence. Unfortunately, what that meant in practice, was that this helped to preserve the existing social and political system, even when it was inequitible or unjust, and any leaders who tried implementing social reforms risked facing a hostile US, who looked at them (because their domestic opponents tended to portray them as such) as potential revolutionaries threatening US interests and political stability.
So you remember that thread ! Good for you. I did a lot of research to present that argument and presented a lot of hard and comprensive current data to support my argument that environment plays a role in the economic success of a nation but lets be clear. It is only one factor of many different influences.
Someone mentioned earlier that one factor that might cause a difference between the prosperity between north and south in the Americas is that the Spaniards excercised genocide. Perhaps in some instances, but it is my impression that North America itself thrived on genocide. Well into the 19th century the British and Americans were killing off Indians with small pox blankets and guns. Except for the French settlers on the praire and in Quebec many of whom took on native wives, there wasn’t much intermarriage or accomadation with the native Americans.
The situation in a good part of Latin America was much different. But why.
I believe the influence of protestantism and Catholicism might well be the answer. The Catholic priests looked upon the southern natives more favourably after conversion and protected them to a large degree. Conseqently a large segment of the native population survived and melted in with the disenfranchised Spanish population. (These people were the subject of racial discrimination by the pure Spanish that exists to this day. )That is why Mexicans for example are so physically obvious today. Yet the downside of this Catholic benevolence is an acceptance towards exploitation and authority in order to keep the peace.
In Canada and the US however The British protestants were more concerned about their own salvation in the here and thereafter. They had very little respect for authority having shed the confines of a centalized religion and were free to look upon the natives as not worthy of being treated equally or fairly. This freedom required however a great deal of self reliance which set off the famous work ethic that Americans in particular are so familiar with.
The prosperity of a country depends not only on the elite, but the vast majority.
If you are referring to [post=6160964]this post[/post], my point on the issue was that effective genocide wiped out the cultures on both continents and the subsequent developments were predicated more on the colonizing powers than the indigenous peoples. South and Latin America were clearly more technologically (and arguably sociologically) more developed than the North, with archeological evidence of innovation, architecture, mathematics, et cetera, in evidence that suggests that more than one of the civilizations south of the modern US border were as developed as Cathay or Ancient Rome. That the Aztecs, Incans, and other cultures failed to dominate past the colonial era is not an impingement upon their social development but an indication of the limitation of their natural resources (no iron or gunpowder) and biological resistance (no protection against the plagues and poxes of Eurasia).
Effectively, modern development of the Americas starts with the colonial powers, regardless of what cultures came before them; else, we’d expect the South to dominate.
Stranger
This is a key point. In general, South America lacks viable natural means of communication. The major waterway system, the Amazon, goes from (in terms of 16th-19th Century technology) from nowhere to nowhere. The jungle wasn’t really exploitable, so it didn’t lead to development.
The Parana/Rio de la Platte system is a significant one, and substantial economic development occurred along it, but it pales in comparison to the Mississippi/Missouri system.
Sua
I expect many of those mountains and jungles made railroads unfeasible, or at least, difficult and unprofitable.
The power of slavery may have been another factor. The Spanish, British, French, Dutch, and Portuguse plantation systems could hadly have helped the development of society. They existed for a lot longer than in N. America, were much more brutal (compare the reproductive rates), and far more widespread. Even after freedom, caused in large part (and ironically) by the US Civil War, many former slaves continued to live in a similar fashion.
In the US, this led to a persistent segments of the population remaining poor. In South America, same thing.
You can see some of the same problems back in Europe, where Spain was the richest and most powerful nation for almost a hundred years. Its downfall came from its rigid heirachy of power, its rapacious idea of the acquisition of wealth, and its monolithic religion. England’s break from Rome, its creation of wealth through trade and commerce, and the ascension of Parliament over Monarch all pulled it ahead.
Not true about the infected blankets, says the Master. http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a5_066.html
Actually, this seems to partly explain South America’s limited economic growth.
Hot and humid conditions are not big deterrents to development when the work is being done by a practically unlimited supply of slaves, while the overlords and taskmasters cool their heels. But when slavery is replaced by a (somewhat) more egalitarian system; when people have more of a choice about working or not working; when food is relatively easy to obtain, and there is no need to build shelter and gather wood for fire to avoid freezing to death; when there are plenty of rivers for cooling; and when it’s *really * hot; then, there’s less desire or need to engage in productive activity.
In other words, as tropical countries became more “civilized”, they became less productive, at least in comparison to countries in temperate climates.
Yes, there are geographical, political, religious and cultural factors. But it seems hard to dismiss climate entirely.
So basically all we need to do to accept temperature as a factor is to ignore Australuan and South Africa as well as ignoring that Egypt never used slaves much.
IOW it’s an explanation that works really well so long as you steadfastly ignore all the cases where it totally fails to work at all.
Blake, while I appreciate that your observation tends to support my beliefs, in fairness to the discussion two points need to be noted: A) Egypt tends (now) to be hot and dry not hot and humid (although the Sahara has been expanding for many years and I do not know what the climate of the first few thousand years in Egypt was like); B) South Africa (the nation, not the general descriptor of sub-Sahara Africa) and the more populated regions of Australia are actually in temperate zones that are not hot and humid. Cape Town’s latitude corresponds roughly to that of the border between North Carolina and Tennessee and South Caroilna and Georgia (as well as sections of Southern California and the Texan Gulf Coast) and while Australia does have a large (dry) desert, as well as a tropical climate up around Darwin, Perth and Port Macquarie along with all the major cities south of them again are found in latitudes that correspond to the Sun-Belt of the U.S.
From your cite:
Closer to my home in British Columbia, the Haida nation were nearly wiped out with deliberate small pox infestation.
We were just talking about the Latin American economy in my macroeconomics class yesterday.
Countries like Belize, Nicaragua, and Uraguay took loans from agencies like the IMF and World Bank to help their economies. These loans are paid in dollars. In 1981, when the US tried to combat its own inflation by jacking up interest rates, that had a severe effect on Latin America and its money supply. Six countries were kicked into hyperinflation.
Actually, it sounds like they were just greedy morons.
Well yah.
But if those countries had debts in dollars the inflation of the late 70s and 80s would have helped them…they borrowed high-value dollars and only had to pay back the debt in low-value post-inflation dollars.
Of course, this doesn’t explain why Belize, Nicaragua and Uruguay had such poor economies that they were borrowing money from the IMF and the World Bank in the first place. Being poor makes it more difficult to borrow money and more difficult to pay back your debts. But why were they poor in the first place?
Also, as has been mentioned before IRT the “temperature” issue, large chunks of Latin America are in relatively “temperate” climate due to altitude (And southern Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina and Chile ARE in temperate zones). There, the difference in sociopolitical and economic culture seems to make the difference. For instance, a majority of the population of Guatemala lives, NOT in the Petén jungle or the hot Pacific coast, but in the very pleasant climate of the highlands. Hasn’t helped, because of longstanding bad social/economic policies.
Argentina and Chile are two South American nations that at various points have alternated as examples of prosperity for the region (and for a time in the early 20th century, Argentina was a top-tier economy by worldwide standards), and Uruguay at one time was modestly succesful; but historically their economies even when growing were made weak by a near absolute reliance on commodity export (Argentina & Uruguay: beef & grain; Chile: minerals – Chile finally got around to diversification during the later part of the dictatorship and afterwards a series of moderate governments that have kept it up) and at least in Argentina by persistent social-unity problems (that enabled the rise of the Peróns, who proceeded to muck up things, leading to their succession by a series of reactionary/populist governments who made things even worse).
The problem with this of course is defining what we mean by hot and humid. Yes much of Egypt is arid now, but much of the fertile land is and was alluvial plain, which I could guess was pretty damn humid. I find it hard to imagine that a waterlogged floodplain in the heat is going to produce a dry heat.
Here again we run into the problem of just what we mean by hot and humid. Australia is a continent that I know well, and the major population centres of Sydney and Melbourn regularly experience summer temperatures over 100o. That’s not what anyone would call cool temperate. More importantly cities like Brisbane, which is now the 2nd largest population centre IIRC, is definitely subtropical and by no stretch temperate.
This is the problem with making sweeping statements without defining anything. Different places have different weather patterns under different influences. Brisbane has a summer average maximum of 29oC. That makes it as hot as Brasilia with exactly the same summer maximum. Capetown is somewhat further north and about 2 degrees cooler. And if South America is underdeveloped because it’s hot then Brisbane should be likewise.
We can’t just look at latitude when trying to decide what places are hot and what aren’t. We need to specify precisely what temperatures make the cutoff for hot and look at that. If heat makes it hard to work then we will need to explain why SE Qld is so prosperous while Brasilia remains an obvious part of a third world state.
The trouble is that the whole hypothesis is ill-defined and poorly thought out. It requires massive double standards and ignoring of numerous obvious counter-examples or else finagling that Giza is hot and dry while somehow the Argetinian pampas are hot and dry, or that Brisbane is cool while much of Brazil, which is actually cooler temperature-wise, is somehow hot.
As I said, my objection is that nothing is defined and there are so many glaring counter-examples.