My brother and I were discussing… why don’t any of the countries on the equator have more influence? Most of the world powers are located in more moderate climates… is this a direct relation, or just a coincidence?
I have two answers for you: Malaria and Heat
I call it the mañana effect. Because there is no appreciable change in climate or seasons (at least not in the way you’d get in Europe, USA, Canada or North Asia), people are not in as big a rush to do things.
For example, I grew up in Florida. If we want to go to the beach, the beach is there. There are sometimes when it’s nicer than others, but the beach will always be there tomorrow. So you might ask some friends to go to the beach. They might say, “sure”, but for any number of reasons they might say, “let’s go tomorrow”. Now, since you live near the beach, “tomorrow” is a perfectly fine answer. Contrast that with a group of friends who drove down from Detroit to spend a week or less of Spring Break at the beach. They’re out early every morning, catching rays, up all night drinking, making the most of their time because it’s limited.
Now, this doesn’t mean that people in tropical climes are lazier, just they aren’t as deadline driven. If they need food they catch some fish. For the most part they don’t have a “planting schedule” whereby the weather dictates to them when to plant and harvest. There are some big exceptions to this – rice, an equatorial staple, has a window of opportunity, but it’s not like an early frost or heavy snow will screw things up if you’re a week or so late harvesting. Most of the fruits and vegetables are harvested more than planted, that is, the trees are just there and you go pick them when you need to. Again, no threat of frost.
Add to that the extreme heat makes over exertion a bad thing. You can’t bust your ass for 12 hours straight – you will die of heat exhaustion. So a more typical pattern is get up early, work in the cool of the morning, then rest in the afternoon, then do other things after dusk when the heat of the day is gone.
Now, the question would be, does this make equatorial cultures “subpar”? I recall a story that goes like this:
An American businessman takes a vacation to Mexico. At the beach he spots a fisherman, sitting and mending his nets with his son. He tells the fisher, “You should use nylon nets, then you won’t have to mend them, and you can spend more time on the sea catching fish. This will increase your catch, and you can make more money. You could use this extra money to buy another boat. Then you can hire your neighbors to work that boat and make more money off of them. With that you can buy more boats until you have a small fleet. Here’s my card, I’m John Smith, an efficiency expert and business consultant.”
The Mexican fisher looked at the American and asked, “Then what would I do?”
The American smiled, “Well, after some years you’ll have saved up a nice little nest egg, and you can afford a nice vacation, maybe even a little villa somewhere.”
The Mexican asked, “And what do you do on your vacation?”
To which the American replied, “I like to take the time to spend with my family and come here for the fishing.”
The Mexican just looked at his son and shook his head.
The founder of modern Singapore, Lee Kwan Yew, said that his country (1 degree N of the equator) would never have become a developed nation without the air conditioner.
No wonder I hate this society. Great story.
While ShibbOleth’s explanation has its merits there are a couple problems with it. For example, it doesn’t take into account EARLIER civilizations that thrived in tropical regions. Take Egypt for example. Not exactly a cool weather country, yet at one time was at the peak of civilzation. Granted, it was a cyclical agrarian society (ruled by the flooding of the Nile rather than temperature variations) but still had a relatively advanced society compared to the north for example.
The best argument I’ve ever heard to explain this is sort of related to what ShibbOleth said, in that it’s weather/crop related, but it said that due to the “down” time (that is, the time that people WEREN’T farming, eg the winter) there was a significant amount of so called free time for innovation.
That is, during the growing period, people had to haul ass in order to store enough food to survive during the colder time periods, but once that was done, they had spare time to essentially learn and pass on knowledge. Normally this involved how to improve on some aspect of their life (grow more crops, transport more goods, etc). This sort of thing led to craft specialization which tends to allow faster innovation in societies.
As for world power, the Europeans innovated faster and then just took over. Its only been what… 50years? since the former colonies (which pretty much includes all the tropical countries) have started to manage (more or less) their own economies and politics? So in essense, the Europeans took command (and as such made them subservient to) their own political/economic will and that has given them a pretty big head start.
A really good and interesting article as to why europe became the powerhouse it did compared to other ancient civs is found right here in the SDMB itself but I can’t seem to access it anymore which is a pitty as it was darn great. (Answered by Cecil himself, so I imagine to be found in one of his books).
An old GD thread on the topic:
- Tamerlane
When I was taking Health110 my instructor mentioned that people live longer in colder climates. That got me thinking that perhaps people that expect to live longer tend to think futher ahead and pay more attention to the future thus ending up better off.
No cite, but in school I read that tropical agriculture produces a lot of carbohydrates and not a lot of protein, since tropical soils are usually deficient in nitrogen, due to the warmth and rainfall. So wheat doesn’t grow there, but maize (corn), sugarcane, cassava, and so on do. Bean and nut production is limited in area.
Animal proteins are also limited, especially once you get a population large enough to be a candidate for civilization.
The Incas did OK, but they were up in the mountains, with lower temperatures and less rainfall to dissolve the good stuff out of the soil; same holds for the Aztecs. The Mayans would build up a civilization that was based on slash-and-burn agriculture, but then it would collapse, which would be consistent with exhaustion of the soil’s limited function.
Tropical areas seem to have more disease, fungi, and parasites that areas with cold spells do, though I have no cite for that.
Lets’ look at that point by point Mary.
The first problem with that assumption is that protein is primarily the product of legumes production and legumes make their own nitrogen.
The second problem is that some of the most fertile and indisputably the most productive soils in the world are located in PNG and supported the world’s highest agricultural population density ever. PNG isn’t exactly temperate, its well within the tropics.
The first problem with this is that wheat isn’t a high protein food. Modern Durum varieties manage about 15% after millenia of careful selection but standard hard white wheat, which makes up most of the wheat ever grown, prior to this century averaged only about 10% protein. Compare that to maize which has a base protein level of around 11% and after just a few centuries of selective breeding manages to top 20% in the high protein varieties.
The second problem is that wheat is just as much a tropical crop as maize is.
The third problem is that beans were first domesticated in the tropics, as were most of our legume crops.
Yes, but that’s an artefact of already successful spreading their own resources. Cattle, donkeys, sheep and camels are all subtropical and tropical species that have been modified to suit temperate regions, not the other way around. There were strains of temperate wild cattle but there were also tropical strains.
The reason animal proteins are limited was because tropical areas weren’t as successful, it’s not the cause
Quite the opposite in fact. Subtropical, temperate and frigid areas experience more disease because the population is forced to cohabit in stifling conditions for long periods.
Basically Mary what you have suggested doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
Related to the differing crops and seasons, one of the big reasons the more northern areas developed more is due to the difference between the cyclical farming, common in the higher latitudes (and Egypt, due to the yearly flooding of the Nile) , and the garden agriculture, more practical in the tropics.
With cyclical farming, everyone is harvesting the bulk of the food supply at roughly the same time. This makes it much easier for the taxmen of the local thug to collect a portion, which then leads to amounts of grain suitable to lead to a government class, which tends to build large infrastucture projects, makes feeding armies for taking over your neighbors much easier, and so on.
With garden agriculture, you can still produce lots of food - the high population density of Papua New Guinea has already been mentioned, but since everyone’s own little plots of land are being harvested at different times, and a person might only has a couple weeks of food being harvested at once (with the food for the couple weeks after that being grown on a different plot), this means tax collection is much more difficult, and the larger, stable governments can never arise.