Geographic Luck: A Crucial Factor in Global Inequality

According to Jared Diamond, the inequality in the world--distribution of wealth, agricultural, industrial and economical success, and power-- is the sole result of Geographic Luck, and how people in certain regions were simply born into great environmental circumstances. He goes into detail, discussing the types of geographic advantages and disadvantages people had, the developments and advancements that came for some as a result of such advantages, as well as the technological breakthroughs, which made way for the future success and dominance of certain nations, spawning and branching from these developments.

To help illustrate his idea of Geographic Luck, Diamond uses the present day United States of America and the impoverished developing

As a result, they had an incredible food supply, healthy communities and time to spend developing their culture and technology. With this extra time, they were able to develop Religion, convenient urban housing, writing and advanced agriculture, amongst many other additions to their society. At around the same time, surrounding countries and those akin to the climates of The Fertile Crescent made similar developments-- domestication, different unique grain crops, like rice, corn, and millet, and specialized careers in communities, all because, according to Jared Diamond, of Geographic Luck. New Guinea, by contrast, had and has always had poor soils, inconvenient and inefficient crops and no domesticable or otherwise beneficial wildlife, and as a result, has never had the time for these developments-- all time had been poured into struggling to obtain a livable food supply, short of protein and nutrients.

Without good geography and opportunities for time for advancement, a country cannot

Geography is, when thought about in this sense, the main reason for the inequality in the world, but it is not the sole reason. Without convenient and suitable geography and good environmental conditions, a community is practically doomed to fail: New Guinea, as the documentary uses it, is a perfect example of this, in contrast to other thriving countries around the world. Because of it’s poor geography-- the inconvenient layout of the land, it’s lack of crops and productive, beneficial sources of food and the poor nutrients that such frugal crop (the taro plant) provides, the country has struggled for centuries. Moreover, New Guinea’s wildlife is incredibly poor, home to no animals that they can control, domesticate and use as a reliable source of food or to work.

They spend all of their time struggling, and therefore have no time to advance. Countries who have made it, however, have acted as almost complete opposites to this, with surpluses of nutritious food, reliable and efficient crops. animals to domesticate, and time to spend in specialized careers, trade and