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What we have here is a series of books, all on the same topic. To paraphrase P.J. O'Rourke's introduction, the question examined here is "Why are some places pretty good, and some just suck?" Why are South Koreans concerned about whether they can afford a better Hyundai, while North Koreans are concerned about finding enough bark to eat. Why do North Americans spend as much time trying to loose weight as Somalians spend trying to find food. Why are Australian Aboriginies living in a mostly white Australia instead of the native English living in a mostly black Britain? In other words, why have some countries done so well while others appear to go backwards if anywhere? The answers given in all these books are rather consistent, with any differences attributes to slight variations in the actual questions they are trying to address. For example, in "Guns, Germs and Steel", Diamond is looking at long term effects, developments over hundreds, if not thousands, of years. He is also looking at people on a continent, or sub continent basis rather than individual tribes or nations. Hence he does not consider culture to be a deciding factor, because over a subcontinent, during an entire Eon, there will be a multitude of different cultures, at least some of which will be able to make use of any opportunity. Other writers are looking a more short term effects, where culture can be the dominating factor.

But in general, all these writers agree on the main points. That is, that to be successful, a group of people need the following conditions.

1. The plant and animal resources necessary for agriculture. This is covered most heavily in "Guns, Germs and Steel"
2. A culture which supports hard work, thrift and enterprise.
3. Rule of Law
4. Free exchange of ideas within a large population base (not necessarily the same nation).

This is the least scholarly of the tombs in this section. Written by P.J. O'Rourke, humourist and foreign correspondent for Rolling Stone magazine, this is nonetheless a serious work examining the difference between wealthy and poor countries and the reasons for the differences.

O'Rourke actually travels in all the countries he examines, and hence gives some reports that are wildly different from accepted wisdom. For example, there is his view on Russia. Common knowledge, supported by all the media reports about Russia, has the economy spiralling down into the middle ages, with everyone getting poorer and poorer except for a few organised crime figures.

O'Rourke's perspective, based on having visited Russia while it was communist, in the early 1990s, and now in the late 1990s, is that it is wealthier each time he sees it. This is not a view based on economic data, but on how the people in the streets look. How they are dressed, how they are eating, whether they have a phone, a TV, a VCR, a roast dinner. Based on these measures of national wealth, O'Rourke concludes that the Russians are getting better and better off.

So how does he explain the Economic figures. Well the measures of growth used by the economists is the GDP. Compare this years GDP to 1990s GDP and you can see if the economy is growing or shrinking. The problem here is that this method assumes that both GDPs are measured in the same way. And this assumption does not hold for Russia at all.

In 1990, Russia was a command economy, in which it suited everyone's interests to exaggerate all measures of production. The factory manager would exaggerate output because that made him look more successful. The district manager would take all the reported outputs, combine them, and then exaggerate the total because that made her look more successful. Then the keeper of national statistics would combine all the twice exaggerated totals together, and exaggerate those because high statistics would make the bosses happy and the statistician would prefer to be the bearer of happy news.

In 1999, the situation is reversed. The best thing for everyone would be to minimise all reported profit. Any factory owner or businessman wants to minimise the income tax bill, and that means underreporting income. In some parts of Russia the income tax rate is 100%. That is one hundred percent. Everything. No business that reports more than a fraction of their real income will stay in business for long. Likewise, many businesses are straight out illegal, so no statistics are coming from there. And finally the national government is trying to maximise the amount of western aid they receive. One way to do this is to round down all reports of economic activity.

So what economists are doing, is taking figures from the Communist party, who have every reason to lie. Taking these numbers away from ones provided by the Mafia, who also have every reason to lie. And pretending that the resulting numbers have any relationship to reality at all. Why is it only O'Rourke who points out the dubiousness of these calculations?

The answer could be because O'Rourke is trying to paint a coherent picture of how economies work, rather than going for a scary headline. The other point about O'Rourke's book, is that it is sidesplittingly funny. Order Eat the Rich

Guns, Germs and Steel : The Fates of Human Societies

This book takes a totally different look at the question of why are some places richer than others. "Guns, Germs and Steel" approaches the problem from a long term perspective. Rather than asking "Why is Germany richer than Spain?", it asks "Why did Europe have the industrial revolution rather than Aboriginal Australia?"

In the process of answering the second question, Diamond ends up answering the first question too. But because of the long term perspective other factors become important compared to the issue of culture. Such varied factors as geography and botany have a more significant role once the scale becomes thousands of years. Even so I feel that the issue of culture has been suppressed slightly, because of Diamonds obsession with proving his thesis that individual peoples were totally at the mercy of their environments.

For example it is argued that the reason Europeans were able to establish an industrial society in Australia, while the Aborigines were not, was that they were equipped with domestic animals and crops that made such a society possible. Native Australian flora and fauna include very little if anything that is suitable for domestication. The emu has been farmed to a limited extent, but only with the help of metal fences and other such advanced techniques.

This is exactly the sort of insight that a longer term look at national wealth can afford, which distinguishes this work from the others in this review.

The only problem I had with this book is that an inordinate amount of the space is taken up in refuting a strawman argument. Every few pages Diamond returns to the theme that differences in national development are NOT due to the racial characteristics of different peoples. That black people aren't inherently dumber than whites etc. Now I do not agree with the racist interpretation of history, but surely no-one else does either? Why devote what is probably one fifth of a book to arguing against a position that is not believed by anybody? Or at least not anyone educated enough to be reading such a book. Order Guns, Germs and Steel

The Wealth and Poverty of Nations : Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor

Like "Guns, Germs and Steel", this book takes a longer view of history than just the last 100 years. It does not quite go back to the stone age, but it does look at the long term development of nations and seeks to explain them in terms of Natural Resources, Culture and Accident. Unlike Diamond, whom he cites, Landes does regard culture as an important feature of national development. This is however still consistent with Diamond's argument that culture is important in the short term, but not in scales of eons, and that culture is determined by geography and biology.

For example, it is argued that one reason Europe was able to pull ahead of China and the Islamic Empire in the 14th to 16th centuries is because Europe is a physically divided continent. That because of the mountain ranges, the presence of deep coastal indentations such as the Adriatic and Baltic, and the fact that significant areas are either islands, like Britain, Ireland, Iceland, Malta and Sicily, or peninsulas like Iberia, Italy, Scandinavia and Greece, it has never been possible to control Europe under one government.

Rival technological centres such as China and the Islamic Empires were usually under the control of a central, autocratic government that would oppose innovation and anything that could threatened the status quo. Indeed such governments often suppressed technology, such as the Chinese abandonment of blue water sailing technology, and the Japanese rejection of firearms. In Europe, many regimes did attempt to suppress advances, but because there were so many power centres, there was often one group that was willing to adopt a new idea. Once the new idea was proven and adopted, other countries were forced to adopt them too, or else fall behind and risk domination. Once again, by looking at the same question from a slightly different angle, "The Wealth and Poverty of Nations" provides valuable insight into what is probably the biggest issue in the world today. Order The Wealth and Poverty of Nations

East & West : China, Power & the Future

Finally we come to the book "East and West". Chris Patten is, as you may recall, the last Governor of Hong Kong, and was responsible for overseeing the transition from a British colony to a democratic city under Chinese rule.

Unlike all the previous books, Patten only looks at one country in detail. That is (naturally enough) Hong Kong. But Hong Kong is at the Junction of the three main types of society in the world today, so it is almost a case study of the entire field. Hong Kong consists of overlapping representatives of

1. Third world peasantry, from the rural fields of China.
2. First world democratic industrialists. From the City of London, New York and Tokyo.
3. The Asian Tiger culture, industrialising, adopting high technology, but still stuck with autocratic if not totalitarian governments.

Like "Guns, Germs and Steel", East and West devotes considerable space to refuting a racist argument. This time however, the argument is one that is actually put forward from time to time. This is the theory of "Asian Values", which claims that Asian people are more suited to autocratic governments, and are not as interested in Human Rights, Rule of Law and Democracy as non-asians are. Needless to say this argument is baseless and is only put forward in self-justification by non-democratic Asian leaders of Malaysia, Singapore, Fiji etc. Nonetheless this does get a lot of publicity in the press, and the more politically naive or commercially greedy members of western countries are prepared to believe it. Order East and West

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