Jared Diamond is a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. His books include Guns, Germs, and Steel, The Third Chimpanzee, and Profits, Prophets, Coaches and Kings: (When) Do Leaders Make a Difference?
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Jared Diamond discuss how to measure the true impact of individual leaders, why the institutional environment determines how much difference a leader can make, and whether societies are better served by systems that constrain leaders or empower them.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: I have many questions about this book and about your work more broadly. Your new book is really about what difference leaders do and don’t make, and that’s a different way of asking the age-old historical and social scientific question about structure versus agency. How should we think about salient leaders, ones that have led a country, a sports team, or a company to great success? Are they just being lucky, or did they actually make a difference in bringing about that success?
Jared Diamond: There’s been a longstanding question whether leaders make a difference. Thomas Carlyle said yes, he believed in the role of the great man. Tolstoy said no, and historians nowadays tend to be skeptical about the role of leaders. But the question arises in so many spheres: in politics, in business, in sports like the World Cup, in religion.
Do leaders make a difference, and if so, do they make a difference under some circumstances, and what are those circumstances? This is a question that interests me personally. I was born in 1937, so I spent my childhood under the shadow of Hitler, and leaders have made a difference, mostly for the good, occasionally not for the good, in my own life. I’m personally interested in the question of whether leaders make a difference.
Mounk: So how should we think about this, presuming somebody does make a big difference and somebody does make much less of a difference? In your book you suggest that it depends on a set of circumstances, such as how set the institutional environment is in which they operate and what the likely replacement would be like. The best way to think about this is to engage in what you call a kind of natural experiment. For us, we might think about it as a kind of counterfactual.
Diamond: As a laboratory scientist, my PhD was in laboratory physiology, so I was used to doing manipulative experiments, putting the gallbladder in sodium-rich solutions and then in potassium-rich solutions. If we were an omnipotent creature from outer space, you and I could quickly decide on the role of leaders by manipulative experiments. We would kill some leaders and not kill others, or we would make 50 worlds, and in 25 of them Hitler died in 1930, and in the other 25 he didn’t die in 1930.
But we can’t do that, and if we could, it would be immoral and illegal. So we have to do what astronomers and epidemiologists and so many other scientists do, which is to rely on natural experiments. We can’t and shouldn’t kill leaders, but leaders do die natural deaths, and we can compare what happens when a leader dies with when a leader doesn’t die.
Or if you want to do something less drastic, instead of seeing what happens when a leader dies, you can get a leader very upset, slightly upset, or not much upset. Business people often lose family members. If a business person’s only son dies, the business person is very upset. If his or her wife or husband dies, they get quite upset. If a sibling dies, somewhat upset. If a parent dies, slightly upset. And if a mother-in-law dies, perhaps not upset at all, but happy.
Then you can look at the results, and it turns out that business profits go down the most if an only child dies, and they go down much less if a parent dies. They don’t go down, and may even increase, although it’s not statistically significant, if the mother-in-law dies.
So those are examples of natural experiments that allow us as social scientists to do what molecular biologists would do by manipulation.
Mounk: That’s quite a striking statistic. I don’t recommend that any listeners who hold stock in a company go about murdering the mother-in-law of the CEO, because as you pointed out, it wasn’t a statistically significant result, but that tells you perhaps as much about human nature as it does about business. What is the magnitude of these kinds of results? If one of the starting questions is whether great men and women make history, when you look at all of the hero worship we have today for some of the greatest individual athletes, some of the greatest coaches, some great founders and CEOs, or of course for politicians. I think by and large people have negative views of politicians, but many do admire one politician or another and think that if only they were in office, everything would get better. On the whole, should we be much more skeptical of this? Or does your research suggest that they really are the decisive factor?
Diamond: If I gave you an “on the whole” answer, you should stop right now and say, Jared Diamond, you’re an idiot, because one can’t generalize so easily. It depends. In politics, for example, the influence of a leader depends upon the amount of authority that the leader has. A democratic president in wartime has more authority than in peacetime. It depends upon the moment.
De Gaulle had authority in 1946 and not in 1948, so he resigned. De Gaulle regained authority in 1958, and he didn’t have it in 1968, so he resigned. It depends upon the timing and the place. Seretse Khama, the first president of Botswana, had a lot of authority as president of Botswana. He would have had little power as president of Somalia. Genghis Khan was born at the right time and place, but he didn’t have the faintest idea that the rainfall was particularly high where he was born and wasn’t high two hundred miles away.
So in short, leaders, particularly in politics, have influence depending upon time, place, and circumstances. But I can offer a generalization. In the business world, the leader, the particular industry, the year, and the particular business all make a difference. On average, the leader and the particular business and the industry have roughly equal effects.
In the sports world, coaches sometimes have an effect, but much more often coaches get fired. My university has frequently fired our coaches, and it never makes a difference. We fire a coach because of a losing season, and the next year there’s a statistical regression to the mean. Of course, if you fire a coach for a losing season, the next coach is likely to do better, but that’s just by chance. So that’s a long-winded answer, but what it means is that it depends upon the circumstances, though one can also make generalizations in coaching, in business, and somewhat in politics.
Mounk: I think this is an interesting and perhaps intuitive part of your framework. The degree of constraints makes sense: a political leader in a democracy with many checks and balances, where if they try to do something completely out of the ordinary for that country, they’re probably going to lose power within a week or two, or the other institutions will simply step in and say, you can’t do that, is going to make a smaller positive or negative difference than a dictator in a place where the decisions are unconstrained.
A political leader in a state with high state capacity that is very unified is able to make a bigger difference because the decisions will actually be carried out and they have the resources and means to undertake some kind of project, whether that’s a good or a bad project, than in a place like the Somalia you mentioned, where there are so many rival centers of power and the central state is so weak that the decisions are unlikely to matter.
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What about the difference between making a positive difference and a negative difference? I think often when we think about leaders, certainly in the business world, we tend to think about the ones who found great companies. We tend to think about the ones who have had a positive impact, and perhaps that’s the nature of the area. In business, the worst thing that can happen is that a business goes bankrupt. That’s certainly sad for the people who work for it and perhaps sad for its customers, but some other business will swoop in to take the opportunities left on the table most of the time, and we don’t think of a business failure as one of history’s great tragedies.
On the other hand, when you found a new company, something new that wasn’t available before, that can create great fortunes and sometimes really satisfy customers. Perhaps somebody else would have come in and done that same thing, but it’s natural to think that it’s because of Elon Musk that Tesla was able to develop and mainstream electric cars, and that they’re beautiful objects, and all of those kinds of things.
In politics, it tends, I think, to be the other way around, perhaps because the best kind of states that exist still have all kinds of flaws and shortcomings. Perhaps Sweden is doing rather well, but we’re not hero-worshipping individual Swedish prime ministers, who don’t seem to have had such a great influence on the world. On the other hand, the negative examples are much more salient, whether that’s Mao, whether that’s Hitler, or whether that’s somebody like Vladimir Putin today, who quite single-handedly took the decision to invade Ukraine, leading to great suffering for the Ukrainian nation and for the Russian nation, for that matter.
Is there a kind of difference in how we should think about the positive difference versus the negative difference that leaders make, and are they more salient in different kinds of fields of endeavor?
Diamond: One can say that, in general, a leader can make a difference either for the good or for the bad, and the examples are roughly equally divided. In Germany, Hitler made a difference for the bad, Konrad Adenauer made a difference for the good. In the history of the United States, we have presidents who’ve made a difference for the good. Franklin Roosevelt dealt with a difficult situation in World War II and resolved it. Other American presidents, Warren Harding, is often held up as an example of a do-nothing or ineffective president. So in short, in leadership, as elsewhere in life, people can either do good or do harm.
Mounk: One question to ask is about how big a role leaders play, and as you point out, that itself is dependent on the institutional environment. Leaders are going to play a much bigger role when they’re less constrained. A different way of asking the same question is about institutional design. Should we aim to erect institutions in which leaders matter greatly, or should we aim to build institutions in which the influence of leaders is restricted? That might lower the upside, meaning it might mean that the most brilliant leader isn’t able to have as transformative an impact as he or she might without those kinds of constraints, but it can also buffer the downside, meaning that if you end up getting a leader who makes disastrous decisions, you have all of the constraints which ensure that catastrophe doesn’t ensue.
What does your reflection on leadership teach about what role we should try to assign to leaders in our political and economic systems, in our sports teams, and in other kinds of contexts?
Diamond: I conclude that some countries do well minimizing the effect of leaders, and other countries have done well maximizing the effect of leaders. Within Europe, Switzerland: my Swiss friends, when I ask who’s the president of Switzerland, don’t know, because the president of Switzerland changes from year to year, and the president of Switzerland doesn’t have much power. The Swiss have set up a system with their four ethnic groups and their thirty or so cantons where leaders don’t make a difference, and you don’t even know who the leader is.
At the opposite extreme, France in 1958: the French and de Gaulle recognized that the French presidential system left the president much too little power, and de Gaulle introduced a new constitution that gave the president considerably more power, and that worked out well for France. It enabled de Gaulle to bring France out of the Algerian War, contrary to the wishes of many French people. So one cannot generalize. There are systems that work well leaderless, like Switzerland, and there are systems that work well with leaders.
Mounk: I’m intrigued by this comparison between Switzerland and France. I’d guess the first point I would make is that many French people might feel that the Fifth Republic, which was set up in 1958, hasn’t worked all that well, and that the over-focus on the president and the expectation that the president should somehow solve all of a country’s problems has often gone awry. At this point, every one of the last four or five French presidents has left office incredibly unpopular, in part because there are probably expectations upon the office that whether we’re talking about Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy, François Hollande, or Emmanuel Macron, they can’t really fulfill.
The other question is whether Switzerland is successful because it has that consensual democratic model and doesn’t really have leaders, or whether it’s successful because it’s kind of the tax paradise in the middle of Europe. It’s a country that avoided being drawn into World War One and World War Two. It plays a particular kind of role within the European ecosystem which allows it to draw a lot of the advantages from the continent without being fully a part of it. That might be just as true if it had elections every four years in which the figure of a prime minister was more visible and changed, like in some neighboring countries.
Diamond: This is a case where I think one cannot generalize. Even in the case of France, nowadays the French complain about the power of a president, but from 1951 to 1958, during the Algerian War, they had every reason to complain about the lack of power of the president.
In the history of the United States, when the United States became independent, our founding fathers set up a constitution that balanced the power of the federal government against the power of the states. In Europe, I think it’s hard for Europeans to understand how much power the American states have. They can prevent the president from doing things. The United States set up that system intentionally because we wanted to get away from the powerful British system where there was one leader in charge. Nowadays in the United States, there’s tension between the federal government and many of the states, the so-called blue states. It makes a big difference for the blue states, like California, that the federal government cannot do what it wants there, and we Californians are very happy to have limitations on the power of the national leader.
Mounk: A friend of mine who is a state legislator and a member of the Democratic Party points out that when you look at states within America that have been persistently governed by Democrats, whether that’s California, Illinois, or New York, and compare them to states that have for a long time been governed by clear Republican majorities, like Florida and Texas, it’s not obvious that the comparison is particularly flattering to those Democratic states.
Is that because somehow the individual leadership in places like California and Illinois has been worse? I myself am more sympathetic to the ideas of the Democratic Party, but they actually are wrong about some important things, like how hard it should be to build new housing, and that has ended up being more influential on life outcomes than other things. Why is it that those leaders you just praised seem in many cases to have produced worse results in terms of governance than leaders that certainly don’t seem more inspiring, when you look at some of the quite corrupt political figures in Texas? It’s hard to think that they either have a great political vision or great individual virtues that have served the state well, and yet there are many more people moving from California to Texas than the other way around, and on many objective metrics we care about, like the affordability of life, things are looking much better in Texas than they are in California.
Diamond: There again, I hesitate to generalize. What can one say? Addressing your question about the role of leaders, when do leaders make a difference, and in what way do they make a difference? This is interesting. There are situations where there’s only one person who is qualified to be a leader in a country or in a sphere. That doesn’t happen often, but Botswana: when the African country of Botswana became independent, I think in 1966, there were twenty-two university graduates in Botswana. That’s not many, and there was only one of those university graduates who had much experience of the Western world.
That was Seretse Khama, who had lived in London for half a dozen years and married a British woman. He was also the hereditary chief of the biggest tribe in Botswana, and he was also the chief of the tribe on whose land were found the diamonds that became the basis for the wealth of Botswana. There was no one else in Botswana who could have undermined the reactionary authority of the Botswana chiefs, and there was nobody in Botswana who could have ensured that Botswana’s diamonds would go to the benefit of the whole population and the national government rather than to an individual tribe.
So there’s a case where only one person could make a difference. I refer to that as the Hamlet test. In Elizabethan England, we know who the other playwrights besides Shakespeare were, and if Shakespeare had not existed, we’ve got their plays, and they were fair, but none of them was up to Shakespeare. So Shakespeare passed the Hamlet test, and Seretse Khama passed the Hamlet test.
One might argue similarly in the business world. Pomegranate juice: nobody drank pomegranate juice in the United States, or industrially around the world, until the year 2002. Why not? Because to make pomegranate juice industrially requires a press three stories high. It’s very expensive, and no money-making business would ever dream of getting into the pomegranate juice industry. But there was a couple in Los Angeles who were the biggest agricultural landowners in California. They had more than fifty percent of the pomegranate market, and for them it was worthwhile to put money into developing a pomegranate industry, because they were the only ones who could profit from it. The others didn’t have pomegranate groves, didn’t have the ambition, and didn’t have the money. So there’s another case of an individual leader making a difference.
More often, in the business world: Jeff Bezos at Amazon, or Mark Zuckerberg, or Elon Musk, or Steve Jobs. Whereas one could say that without the Resnicks there would be no pomegranate juice industry, without Jeff Bezos, of course there would be an “everything store.” There were “everything stores.” There was eBay, and Walmart had set up an “everything store,” but on a different model from Amazon. So in short, here’s a case where a leader didn’t make a difference as to whether there would be an industry or business at all, but did make a difference as to how it would operate.
Again, Mark Zuckerberg, in his second year at Harvard: it was not that Mark Zuckerberg recognized that he was born in the right year and that his second year at Harvard was the perfect time to set up a social medium. There was social media before Mark Zuckerberg. Mark Zuckerberg happened to be there, without knowing it, at the right place, and he set up his social medium in a particular way, with likes and interest groups, that resulted in his social medium becoming dominant.
So in short, there are individual leaders who can do something when nobody else can do it. In many other, perhaps most other, cases there are many leaders who could do something, but different individuals would do it in different ways. Overlying all this is the fact that different circumstances offer different opportunities to leaders. In the business world, the magic word is discretion. Discretion, not in the sense of I’m discreet and I say something nice rather than something stupid. Discretion means the power to make decisions.
In the business world, the CEO of a perfume company, or the CEO, like a friend of mine, of a teenager’s t-shirt company, can make a big difference by finding the right perfume or recognizing the right t-shirt that will sell. Whereas the CEO of a railroad, or the CEO of a water company, can’t make any difference, because once you’ve got the railroad, it’s there for the next seventy years, and water companies are so tightly regulated. So some leaders have discretion, and some leaders don’t enjoy discretion.
Mounk: It certainly doesn’t sound particularly fun to be the CEO of Amtrak. I can think of a number of relatively straightforward improvements they could make, such as recognizing that the point of a train is that it has multiple doors, so you can have people board simultaneously at multiple doors rather than lining up single file for one person to check all of their tickets, which is one of the most idiotic things about these lovely United States of America.
What about a conspicuous absence in your book? He’s maybe mentioned once or perhaps twice: Donald Trump. That’s one of the cases where thinking about how much a leader matters is really important to understanding this political moment. I was very concerned when Donald Trump was first elected that he might be able to escape the constraints that the system of checks and balances is meant to put on him, that he might become a genuine danger to democratic institutions. I think Trump has had a negative impact, without a doubt, on the quality of our democratic institutions, and probably on many other things. The Iran war has so far been an unmitigated disaster that I think is going to harm America’s geopolitical standing and is already harming its economy.
But ten years into the era in which Donald Trump really dominates our politics, I’m less certain than I would have been ten years ago that he will really have a decisive influence on the United States. He seems to be both heralding and bringing about a kind of political realignment, but that was probably in the making anyway. I don’t think he single-handedly created it. Nearly two years into his second term in office, it feels as though he is somewhat losing control of the political system. He’s very unpopular, and he doesn’t seem as energetic as he was. We’re starting to see attention shift to the primaries for 2028, and that’s going to happen very quickly after the midterms.
What is your hunch about Donald Trump in particular, and what does that tell us about the nature of leadership more broadly? Is he going to be remembered as a kind of strange and perhaps rather grotesque chapter or footnote in American history, or do you think he has had the capacity to really influence the trajectory of the United States, either positively or, more likely, negatively?
Diamond: I’m going to give you a clear answer, and it will either disappoint you or enrage you. You’ll remember that in my book there is no mention of Donald Trump, except for one sentence in which I said I would not discuss Donald Trump, and I would not discuss Angela Merkel. Why? Because they’re too recent. I discuss only political leaders whose careers are within my lifetime, but whose political careers are closed, so that we can pass judgment on them. I wrote a book. I did not write a magazine article that will be out of date by Sunday.
In the case of Angela Merkel, for example, views of her have been changing within the past few years, which is a warning that my book is not the place to discuss Angela Merkel or Donald Trump at all, or any other leader who is still active. I wanted to discuss only the leaders on whom we can pass judgment.
Mounk: That’s fair, but this is a podcast interview, so it’s fine if it’s out of date by Sunday. You must have some feelings about this, some hunch. I’ll take it with the proviso that I understand it’s not the definitive judgment of history, but having reflected on the role of political leaders, what is your hunch about how we will remember Trump? Not so much whether positively or negatively. I’m guessing you have a similarly negative view of him to mine. But in terms of the magnitude of the influence he’s going to have on the world.
Diamond: Again, I will disappoint and enrage you. I have two reasons for not discussing Trump at all. One is that it’s too early to pass judgment on him. The other is that I write books not for people who already share my view. I write books for a broad public. I write books for Republicans and I write books for Democrats. Whatever I said about Donald Trump would either offend or please one group, and as a book writer, I don’t want to be stereotyped as having a predictable view. My views are not predictable. That’s my second reason why, regretfully, I will decline to say anything about Donald Trump.
Mounk: It would take a little more to enrage me, though perhaps I’m mildly disappointed. Let’s go further back into the past, because I do want to introduce listeners to this podcast to some of your previous work as well, which many of them may have read, or perhaps more will have heard discussed in one way or another. I think it’s both interesting in itself and interesting in relation to this new book. This book focuses on individual leadership and trying to assess its influence. A lot of your earlier work, particularly Guns, Germs, and Steel, was really about structural determinants of history, and in particular about the influence that geography plays in various ways.
The big question of why a few small countries on the tip of the Eurasian landmass, in Western Europe, ended up dominating so much of the world for many centuries and continue today to be among the richest parts of the world, has been given different answers. There are racialist or racist answers that say there’s something particular about the ethnic group that was predominant in that part of the world. There are more religious or culturalist answers that say it’s really about Christianity or about a particular set of values that people in those nations adopted. There are institutionalist answers that say that part of the world built, or locked into, depending on the account, a certain set of institutions which rewarded certain kinds of economic initiative, and that’s why they had economic growth earlier than others, and that’s why they could conquer the world. Your answer distinguishes itself from all of those by emphasizing geographic factors.
Explain that theory to us, and tell us why we should think about geography as the key long-run variable in explaining this huge divergence in the world.
Diamond: You are correct that my book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, lies at the opposite extreme from my current book on leadership. My current book on leadership is about what individual people can do, and I acknowledge that individual people can make a difference in politics, in business, in sports, in religion, and probably in science and in art.
At the opposite extreme, though, Guns, Germs, and Steel had nothing to say about individual leaders, and I was explicit about that. Guns, Germs, and Steel is about the history of the whole world over the last twelve thousand years, and it’s about the history of large parts of the world. Over the course of twelve thousand years, one individual could not make a difference in the growth of societies in different parts of the world, because the growth of societies in different parts of the world depended ultimately on agricultural productivity, on population growth, and on agricultural and animal productivity, dependent upon whether any area had the right plants and animals to domesticate.
No Aboriginal Australian could have propelled Aboriginal Australia to develop atomic bombs and writing, because Australia still today has no domesticable animals. Australian farmers have not been able to domesticate kangaroos. Why not? Because kangaroos can’t be herded. So of course Aboriginal Australians never developed herding. There were no domesticable animals, and Aboriginal Australians didn’t develop farming; there was a minimum of domesticable plants.
In short, Guns, Germs, and Steel was about the history of large areas of the world over the last ten thousand years, where the differences between different parts of the world, the reason why Europe rather than sub-Saharan Africa, or Europe rather than Mexico, took the lead in the world, depend entirely on facts of geography. That’s something that upsets many historians who would like to believe that I’m neglecting the role of individuals and culture and art. Yes, I am neglecting those roles, because over ten thousand years, in large areas, they make no difference.
Mounk: What about some of the differences in outcome within regions that are themselves somewhat geographically similar? On your account, there are particular advantages that, broadly speaking, the European continent had, some of which have to do with the presence of animals that could be domesticated, some of which have to do with a kind of climatic zone, and some of which have to do with the fact that the continent runs largely east-west rather than north-south, which turns out to matter because it means you have a roughly similar climate across the span of a continent, so that if a farmer makes a great improvement to a particular crop, it can relatively easily spread to other parts of the continent. Whereas if you have a continent like Africa that runs mostly north-south, a crop that works very well in one part of the continent is not going to work in another part because of the climatic differences, and that creates a bigger hurdle to the spread of agricultural technology.
But when you look at Europe itself, you see huge differences in economic development between different parts of the continent, and there are alternative explanations that emphasize institutions. One kind of grand historical story, of which we might be skeptical for all kinds of reasons, is to say that after the Black Death, there was a real scarcity of human labor, and this meant that those people who did survive the Black Death, and a third to possibly as much as half of Europeans died in the Black Death, were able to negotiate much higher wages and exert more political influence in all kinds of ways. The reaction to that ended up being different in the east of Europe and the west of Europe.
In the east of Europe, it was basically quashed by force, with an even more controlling feudal system than before, and that led to extractive political and economic institutions which entrenched hierarchy and stopped Eastern Europe from developing over the next centuries, which turned out to be crucial in the run-up to the Industrial Revolution. Whereas in Western Europe, this is what allowed the growth of certain free cities, allowed more capital accumulation, and allowed the growth of the bourgeoisie, and therefore seeded the Industrial Revolution. You don’t need to speak necessarily to this particular example, but that’s a way of explaining the big difference in development by 1750 between London and Amsterdam on one side, and Warsaw, Moscow, or Istanbul on the other, through factors that are political and institutional rather than rooted in the kind of geographic factors you emphasize. Can your geographic theory explain the differences within broadly comparable geographic zones?
Diamond: That’s a very good example, and it illustrates a generalization: the larger the scale and the longer the time span, the more broad geographic factors have influence, and the shorter the time span and the smaller the geographic scale, the more role there is for things that have nothing to do with geography and everything to do with institutions.
One example that you and I know very well: I was in Germany during the GDR years. I gather you had a short sample of the GDR. The difference between East and West Germany.
Mounk: I was born a few years before the GDR disappeared, but I never set foot in it. I grew up in West Germany.
Diamond: Right. I remember going in by the S-Bahn when the GDR still existed, before the wall came down. The difference between East and West Germany has nothing to do with geography. It is everything to do with the institutions and who conquered those different parts. Again, North and South Korea: there’s an enormous difference between North and South Korea, a factor of about a hundred in their per capita domestic product, that has nothing to do with the geographic differences between North and South Korea and everything to do with the institutions.
Within Europe, does geography play some role? Clearly, yes. For example, the fact that the British Isles are an island had a big effect on British history. The fact that Portugal, Spain, France, and the Netherlands were on the Atlantic coast, and that Switzerland and Italy were not, had a big effect on European history. The fact that Greece, Italy, Spain, and Norway are peninsulas, and that China does not have peninsulas, has a big geographic effect within subcontinents. The peninsulas of Europe, the Iberian, the Italian, the Greek, and the Scandinavian peninsulas, developed different languages and different cultures, whereas China, without a major peninsula, became unified early and never developed separate political entities, even within Europe.
Mounk: Just to draw out the point about peninsulas, the idea here is that a peninsula obviously separates you geographically from surrounding lands. If Spain, Italy, and Greece were squashed together into one landmass, they may have ended up influencing each other culturally and linguistically much more than they did. I take it your point is that peninsulas favor political fragmentation, which then makes a downstream difference to all kinds of political institutions and economic factors.
Diamond: Yes, exactly. Peninsulas geographically favor linguistic divergence and social divergence. The differences between Italy, Greece, and Spain are not paralleled by the differences between any regions of China. Instead, in China there’s a difference between rice-growing regions and millet-growing regions, but that’s not because there are peninsulas in China. China doesn’t have big islands either, whereas Europe had the British Isles, which had their own independent course, and there was Crete, which for a while had its own independent course.
To summarize: on the largest geographic scale, for the longest times, geography is everything and individuals are nothing. As the geographic scale and the time reduce, down to the DDR and North Korea, institutions are everything and geography is almost nothing. Naturally, in the intermediate phase, within Europe, geography plays some role, but it doesn’t play the overwhelming role that it did over ten thousand years, because of things like the Black Death and other factors within Europe.
Mounk: When we look at the difference between Western and Eastern Europe, is the explanation for why Western Europe has historically been much more affluent than Eastern Europe geographic, institutional and political, or something in between? What is the answer to that specific challenge, given that geography doesn’t in an obvious way explain why Italy has historically been much more affluent than Poland, though that may no longer be the case five or ten years from now, according to the latest statistics.
Diamond: That’s a very good question, and it’s one I haven’t thought about systematically. Yes, there are differences between Western and Eastern Europe. You point out reasons why those differences might have particular causes, such as the Black Death. Another relevant cause, of course, is the Mongol invasions. The Mongols got as far as the end of the steppe. The invaders from the east got into the Hungarian plains, but Attila’s and Genghis’s legions never got beyond the Hungarian plains, because the Hungarian plains are as far west as you can get in Eurasia and still have large areas of grassland to feed your horses. So there’s a possible geographic reason for the differences between Eastern and Western Europe.
But how much of it is geographic, and how much of it is the influence of the Black Death? Did the Black Death have more influence in Western Europe than in Eastern Europe? I don’t know. So the short answer to your question is that it’s a very interesting question I haven’t thought about, and I’m interested to hear what you’ve said about it, but I don’t have any more to say about it.
Mounk: I’m very sympathetic to the idea that geography, especially over these very large time spans, could make a difference. The problem, of course, is that we both know the outcome. We know what the dependent variable is that we’re trying to explain. We know that historically it’s Europe that conquered many parts of the world rather than Australia, China, or North America conquering the rest of the world in the early modern period, and we know what the geographic features are, without necessarily knowing what the natural impact of those geographic features should be.
That raises the danger of a kind of just-so story. Just to pick up on the example about peninsulas, you might think that having a big unified geographic area is a huge advantage, that you should expect China to be dominant rather than Europe, because China doesn’t have peninsulas and so ends up with a much more unified state much earlier on. If you want to go around conquering the rest of the world, having the scale and sophistication of one unified military, and the resources to put toward that conquest, probably is an advantage over having lots of fragmented states at a much smaller scale that are busy fighting each other.
If China had conquered the rest of the world in the sixteenth, seventeenth, or eighteenth century, I could imagine a story in which we say the reason for this is geographic, because China has this big unified space, and that allowed it to reach scale and put its resources toward conquest. Whereas the poor Europeans were hampered by geography, they had all these different peninsulas and therefore fragmented states, so how could we expect them to conquer the world? How do we make sure we’re not just back-projecting the result onto these geographic features?
Diamond: Good question. Let me give you two answers, and let me tell you what they are at the outset, because I get so involved in these things that after I’ve given the first answer I’ll forget the second. Let’s talk about unity versus fragmentation, and let’s also talk about independent tests.
First, unity versus fragmentation. One might think unity is an advantage: China had a big area, China got unified, so why didn’t China conquer the world? Well, disunity is an advantage, and unity, one can see historically, was a fatal disadvantage for China. Where you have disunity, as in Europe, it means you have different polities competing and struggling against each other. So if the leader of one polity gets the bright idea of abolishing guns, as happened in Japan and China, in disunified Europe, when one leader abolishes guns, there are so many other polities nearby that have kept their guns that a leader cannot get away with doing something so stupid. Whereas in both China and Japan, precisely because they were unified, that had fatal disadvantages. There was no competition. The competition in Europe resulting from Europe’s disunity was a decisive advantage.
Another example: Christopher Columbus had this crazy idea of crossing the ocean. He went to various Italian leaders: Give me ships. No, go to hell, stupid idea. He went to France: stupid idea, no ships. He went to Portugal: no. He went to Spain: no. On his seventh try, he finally got ships. But China also had a fleet, a much bigger and better fleet than any European fleet, which started to cross the Indian Ocean and for thirty years was rounding the tip of Africa. But because China was unified, an emperor came in and said, no more of those fleets. The fleets are bringing back white giraffes, but they’re not bringing back anything that’s of use to us. Precisely because China was unified, when one emperor said no, that was the end of the fleets, whereas in Europe, because it was disunified, that couldn’t happen.
Mounk: On the other hand, you could relate this back to the leadership book and say yes, unity sets you up for failure because of one leader, but it also sets you up for success because of one leader. If one leader in China had had the visionary idea to go and conquer the world, not that that’s necessarily a good thing for the world, but in terms of what we’re explaining, why Europe did that and not China, then perhaps China would have conquered the world at that time, and all of these geographic differences between Europe and China wouldn’t have mattered. It would have just come down to this one piece of smart or not-smart leadership at this one point, I believe in the fifteenth century, when China went the wrong way. Despite all of China’s geographic features, they could very easily have gone the other way, if only that leader had loved white giraffes less, or had recognized that the ships brought back things beyond white giraffes that were also useful.
Diamond: China went the wrong way not only that time but repeatedly. China backed away from an industrial revolution. China was developing major technology; gunpowder was developed in China, but China did not carry on with the development of gunpowder. China did not carry on with the Industrial Revolution. Time and time again, and we’ve seen it since World War II as well, when you’re unified, when you’ve got one person with a lot of power, you do not get the advantages that come from jostling between multiple people with power. That’s my first point.
The second point, the one you mentioned, is whether this is just a just-so story, and whether we can make any independent test. Some colleagues of mine and I are now in the process of doing a quantitative test. We’re looking at the last ten thousand years. We’re counting up all the plants and animals and looking at the value of the plants and animals. We’re letting the results tell us the value of the plants and animals rather than assuming it. We think high-protein cereals, for example, seem to us more valuable than other plants, but is that just our prejudice? One can look at the outcomes. If you do a regression of outcomes around the world, where the outcomes are development of state government, development of technology, and development of population, those outcomes can be related to the number and value of plants and animals, allowing you to say empirically that high-protein cereals have been more valuable than high-starch tuber plants, and that domestic animals that can be ridden are more valuable than domestic animals that cannot be ridden.
Let me throw in one more tidbit. In the New World, there was only one medium-large domestic animal, and that was the llama, the only pack animal of the New World, whereas in the Old World pack animals included the horse, the donkey, and the camel. The llama was domesticated in Peru. A thousand miles away is Mexico. In Mexico, Mexican Indians invented a wheel. Peruvian Indians never invented the wheel. But the New World runs north-south, and the llama, a creature of the Andean highlands, never got through the Isthmus of Panama. The llama never got the thousand miles from Peru to Mexico, and the Mexican wheel never got the thousand miles from Mexico south to the Andes, with the result that there was never any wheel transport in the New World. That’s a dramatic example of the influence of north-south geography.
Mounk: Incidentally, the other handicap of having a north-south geographic orientation rather than an east-west one is that the cold wind blows down from Canada and Alaska toward Boston and New York, which is why they’re so much colder than Rome and Naples, which are at roughly similar latitudes. I agree with you that these geographic determinants explain why it gets so cold on the East Coast in the winter.
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