The New York Times has the op-ed piece Mitt Romney’s Search for Simple Answers written by Jared Diamond. Jared Diamond wrote the book Guns, Germs and Steel, … which Romney used to justify his racist comments about Palestinians, Mexicans, and others.
MITT ROMNEY’S latest controversial remark, about the role of culture in explaining why some countries are rich and powerful while others are poor and weak, has attracted much comment. I was especially interested in his remark because he misrepresented my views and, in contrasting them with another scholar’s arguments, oversimplified the issue.
It is not true that my book “Guns, Germs and Steel,” as Mr. Romney described it in a speech in Jerusalem, “basically says the physical characteristics of the land account for the differences in the success of the people that live there. There is iron ore on the land and so forth.”
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That’s not the worst part. Even scholars who emphasize social rather than geographic explanations – like the Harvard economist David S. Landes, whose book “The Wealth and Poverty of Nations” was mentioned favorably by Mr. Romney – would find Mr. Romney’s statement that “culture makes all the difference” dangerously out of date. In fact, Mr. Landes analyzed multiple factors (including climate) in explaining why the industrial revolution first occurred in Europe and not elsewhere.
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Mitt Romney may become our next president. Will he continue to espouse one-factor explanations for multicausal problems, and fail to understand history and the modern world? If so, he will preside over a declining nation squandering its advantages of location and history.
If Romney would look at Mexico’s history of concentration of wealth in the hands of a small number of land owners, he might realize that he wants to take the United States down the exact path that is part of the explanation for Mexico’s poor economic situation compared to the United States.