Critique of the Geography Hypothesis

Key Insight

The geography hypothesis posits that global wealth disparity is due to geographical differences, with poor countries located in tropical zones and rich ones in temperate latitudes. This idea, dating back to Montesquieu, suggested people in tropical climates were inherently lazy and uninnovative, leading to poverty and despotism. Modern versions, such as that advocated by economist Jeffrey Sachs, emphasize that tropical diseases, especially malaria, negatively impact health and labor productivity, and that tropical soils are intrinsically unproductive for agriculture.

However, this hypothesis is demonstrably flawed. Clear counter-examples abound, such as Nogales, divided by a border but not geography, or the historical 'reversal of fortune' in the Americas. Five hundred years ago, advanced civilizations like the Aztec and Inca flourished in the tropical zones of Mexico, Central America, Peru, and Bolivia, while temperate North and South America hosted Stone Age cultures. This pattern also reversed in South Asia, China, Australia, and New Zealand. Furthermore, tropical diseases are largely a consequence of poverty and government inability to implement public health measures, not a primary cause, as exemplified by nineteenth-century England's health improvements resulting from economic success.

Ecologist Jared Diamond's influential variant attributes historical intercontinental inequality (500 years ago) to differential endowments of domesticable plant and animal species, fostering earlier farming and technological development in regions like the Fertile Crescent. Yet, this cannot explain modern inequality. For instance, the Spanish-Inca income gap was initially small (less than double) but dramatically widened to over six times today, due to the uneven spread of industrial technologies, not species availability. Nor can it explain why North America, despite fewer initial geographic advantages, surpassed South America by adopting industrial advancements, or why China and India, with favorable geographic conditions, still contain most of the world's poor. The hypothesis fails to account for modern economic divergence and intra-continental variation.