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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   4067 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 29, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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Climate seems to have an impact. When you have long winters, you need to plan ahead and develope large ag or industrial capacity.

If you can just pick fruit off a tree all year. No need.

It’s pretty hard to find any warm

Climate country that produces cars. Though I imagine there’s local South American brands I don’t know if perhaps.

If you can just pick fruit off a tree all year. No need.

Is that the case, though? Any tree whose fruits can "just be picked" at any time would be stripped bare pretty quickly, and Malthus would rear his head soon. Hunter-gatherers and horticultors in tropical jungles have to work really hard for their food, water, and toolmaking resources. Even in the lushest jungle the vast majority of biomass is useless to humans. Besides, warm weather does not necessarily lead to lush jungles -- monsoon or savanna climates with long dry seasons often result, and harsh deserts as well. Is life significantly easier for the San or the Yanomamo than for the Inuit?

Mexico and the US south both have pretty large industrial capacities. India and Vietnam do too.

Where climate has a truly large impact seems to be on the development of long distance trade to obtain luxuries that cannot abide cold winters, like sugar or pepper.

But that wasn’t really true until 100+ years after industrialization. The Civil War would have looked pretty different if the South developed industry as fast as the North.

Still, I think any explanation has to start way before the 1800s, so maybe trade is the key.

I think any explanation has to start way before the 1800s

Why not the fact that slavery is a lot more economically feasible when your crops spoil very quickly when picked, have relatively constant harvest times, and don't lend themselves very well to even rudimentary mechanization (ox + plow + wheel and axle will not help you generate more tree fruits to anywhere near the same extent those things will help you get more grain per harvest)?

When labor is cheap, and you inherently need lots of it due to the properties of one's crops, how can you justify spending the money to mechanize for only marginal benefit? The only other real option is defense/arms races, and the American civilizations really had no concept of what kind of destruction the Sea Peoples were going to visit on them when they arrived. No need for selection pressure there, just sit back and relax, we're the only people in the world.

But spoilage was not a problem for the crops that slaves in the New World were imported to work on: cotton and tobacco in the US; sugar in Brazil and the Caribbean. And of course cotton did lend itself to mechanization, in the form of the cotton gin.

I’m talking tropical. The south generally still has winter where ag doesn’t work. Mexicos industrialization is a function of the US industry rather than home grown. Plus Mexico has significant European stock. The indigenous Mexicans are a different story.

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