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Geographic positions (and natural resources) have remarkably little link with economic development, which is why e.g. New Zealand is more prosperous than Brazil, or places like Albania and Moldova can be poor while being close to places like Switzerland and Luxembourg.
Au contraire; geography has everything to do with economic development, just not in the most simple, straight-forward ways. Brazil has surprisingly crappy topography for development, with the Amazon jungle being surprisingly infertile, and major mountain ranges limiting the ability to move goods from the interior (such as it is) to the coasts.
The U.S. has the Missouri/Misouri/Tennessee/Ohio River systems draining incredibly productive agricultural land and moving its goods cheaply, several amazing harbors on each coast, examples of just about every single type of topography in the world (and the variety and quantity of natural resources to match), natural moats to the east and west, deserts to the south, and forests and tundra to the north. While it's possible to screw up that position, it's really hard; kind of like how France's agricultural productivity made it by far the population hub of the European continent in the late middle ages, and thus it was a power player in European politics even when its politics were a horrifying mess.
That's my point, and that such a position is not necessary for rapid economic development. And it's not that hard, e.g. Russia has lagged despite the Volga, Don, extremely fertile soil in the south, and massive quantities of oil, natural gas, and other commodities.
There's no reliable link from geography to economic development, especially the sort of development that the US has achieved. Socio-cultural explanations are essential: the only comparable successes in the 19th century had similiar cultures of bourgeois values (where an enterprising commoner could rise to high status) and policies, even when geographically very different from the US e.g. the UK or Germany.
Russia also has very few natural defensible borders, and has land connections to historically-expansionist powers (Western Europe to the west [French, Germans, Swedes, Poles, etc.], and steppe nomad confederacies to the east and south). This has had a major impact on their political development, and arguably still is exerting a negative influence on their geopolitical standing if you buy Peter Zeihan's thesis that the current war in Ukraine arose out of a Russian perception that they needed to control the Carpathian gaps against potential future aggression.
Before WWI killed it, Russia was ascending precipitously throughout the 19th century without this kind of culture. Similarly, Japan pulled off a faster ascent than the U.S., U.K., or Germany, with a very different culture. Even Belle Epoque France, though not as successful as the British, was renowned for its culture worldwide and still sneered at the U.K.'s "nation of shopkeepers." Bengal under the Mughals was the richest place in the world by far in the 1700s, and only a weird quirk of elite politics brought its trade under British control (i.e., one governor's extremely bad decision to piss off his bankers, who promptly turned around and funded the British interlopers).
I agree that it is better to have positive cultural values, and that noxious cultures retard or even reverse development. However I don't think culture is sufficient to explain developmental successes, particularly at the national level. Geography and geopolitical context really, really matter a lot.
But these were rising from a much lower base and (Bengal aside) experiencing catch-up growth. And even then, Russia, France, and Japan all took big steps towards bourgeois culture in their periods of ascent.
So what's the geographic explanation in Germany's success, which is even less defensible than Russia, in that it lacks Russia's vast distances between its borders and its capital?
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