Yes. He cherry picked some ideas about history to support his theory, and ignored the couple centuries of development of geographic determinism in history that went over all his ideas in detail and showed they didn't work before he was born.
I have never examined his ornithology, but I'm willing to extend him professional courtesy that it's solid, but his popular books should be categorized with Gavin Menzies.
Could you list a few books and main criticisms? Like do the critics claim Diamond is mistaken about the need for plants and animals that can be profitably domesticated, and how few there are? Or that infections diseases played a key role in the success of Western imperialism?
Well I skimmed over the links, and like all the other critiques of GGS I have seen, they don't really address his argument.
For one thing, he was not arguing why Europeans conquered the world, but rather why a Eurasian civilization did so. Also he was not a determinist who was arguing that it was inevitable that this happen, rather that it was possible that it could, and that a civilization from another continent couldn't, or at least it was much less likely.
And indeed, when you look at the civilizations on other continents, they had much less developed military technologies, and much lower agricultural production per capita than the advanced Eurasian ones. None of the critiques I have seen address Diamond's argument that Eurasia prevailed because it had the plants and animals needed to develop more powerful civilizations than did the other continents. I mean, do you think the Mayans could have conquered Europe, China, India and the Middle East, even though they lacked grains and beasts of burden? And what about a civilization whose territory lacked the coal and iron ore needed to produce iron and steel, could it have won militarily against those that did and were making use of them?
If you've already familiar with a lot of Diamond critiques but have decided he's right all along then why say "Could you list a few books and main criticisms?". You come off as not engaging in good faith.
In what way? I'm not sure that anyone seriously argues [against the idea] that geographic determinism had a lot to do with which two core centers of civilization arose earliest (and hence had a big head start). The criticism, such as it is, mostly relates to the fact that geography certainly isn't the only factor that played into how civilizations evolved after they got going in the first place.
However, if you read Why the West Rules for Now (which serves as a pretty good East and West world history), the author basically says near the beginning that of course geography played a big role in where early civilization started.
But, to the central question of the book, that doesn't begin to explain why China had to pay homage to Britain, rather than the other way around.
If I understand correctly, China could have ruled the world at least twice.
First, around 1100, China was starting in on an industrial revolution. They peaked at tens of thousands of tons of iron produced each year. Then the mandarins noticed that some commoners were getting rich, which was contrary to the proper order, and the government shut down the iron industry, and the whole thing stopped. But they could have had at least the beginnings of the industrial revolution five centuries before England. (Source: The Victory of Reason, by Rodney Stark.)
Second, China had fleets that dominated at least the Far East, and could have dominated the Indian Ocean. But shortly after 1434, the Chinese emperor decreed an end to the voyages of their great fleet. (Source: 1421 and 1434, by Gavin Menzies.)
Underpinning the book I referenced, the author Ian Morris put together a very detailed attempt to quantify the overall level of civilization [1].
Certainly after the Fall of Rome, the West declined precipitously. I've been reading a bit about that period in Europe recently and the extent of the decline is really quite staggering. It's uneven to be sure as areas of the Middle East, for example, didn't really fall as far.
In any case, China was arguably more advanced than Europe for a significant period and certainly didn't trail significantly until the industrial revolution in the West. (And the industrial revolution(s) pretty much swamped everything that came before.)
ADDED: The book is pretty light on the why behind the West's relative success but there's some speculation, as I recall, around centralized government and general conservatism caused China to miss out.
In Jared Diamond's "guns, germs and steel" an explanation given is that in China, some monarchs simply decided to abandon ocean faring ships, and so China didn't have them for a long time. The same couldn't happen in Europe, because there were so many small competing countries.
According to Pew Research, as of 2015, ~126,000 prisoners (state & federal) were held in private prisons[1]. As best I can tell, there are/were 2.2 million prisoners in the U.S. at the time. So about 5.7% of the prison population.
The SEC Chairman released a statement this morning about cryptos & ICOs. There is a mention of how an ICO can fall outside of the securities designation in the memo.
The Chairman just reiterates what's long been the case in securities law: whether an ICO, like any other instrument, is a security depends on the facts of the case.
Curious if you have any source links for banks pulling out. It seems like smart risk management to back off supporting a BTC futures contract right now.
Wireless spectrum is limited and either exclusively owned or subject to congestion. Dedicated ine-of-sight direct links are possible and avoid some broadcast problems, but still have property rights issues (they manifest a little differently, since you can smoke a connection without establishing property rights to the whole route, but then you are at risk of someone on the route interposing a temporary or permanent obstruction at any time.)
The existence of wireless connections does not change the fact that broadband last-mile service is a natural monopoly.
That isn’t realistic in this decade for rural/remote areas. Satellite internet also failed because of the unusable latency incurred. The only way to guarantee bandwidth is a physical connection because spectrum bandwidth is finite, whereas point-to-point bandwidth scales nearly linearly with more physical channels.
> That isn’t realistic in this decade for rural/remote areas.
Not OP, but I recently lived in a rural area and had 3 options for Internet:
* Mediacom cable with permanent 20-50% (or more) packet loss
* CenturyLink DSL at 1mbps (not a typo)
* Local wireless company, 7mbps, no packet loss
About 2 decades ago I worked for a different wireless ISP (same rural area) that delivered the best local service by FAR. (Cable wasn't yet an option, and satellite had crazy latency.) So wireless was superior ~2 decades ago in that rural area as well as recently, for many people. So I don't know what you mean by wireless being "[unrealistic] in this decade for rural/remote areas."
My position is that municipal fiber is the way to go, but give wireless ISPs credit because they're helping a lot of people get on the Internet who would barely have connectivity otherwise.
They still need access to a (relatively) local backbone. If they started collecting any significant market share from the local mono- and duopolist providers, I suspect that they would simply be banned from those backbones, which are (mostly) maintained by those same providers.
Wireless ISPs would immediately collapse if they had to serve the amount of Netflix traffic wired internet connections use in an evening. They simply aren't a viable alternative for the population at large.
You might want to check out Webpass, which is now owned by Google Fiber. They can and do deliver high speed internet. Webpass specifically targets dense population centers.
Dense population centers are the easiest to cover and already have the most choices. Furthermore, Google Fiber has a history, like most Google municipal projects, of failing to finish and then languishing. They never finished deploying to Starbucks, and what was deployed was still slow. Also, Mountain View Google WiFi, a wireless repeater mesh, was horrible, useless and poorly maintained.
> Webpass specifically targets dense population centers.
The solution nobody needs, effectively. It's already economically sound to run cable/fiber in dense population centers, because the number of customers you reach with every mile of new cabling is huge.
Don't get me wrong, Webpass is very cool. But it's point-to-point and requires you to build a lot of infrastructure on the top of buildings, which requires a lot of permissions, which isn't always easy to get. The wireless ISPs that do exist outside of urban areas have to use cellphone networks, and they are not ready for the amount of data transfer required. Yet.
net neutrality isn't an essential component, the invocation of Title II is. This is what I think the comment you are replying is trying to say. I don't know what the intent of net neutrality advocates is, but the invocation of Title II puts far too much power in the hands of a historically corrupt & repressive agency.
Personally I am ambivalent about net neutrality. I, however, am deeply opposed to the existence of Title II, let alone it being used to regulate the internet. If advocates want net neutrality to be the governing policy of the internet why don't they advocate for specific legislation that does only that and doesn't give the FCC the ability to become a heavy handed regulator of ISPs?
> If advocates want net neutrality to be the governing policy of the internet why don't they advocate for specific legislation that does only that and doesn't give the FCC the ability to become a heavy handed regulator of ISPs?
Do you have evidence that they are not advocating for proper legislation, or are you just saying this to baselessly discredit advocates of net neutrality?
If I recall correctly, the invocation of Title II was a reaction to an unfavorable supreme court case. Perhaps this is not the most ideal solution, but if one believes that net neutrality is important to protect, it appears to be the only solution in the absence of such legislation from a do-nothing Congress.
Also, if you believe that the FCC is historically corrupt and regressive, why do you seem to trust the FCC to make the correct decision right now? Do you have evidence that corruption in the FCC has vanished?
"are you just saying this to baselessly discredit advocates of net neutrality?"
Let's not jump the gun here, I clearly stated that I do not know the intentions of advocates. I haven't heard of any legislation in congress, but that doesn't mean there isn't any.
I don't trust the FCC, Aijit Pai is actively calling for removing power from the FCC. I trust this specific act of the current FCC chair, I don't trust the FCC.
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/04/richard-gere-ho...