"GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL: THE FATES OF HUMAN SOCIETIES" by Jared Diamond

• Those historical inequalities have cast long shadows on the modern world, because the literate societies with metal tools have conquered or exterminated the other societies.
• Peoples of Eurasian origin, especially those still living in Europe and eastern Asia, plus those transplanted to North America, dominate the modern world in wealth and power.
• Empires with steel weapons were able to conquer or exterminate tribes with weapons of stone and wood.
• The history of interactions among disparate peoples is what shaped the modern world through conquest, epidemics, and genocide.
• Sound evidence for the existence of human differences in intelligence that parallel human differences in technology is lacking.
• Almost all studies of child development emphasize the role of childhood stimulation and activity in promoting mental development, and stress the irreversible mental stunting associated with reduced childhood stimulation.
• The whole modern world has been shaped by lopsided outcomes.
• “History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples’ environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves.”
• Far more Native Americans and other non-Eurasian peoples were killed by Eurasian germs than by Eurasian guns or steel weapons.
• the striking differences between the long-term histories of peoples of the different continents have been due not to innate differences in the peoples themselves but to differences in their environments.
• But most wild animal and plant species have proved unsuitable for domestication: food production has been based on relatively few species of livestock and crops.
• In the case of technological innovations and political institutions as well, most societies acquire much more from other societies than they invent themselves.
• A larger area or population means more potential inventors, more competing societies, more innovations available to adopt—and more pressure to adopt and retain innovations, because societies failing to do so will tend to be eliminated by competing societies.
• Without human inventiveness, all of us today would still be cutting our meat with stone tools and eating it raw, like our ancestors of a million years ago.
• The histories of the Fertile Crescent and China also hold a salutary lesson for the modern world: circumstances change, and past primacy is no guarantee of future primacy.
• prediction. In chemistry and physics the acid test of one’s understanding of a system is whether one can successfully predict its future behavior.
• In fact, in proportion to its available area of farmland, Japan is the most densely populated major society in the world.
• Today, Japan is the largest catcher, importer, and consumer of fish in the world.
• My main conclusion was that societies developed differently on different continents because of differences in continental environments, not in human biology.
• The Musket/Potato Wars illustrate the main process running through the history of the last 10,000 years: human groups with guns, germs, and steel, or with earlier technological and military advantages, spreading at the expense of other groups, until either the latter groups became replaced or everyone came to share the new advantages.
• This suggested to me the Optimal Fragmentation Principle: innovation proceeds most rapidly in a society with some optimal intermediate degree of fragmentation: a too-unified society is at a disadvantage, and so is a too-fragmented society.
• We Americans often fantasize that German and Japanese industries are super-efficient, exceeding American industries in productivity. In reality, that’s not true: on the average across all industries, America’s industrial productivity is higher than that in either Japan or Germany.
• If your goal is innovation and competitive ability, you don’t want either excessive unity or excessive fragmentation.
• Among the many “good institutions” often invoked to explain the greater wealth of the first-named country of each of these pairs are effective rule of law, enforcement of contracts, protection of private property rights, lack of corruption, low frequency of assassinations, openness to trade and to flow of capital, incentives for investment, and so on.