Unity Is a Fatal Disadvantage: China Kept Missing the Industrial Revolution, Europe Won by Splitting Up
Diamond says that on a ten-thousand-year scale geography determines everything and individuals are nothing; but shrink the scale to East and West Germany or North and South Korea, and institutions are everything and geography almost nothing.
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The argument · timestamps estimated from transcript position
Scale decides who matters
Diamond offers an operational test: the larger the geographic scale and the longer the time span, the more geography overwhelms the individual; the smaller the scale and the shorter the time, the more institutions overwhelm geography. The gap between East and West Germany and between North and South Korea has nothing to do with geography — it is all institutions; whereas on a 12,000-year scale, no individual could have changed the development trajectory of the continents. He states plainly that in Guns, Germs, and Steel the role of individuals, culture and art is "neglecting," because at large scales they make no difference.
— Jared DiamondMeasuring leadership with natural experiments
Diamond has a doctorate in laboratory physiology, but killing leaders to run a controlled experiment is both unethical and illegal, so he switched to natural experiments. He gives one concrete design: when an entrepreneur's only son dies, firm profits fall the most; when a parent dies, they fall much less; when a mother-in-law dies, profits don't fall and may even rise slightly — though that result is not statistically significant. This lets him quantify "what a leader is actually worth" without running a manipulation experiment.
— Jared DiamondFiring the coach almost never works
Diamond says coaches in sports are sometimes effective, but more often being fired makes no difference at all. His university fires coaches constantly and it has never once helped: firing a coach after a losing season and seeing the next year improve is just regression to the mean, pure luck. This is one of the most counterintuitive pieces of empirical evidence in the whole piece — it directly falsifies the intuition that "swapping the person turns things around."
— Jared DiamondThe Hamlet test
Diamond coined a term: the Hamlet test, for judging whether a given person is irreplaceable. Shakespeare passes — the other playwrights of the Elizabethan era all produced mediocre work; so does Seretse Khama, Botswana's first president — at independence in 1966 the country had only twenty-two university graduates, and only he combined Western experience, hereditary chiefdom of the largest tribe, and chiefdom of the tribe sitting on the diamond deposits; no one else could have suppressed the reactionary authority of the chiefs and ensured diamond revenue went to the whole nation. Bezos fails: without him, eBay and Walmart would also have built the "everything store"; he merely decided how it would operate.
— Jared DiamondUnity is a fatal disadvantage
Diamond directly rebuts the intuition that "unity is an advantage": division is the advantage, and unity is a fatal disadvantage for China. European division meant multiple polities competing with one another — when one leader wanted to do something stupid, like abolishing firearms, his neighbors still had guns, so he couldn't; China and Japan, being unified, lost their fleets the moment an emperor said no more voyages. Columbus went to seven places before he got ships, while China's larger and better fleet ended on a single order. He adds that China didn't go wrong only that once — it repeatedly missed the development of gunpowder and the Industrial Revolution.
— Jared DiamondSwitzerland and France both work
On institutional design Diamond refuses to give a single answer: Switzerland minimizes the influence of its leaders — his Swiss friends can't even say who the president is, because the president changes every year and has little power, and the system of four ethnic groups plus some thirty cantons runs well; France in 1958 did the opposite, with de Gaulle amending the constitution to greatly expand presidential power, and that also runs well, letting him end the Algerian War against the wishes of many French people. So there are both systems that run well without leaders and systems that run well because of leaders.
— Jared DiamondPomegranate juice and discretion
Diamond uses pomegranate juice to illustrate the "only one person can do it" case: before 2002 no one in America drank industrially produced pomegranate juice, because it requires a three-story-tall press, too expensive, and no for-profit company would touch it; but a couple in Los Angeles were the largest agricultural landowners in California, holding more than half the pomegranate market, and only they could profit from it. He also proposes that the key word in the business world is discretion — not "caution," but "the power to make decisions": the CEOs of perfume companies and teen T-shirt companies can make a big difference, while the CEOs of railroad companies and water utilities make no difference at all, because once a railroad is built it's there for seventy years, and water utilities are strictly regulated.
— Jared DiamondRefusing to judge Trump
Diamond twice refuses to answer questions about Trump, for two reasons: first, it's too early to judge, and he only discusses leaders whose political careers are over, because "I'm writing a book, not a magazine article that's out of date by Sunday"; second, he doesn't write for people who already agree with him but for Republicans and Democrats alike, and saying anything about Trump would offend or please one group, and he doesn't want to be labeled "predictable in his views." The host presses, and he still refuses.
— Jared DiamondIn their own words · checked verbatim
If I gave you an “on the whole” answer, you should stop right now and say, Jared Diamond, you’re an idiot , because one can’t generalize so easily. It depends.
Jared Diamond0:00
On the largest geographic scale, for the longest times, geography is everything and individuals are nothing. As the geographic scale and the time reduce, down to the DDR and North Korea, institutions are everything and geography is almost nothing.
Jared Diamond0:00
Well, disunity is an advantage, and unity, one can see historically, was a fatal disadvantage for China.
Jared Diamond0:00
I wrote a book. I did not write a magazine article that will be out of date by Sunday.
Jared Diamond0:00
In the business world, the magic word is discretion. Discretion, not in the sense of I’m discreet and I say something nice rather than something stupid . Discretion means the power to make decisions.
Jared Diamond0:00
I refer to that as the Hamlet test.
Jared Diamond0:00
The llama never got the thousand miles from Peru to Mexico, and the Mexican wheel never got the thousand miles from Mexico south to the Andes, with the result that there was never any wheel transport in the New World.
Jared Diamond0:00
Figures
| University graduates in Botswana at independence | 22 | 0:00 |
| Per capita GDP gap between North and South Korea | about one hundred times | 0:00 |
| Year industrially produced pomegranate juice appeared in the US | 2002 | 0:00 |
| Resnick family's share of the California pomegranate market | more than 50% | 0:00 |
| Year the French Fifth Republic constitution was established | 1958 | 0:00 |
| Number of Swiss cantons | about thirty | 0:00 |
| Diamond's birth year | 1937 | 0:00 |
Glossary
- Hamlet test
- Judging whether someone is irreplaceable: without him, would this thing have happened at all?
- discretion
- Diamond's usage in a business context: the power to make decisions, not "caution."
- natural experiment
- When you cannot manipulate variables, using naturally occurring events to run a comparative study.
- regression to the mean
- After an extreme performance, a natural return to average, often mistaken for the intervention having worked.
How to listen
Founders and investors interested in institutional design, leadership assessment and long-run economic growth; anyone who wants to understand the geography-versus-institutions debate.
The opening stretch on natural experiments and his mother-in-law's death is long; fast-forward to the Hamlet test.