There Are No Irreplaceable Leaders, Only Irreplaceable Luck
Diamond says history has no irreplaceable leaders — Genghis Khan just happened to be born on the wettest steppe in two thousand years. But people like Rachel Carson and Resnick really did move things forward by ten or twenty years.
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There are no irreplaceable leaders, only irreplaceable timing
Diamond's answer to ‘who is the most irreplaceable leader in human history’ is ‘no one.’ The reason is not that leaders don't matter, but that time washes out the differences: Jesus was a charismatic founder, but the Roman Empire of the same period had half a dozen other prophets; Genghis Khan built the largest land empire from China to Poland, but recent research found that the wettest period on the steppe in the past two thousand years fell right around his birth — had he been born twenty years earlier or two hundred miles farther away, we would never have known his name. From this Diamond distinguishes two kinds of questions: why you and I speak English right now has its answer in the domesticable plants and animals of the Fertile Crescent, nothing to do with individuals; why Amazon is the way it is today has its answer in Bezos alone.
— Jared DiamondRachel Carson moved the environmental movement forward by ten years
Cowen challenges Diamond with the environmental Kuznets curve: once per capita income reaches 28,000, countries naturally turn green — is Carson replaceable? Diamond concedes the movement would have come anyway, but stresses that she at least moved it forward by about ten years — the day after her “Silent Spring” was published, a senator announced a government investigation into toxic chemicals. More crucial was her position at the time: in that era a professional scientist writing popular science was seen as ‘selling out,’ and she was not a university professor, so no one could say that of her; she was a woman, wrote like a poet, and would read her drafts aloud to hear them. Diamond says that even today's best science writer, Richard Dawkins, does not write as well as she did.
— Jared DiamondThe pomegranate juice industry waited five thousand years to appear
Cowen tests Diamond's replaceability theory with the pomegranate juice industry: without the Resnick family, America would eventually have gone down this road anyway. Diamond says no. Pomegranates were domesticated five or six thousand years ago, but there had never been a global pomegranate juice industry, because pomegranate juice is extremely hard to make — you cut an orange and squeeze, but the pomegranate's value is inside an extremely hard rind, and the contents are not pulp but small seeds; scaled production requires a three-story-tall tower that crushes whole pomegranates rind and all. In 2002 America had 22 pomegranate growers, 21 of them small farmers with no money and no motive. Lynda Resnick put in about two hundred million dollars and waited 18 years before starting to make money. Companies like Coca-Cola and Nestlé would never allow a division to invest 150 million dollars and not be profitable for 18 years.
— Jared DiamondFace-to-face social skills are collapsing off a cliff
Diamond's advice to a 25-year-old who wants to become influential: learn to talk to people face to face, put down indirect communication tools. He has done 60 years of fieldwork in Papua New Guinea and saw Chevron bring in international lawyers from Switzerland to negotiate with villagers who had never left their village — the lawyers thought they would close the deal in a day, but the agreement reached on day one was met on day two with the villagers saying ‘we forgot that agreement, the people who signed it don't count, these are a few other negotiators.’ The villagers had negotiated face to face their whole lives and had far more skill than the international lawyers. Diamond says that over the past 40 to 50 years he has watched social skills degrade, and in his 39-year-old child's generation it is especially striking, because most communication is no longer face to face and people no longer understand each other.
— Jared DiamondNew Guineans may be smarter than Westerners
Diamond answers ‘yes’ outright, and says some people hate him for it. His argument is that natural selection pushed in different directions: over the past ten thousand years European survival depended mainly on surviving infectious diseases like smallpox, tuberculosis and measles, which has little to do with being smart; the main causes of death in New Guinea were coping with an extremely difficult environment and coping with other New Guineans — war was constant there. So his impression is that New Guineans on average ask more questions and are smarter. He adds that Westerners usually think they are stupid because they use stone tools — but they lack metal tools because agricultural output was much lower, not because of intelligence. Cowen presses him on a Nature paper claiming West Eurasians have gotten smarter since the Stone Age; Diamond says he hasn't seen that paper, but for more than a century eugenicists have been trying to prove Europeans are smarter, with no evidence whatsoever.
— Jared DiamondThe Industrial Revolution happened in Britain because it is an island
Diamond rejects Greg Clark's hypothesis that the British became more patient by intermarrying and lowering their time preference. His explanation is geography: Britain is an island, needs no standing army, and has not been successfully invaded — the last successful invasion was 1066. Not needing an army, it gradually developed democracy, and democracy is a productive form of government. Britain also sits on the Atlantic coast, and like the Netherlands, Spain and Portugal, it was one of the countries that could spread across the world, because the Atlantic coast was the testing ground for seafaring technology. He mentions that in the 1600s Britain cut off its king's head and Parliament became powerful. As for Daron Acemoglu and Jim Robinson's extractive vs inclusive institutions theory, Diamond says he has learned more from Jim Robinson than from any individual in the past 20 years, but thinks they give geography less weight than he does.
— Jared DiamondBig business and young people have made him cautiously optimistic
Diamond says that 20 years ago he would have said the most evil and destructive force in the world was big business, which at the time basically did not care about the environment. But over the past 20 years big business has come to care more and more: Walmart leads on sustainable products, Unilever leads on sustainable fisheries, even oil companies. In 1999 the World Wildlife Fund sent him to do an environmental study of Chevron's oil field in Papua New Guinea; he expected it to be terrible, but found Chevron extremely cautious, because they knew that if they screwed up, New Guineans would sue them and they would not get the development contract for the Norwegian oil field. Another source of optimism is young people: 25 years ago young people did not care about the environment, now they care very much. He gives the odds as 51% good outcome, 49% bad outcome.
— Jared DiamondThe most important question is not to find the most important question
Cowen asks what the biggest environmental problem is at the global macro level, and Diamond laughs and says this is why interviewing Diamond is frustrating: his answer is always ‘the most important thing is not to go looking for that one most important thing, because the world is complicated.’ He uses marriage as an analogy: a couple about to marry asks what the single most important thing for a happy marriage is, and the answer is not to go looking for that one most important thing — you need to get 37 things right, and if you get 36 right but are incompatible on sex or religion, the marriage breaks. Back to the question itself, he says there are three things we must get right: climate change, inequality, and nuclear risk — including the risk of nuclear war and nuclear winter.
— Jared DiamondIn their own words · checked verbatim
There has been no unreplaceable leader in human history because over a long time, things wash out.
Jared Diamond1:09
If he had been born 200 miles further away and 20 years earlier, we wouldn't know anything about him.
Jared Diamond3:22
In those days, the belief among scientists, professional scientists, was that if you write for the public, it's because you're washed up as a scientist. You're prostituting yourself.
Jared Diamond15:54
The big companies like Coca-Cola and Nestlé, they never would have permitted a branch of their industry to sink $150 million and not make a profit for 18 years.
Jared Diamond20:08
In fact, New Guineans had far more experience at negotiating. They had far more negotiating tricks than did the international lawyers.
Jared Diamond30:36
The combination of the birth of my sons, and the MacArthur Fellowship caused me to switch from medical physiology into writing books on big subjects, such as why you and I are now speaking English rather than speaking bilingual.
Jared Diamond1:00:16
Figures
| Steppe wetness around Genghis Khan's birth | The wettest period in the past two thousand years | 3:22 |
| Number of languages in Papua New Guinea | About 700 | 10:49 |
| Number of American pomegranate growers (2002) | About 22, of which 21 were small farmers | 18:00 |
| Money Lynda Resnick put into pomegranate juice | About two hundred million dollars | 19:04 |
| Time Lynda Resnick waited for profitability | 18 years | 20:08 |
| Population of Botswana | 3 million | 21:13 |
| Diamond's estimated probability of a good outcome | 51% | 45:38 |
| France's nuclear share of energy | About 85% to 90% | 46:41 |
| Number of bird species on the street near Diamond's home | 189 species | 51:48 |
| Number of Bach cantatas Diamond has listened to | No. 57 |
Glossary
- environmental Kuznets curve
- The hypothesis that once per capita income reaches a certain level, environmental quality improves as income grows.
- natural experiments
- A method of causal inference that uses naturally occurring variation when variables cannot be manipulated.
- Dvorak keyboard
- A keyboard layout more efficient than QWERTY, but with extremely low adoption.
How to listen
For readers interested in geographic determinism, leadership studies, and the evolution of Diamond's own thinking; founders should focus on the two passages on pomegranate juice and Amazon, which argue about individual agency.
The birding and Bach cantata chat after 51:36 can be skipped; low information density.