Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis

by Jared Diamond

  My assessment of the U.S.’s strengths starts with the reality that we are now, and have been for many decades, the world’s most powerful country, and the one with the largest economy. (China’s economy is close in size, and by some measures is already larger than ours.) To understand the basis for our large economy, let’s remind ourselves of the fact mentioned in the previous chapter to help us understand the size of Japan’s economy. A national economic output or income is the product of two factors: a country’s population, multiplied by its average output or income per person. The U.S. is close to the world’s highest-ranking country in both of those factors, whereas all other countries near the top for one of those two factors are low for the other.

  As for population, the U.S.’s (currently around 330 million) is the world’s third highest, behind only China and India. But those other two countries, and in fact 16 of the countries with the world’s 20 highest populations, have low per-capita outputs or incomes, just 3%–40% of the U.S.’s. (The three other rich countries in the top 20 for population are Japan, Germany, and France, whose populations are still just 21%–39% of the U.S.’s.) The reason for the U.S.’s large population is its large area of fertile land. The only two larger countries, Russia and Canada, have much lower populations, because a large fraction of their area is Arctic, suitable only for sparse habitation and no agriculture.

  My saying now that the U.S.’s large population is part of the reason for its large economy may seem to contradict my saying, in the previous chapter, that Japan’s large population is not a benefit and possibly even a disadvantage for Japan. The reason for this apparent contradiction is that the U.S. is resource-rich, self-sufficient in food and most raw materials, and large in area, and has a population density less than 1/10th of Japan’s. But Japan is resource-starved, heavily dependent on imports of food and raw materials, has an area less than 1/20th that of the U.S., and is crowded (population density more than 10 times the U.S.’s). That is, it’s much easier for the U.S. to support its large population than it is for Japan.

  The other factor contributing to the U.S.’s world-leading economic output or wealth is its high output or wealth per person, due to the geographic, political, and social advantages to be discussed below. The various alternative ways to measure per-capita output or income include GDP (gross domestic product) or else income per person, either corrected or uncorrected for differences in purchasing power parity (i.e., differences among countries in how much goods a dollar of income can actually buy in that country). In all of these alternative per-capita measures, the U.S. exceeds by a large margin all other populous countries with large economies. The only countries in the world with per-capita GDPs or incomes higher than the U.S.’s are either small (populations of just 2–9 million: Kuwait, Norway, Qatar, Singapore, Switzerland, and the United Arab Emirates) or tiny (populations of 30,000–500,000: Brunei, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, and San Marino). Their wealth comes mainly from oil or finance, whose earnings are spread over few people, resulting in high GDP or income per person but a low rank in total national economic output (which equals output per person times population).

  The fact that the U.S. has the world’s largest economy enables it also to have the world’s most powerful military. While China has many more soldiers in its army, the U.S.’s long-standing investment in military technology and ocean-going warships (Plate 9.1) more than counter-balances China’s advantage in number of soldiers. For instance, the U.S. has 10 large nuclear-powered aircraft carriers capable of being deployed around the world; only one other country (France) has even a single one, and few countries have any aircraft carrier at all, nuclear-powered or not. As a result, the U.S. is today the world’s sole global military power that can and does intervene around the world—a fact, whether one approves or disapproves of those interventions.

  It is no accident that the U.S. has become economically rich and militarily powerful. The many reasons for this outcome, besides the advantages of large area and large population already discussed, are advantages of geography, politics, economics, and society. In case you come to feel, as you read the following pages, that I’m going chauvinistically overboard in touting the U.S.’s advantages, be forewarned: these pages will be followed by many more pages on the big problems that we face.

  As regards geography, we are fortunate to be endowed with excellent real estate. The U.S.’s lower 48 states lie entirely within the temperate zones, which are the world’s most productive zone for agriculture, and the safest from the perspective of public health. While China also lies largely within the temperate zones, much of southern China is subtropical, and part of it extends into the tropics. More seriously, China includes the world’s largest and highest plateau, of low value for agriculture, plus a large area of high mountains (including five of the world’s six highest mountains) offering no human economic value except mountain-climbing tourism and glaciers that supply water for rivers.

  Temperate-zone soils are in general more fertile than tropical soils, due in part to the legacies of high-latitude Ice Age glaciers that repeatedly advanced and retreated over the landscape, grinding rocks and generating or exposing fresh soils. That happened not only in North America but also in northern Eurasia, contributing there to Eurasia soil fertility. But glaciation was especially effective in North America because of a peculiar North American geographic feature, unique among the world’s continents. To appreciate that feature, just glance at a world map, and quickly describe to yourself the shape of each continent in one short sentence. You’d say that South America and Africa are both broadest near the middle and become narrow towards the South Pole, while Eurasia and Australia are broad both at high and low latitudes. But North America has a unique wedge-like shape, broadest towards the North Pole and becoming narrower at lower latitudes.

  That shape had consequences for North American soils. Several dozen times during the Ice Age or Pleistocene Era, glaciers formed in the Arctic and marched south, both in North America and in Eurasia. Because of North America’s tapering wedge shape, large volumes of ice forming in the broad expanse at high latitudes were funneled into a narrower band and became heavier glaciers as they advanced towards lower latitudes. In Eurasia, without that wedge shape, the volume of ice formed at high latitudes moved into an equally broad band at low latitudes. The continents of South America, Africa, and Australia all end far short of the Antarctic Circle, and couldn’t generate ice sheets marching northwards. Hence creation of fertile young soils by the advance and retreat of glaciers originating in high latitudes was most effective in North America, less effective in Eurasia, and slight or non-existent in the three southern continents. The result was the deep fertile soils of the Great Plains that astonished and delighted immigrant European farmers, and that now constitute the world’s largest and most productive uninterrupted expanse of farmland (Plate 9.2). Thus, North America’s wedge shape and history of repeated past glaciations, combined with the moderate rainfall prevailing over most of the continent today, are the underlying reasons why the U.S. has high agricultural productivity and is the world’s largest exporter of food. In contrast, China has less fertile soils much damaged by erosion, and an average human population density four times the U.S.’s, making China a net importer of food.

  The other major geographic advantage of the U.S. is our waterways, both coastal and interior. They constitute a big money-saver, because transport by sea is 10–30 times cheaper than transport overland by road or by rail. The eastern (Atlantic), western (Pacific), and southeastern (Gulf) borders of the U.S. consist of long sea-coasts, protected along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts by many barrier islands. Hence ships navigate the latter two coasts through an intra-coastal waterway partly sheltered by those islands. All three U.S. coasts have big indentations within which lie sheltered deep-water ports (Plate 9.3), such as Long Island Sound, Chesapeake Bay, Galveston Bay, San Francisco Bay, and Puget Sound. As a result, the U.S. is blessed with many excellent protected natural harbors: more on ou
r East Coast alone than in all the rest of the Americas south of the Mexican border. In addition, the U.S. is the world’s only major power fronting on both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

  As for interior waterways, the U.S. East Coast has many short navigable rivers. But our most important interior waterway is the huge Mississippi River system and its big tributaries (the Missouri and others), which drain more than half of our area, including our prime farmland of the Great Plains (map here). Once barriers to navigation on those rivers had been engineered out of existence by construction of canals and locks, ships could sail 1,200 miles into the interior of the central U.S. from the Gulf Coast (Plate 9.4). Beyond the Mississippi’s headwaters lie the Great Lakes, the world’s largest group of lakes, and the group carrying more shipping than any other. Together, the Mississippi and the Great Lakes constitute the world’s largest network of inland waterways. When one adds the intra-coastal waterway to the Mississippi / Great Lakes system, the U.S. ends up with more navigable internal waterways than all the rest of the world combined. For comparison, Mexico has no large navigable river at all, and the whole African continent has only one navigable to the ocean (the Nile). China has a much shorter coastline (only on its east side), not as good ports, a much lower fraction of its land area accessible to navigable rivers, and no big lake system comparable to our Great Lakes. All of those waterways join together much of the U.S., and connect the U.S. to the rest of the world, by means of inexpensive water transport.

  The other advantage of our sea-coasts is as protection against invasion. It may seem contradictory that, just after I’ve gotten through praising sea-coasts as the ideal way to deliver freight, I should now dismiss them as a sub-ideal way to deliver troops. The reason, of course, is that it’s cheaper and safer to make deliveries from a ship off the coast than from a vehicle on land only if the people awaiting you on land welcome your planned delivery. Delivery by sea is expensive and unsafe if the people awaiting you are shooting at you. Amphibious landings have always ranked among the most dangerous forms of warfare: just think of the 58% casualties suffered by the Canadian troops who raided Dieppe on the French coast in August 1942, or the 30% casualties suffered by the American marines who captured Tarawa atoll in November 1943. The U.S. was further protected from attack by our annexations of Hawaii and Alaska controlling the approaches to our Pacific Coast. The portions of our borders that don’t consist of sea-coasts are our land borders with Mexico and Canada, both of which have much too small populations and armies to threaten us (although we fought a war with each during the early 19th century).

  Hence the U.S. is virtually immune to invasion. None has even been attempted in our history as an independent nation; the U.S. has not been involved in a war on our mainland with a foreign power since the 1846–1848 Mexican War, which we ourselves initiated. Even mere raids on the U.S. mainland have been negligible: just a British raid on Washington during the War of 1812, Pancho Villa’s raid on Columbus in New Mexico in 1916, one shell fired by a Japanese submarine in World War Two onto the U.S. coast at Santa Barbara, and six American civilians killed by an explosive-laden balloon launched from Japan also during World War Two. In contrast, all other major nations have either been invaded (Japan, China, France, Germany, India), occupied (Japan, Italy, Korea, Germany), or threatened with imminent invasion (the United Kingdom) within the last century. Specifically, China was not only massively attacked from the sea and extensively occupied by Japan in 1937–1945, but was also attacked from the sea by the United Kingdom, France, and Japan in the previous century; has recently fought Russia, India, and Vietnam across its land borders; and frequently in the past was attacked by Central Asian armies, two of which (the Mongols and the Manchu) succeeded in conquering all of China.

  Those are the geographic advantages of the U.S. Now, let’s consider our political advantages, which begin with the fact that our government has been a democracy uninterruptedly for the 230 years of our national existence. In contrast, China has had non-democratic dictatorial government uninterruptedly for the 2,240 years of its national existence.

  What really are democracy’s advantages—or at least its potential advantages? (I emphasize “potential” because, as we’ll see, our supposedly democratic American government is losing some of those potential advantages by deviating from actual democracy.) Today, it’s increasingly easy to get disillusioned with democracy, and Americans sometimes envy China’s dictatorship for its ability to decide and implement good policies quickly. There’s no doubt that decisions and their implementation take longer in democracies than in dictatorships, because the essence of democracy is checks, balances, and broad-based (hence time-consuming) decision-making. For instance, China’s adoption of lead-free gasoline took just one year, whereas that policy required a decade of debates and court challenges in the U.S. We envy China’s quickly outstripping us in its construction of networks of high-speed rail transport, city subway systems, and long-distance energy transmission. Skeptics about democracy can also point out examples of disastrously harmful leaders who came to power through democratic election.

  Those disadvantages of democracy are real. But dictatorships suffer from a far worse, often fatal, disadvantage. No one, in the 5,400-year history of centralized government on all of the continents, has figured out how to ensure that the policies implemented with enviable speed by dictatorships consist predominantly of good policies. Just think of the horribly self-destructive policies that China also implemented quickly, and whose consequences were unparalleled in any large First World democracy. Those self-destructive policies included China precipitating the large-scale famine of 1958–1962 that killed tens of millions of people, suspending its system of education, sending its teachers out into the fields to work alongside peasants, and creating later the world’s worst air pollution. If air pollution in the U.S. became even half as bad as it now often is in many large Chinese cities, American voters would complain and throw out the government then in power at the next election. Think also of the even more self-destructive policies implemented in the 1930’s without broad-based decision-making by dictatorial governments in Germany and Japan, which launched those countries into wars that killed millions of their own citizens (not to mention more than 20 million citizens of other countries). That’s why Winston Churchill quipped, in response to someone expounding to him the usual complaints about democracy’s disadvantages, that democracy is indeed the worst form of government, except for all of the alternative forms that at one time or another have been tried.

  The advantages of democratic government are numerous. In a democracy, citizens can propose and debate virtually any idea, even if the idea is initially anathema to the government then in power. Debate and protests may then reveal the idea to be the best policy, whereas in a dictatorship the idea would never have gotten debated and its virtues would never have become accepted. The prime example in recent American history, because our government was so tenacious in pursuing a policy that revealed itself to be bad, and because the protests against that policy were so vigorous, was our government’s eventual decision to end its policy of making war in Vietnam (Plate 9.5). In contrast, Germans in 1941 did not have the opportunity to debate the folly of Hitler’s decision to invade the Soviet Union and then to declare war against the U.S. while already being at war against Britain.

  Another basic advantage of democracy is that citizens know that their ideas are getting heard and debated. Even if their ideas are not adopted now, they know that they will have other opportunities to prevail in future elections. Without democracy, citizens are more likely to feel frustrated, and to conclude correctly that their only option is to resort to violence, and even to try to overthrow the government. Knowledge that peaceful outlets for expression exist reduces the risk of civil violence. A cynical but politically astute friend remarked to me, “What counts in democracy is the semblance of democracy.” By that, my friend meant that the semblance of democracy may suffice to dissuade citizens from resorti
ng to violence, even if (as is now true in the U.S.) democracy is actually being thwarted in not-so-visible ways.

  A further basic advantage of democracy is that compromise is essential to its operation. Compromise reduces tyranny by those in power, who might otherwise ignore opposite viewpoints. Conversely, compromise also means that a frustrated minority agrees not to paralyze government.

  Still another basic advantage of democracy is that, in modern democracies with universal suffrage, all citizens can vote. Hence the government in power has an incentive for investing in all citizens, who thereby obtain opportunities to become productive, rather than those opportunities being reserved for just a small dictatorial elite.