Unraveling the Mysteries of Global Inequality
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Why did wealth and power become distributed as they now are, rather than in some other way? […] We can easily push this question back one step. As of AD 1500, when Europe’s worldwide colonial expansion was just beginning, peoples on different continents already differed greatly in technology and political organization. Much of Europe, Asia, and North Africa was the site of metal-equipped states or empires, some of them on the threshold of industrialization. Two Native American peoples, the Aztecs and the Incas, ruled over empires with stone tools. Parts of sub-Saharan Africa were divided among small states or chiefdoms with iron tools. Most other peoples […] lived as farming tribes or even still as hunter-gatherer bands using stone tools.
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…Empires with steel weapons were able to conquer or exterminate tribes with weapons of stone and wood…Once again, we can easily push this question back one step further, by drawing on written histories and archaeological discoveries. Until the end of the last Ice Age, around 11,000 BC, all peoples on all continents were still hunter-gatherers. Different rates of development on different continents, from 11,000 BC to AD 1500, were what led to the technological and political inequalities of AD 1500. While Aboriginal Australians and many Native Americans remained hunter-gatherers, most of Eurasia and much of the Americas and sub-Saharan Africa gradually developed agriculture, herding, metallurgy, and complex political organization…
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[So] why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents? Probably the commonest explanation involves implicitly or explicitly assuming biological differences among peoples… The displacement of [technologically primitive peoples] by colonists from industrialized societies exemplified the survival of the fittest… Europeans became considered genetically more intelligent than Africans and Aboriginal Australians.
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Today, segments of Western society publicly repudiate racism. Yet many Westerners continue to accept racist explanations privately or sub-consciously… The objection to such racist explanations is not just that they are loathsome, but also that they are wrong… An enormous effort by cognitive psychologists has gone into the search for differences in IQ between peoples of different geographic origins now living in the same country… However, the peoples compared differ greatly in their social environment and educational opportunities. First, even our cognitive abilities as adults are heavily influenced by the social environment that we experienced during childhood, making it hard to discern any influence of preexisting genetic differences. Second, tests of cognitive ability (like IQ test) tend to measure cultural learning and not pure innate intelligence, whatever that is…
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[So], there is no generally accepted answer to the [original] question. On the one hand, the proximate explanations are clear: some peoples developed guns, germs, steel, and other factors conferring political and economic power before others did… On the other hand, the ultimate explanations – for example, why bronze tools appeared early in parts of Eurasia – remain unclear. Our present lack of such ultimate explanations leaves a big intellectual gap… Much more serious, though, is the moral gap left unfilled. It is perfectly obvious to everyone, whether an overt racist or not, […] [that] history followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples’ environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves…
