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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8337101" data-attributes="member: 82106">Right, so maybe overall we can use notions of trade and capital formation to explain/model the uneven distribution of 'means of production' in a geographic and cultural sense. I think this is an approach which has been used quite a bit in terms of trying to understand the reasons for greater productive capacity and the accumulation of technology in certain parts of the world. It can then be used to ask questions, like "Why has Sub-Saharan Africa not developed an industrialized civilization?" (at least prior to European colonialism). Trade seems to be one factor, certainly Europe, South Asia, and East Asia seem to have developed a large-scale trading system. Africa participated to an extent, but not so much, and was geographically more distant from the main trade routes. Geography (lack of harbors and navigable rivers) has also been sited. The whole idea of technological appropriateness, Europe and China have similar climates and geographic features, allowing their innovations to be more easily exchanged (IE domesticated animals, crops, architecture, etc.). Nobody can really say for certain which factors are the most significant.However it is hard to invoke overall cultural or biological factors. We can't find biological factors, they don't seem to exist (they cannot actually be 100% ruled out, but their magnitude must be small). Cultural factors seem not too relevant, as various polities of sophistication on the same order as those in Eurasia have existed in Sub-Saharan Africa for millennia. Not only that, but there's no sign of some sort of cultural stasis there which would make some particular social/cultural institution so prevalent over all of history as to rule out progress. If we examine the detailed history of various regions of Africa, politics and society seem pretty similar in their basic structure to other areas. The most significant factor SEEMS to be that there was little incentive for exchange of ideas with Eurasia and capital moved to the areas with easier access to technology, eventually creating a disparity in means.Right, I mean, science fiction has basically identified this process with ideas of a 'singularity' etc. That is basically the notion that there is a NON-LINEAR effect in which employment of capital in an area leads to greater effectiveness of more employment of capital in that area. One instrumentality piles on another. This also explains the current divide between the North/West and the South. It is vastly easier to invest $'s in the US markets and make a good return than to attempt to do so in somewhere in Africa or Latin America, generally. One would thus expect that diffusion will, at this point, probably never produce a homogeneous result, not unless the 'First World' runs into fundamental limits which change this effect. I'd note that we may well be seeing signs of that, but since the ramifications are global, it seems this alone will not do the trick. Perhaps if we get off our high horses and look at what other cultures actually have to offer in terms of social organization and ecological knowledge, that might help. I'm not sanguine.In all fairness, h-g, pastoralist, and traditional agriculture have not necessarily produced sustainable results either. I cited 2 examples where local knowledge proved to be superior, but even that knowledge cannot guarantee long-term sustainability. Every system is vulnerable to certain kinds of weaknesses, has blind spots, runs into things beyond its control. I mean hunter-gatherer people once roamed a fertile northern Africa, but nothing they could have done would have prevent the Sahara from forming (largely a consequence of orbital dynamics). Nor were they probably keeping records detailed enough to even discern the problem's existence.</blockquote>

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