European settlers start growing in the nineteenth century,
scarcely looking back? What explains the persistent
ranking of inequality within the Americas? Why have sub-
Saharan African and Middle Eastern nations failed to
achieve the type of economic growth seen in Western
Europe, while much of East Asia has experienced
breakneck rates of economic growth?
One might think that the fact that world inequality is so
huge and consequential and has such sharply drawn
patterns would mean that it would have a well-accepted
explanation. Not so. Most hypotheses that social scientists
have proposed for the origins of poverty and prosperity just
don’t work and fail to convincingly explain the lay of the
land.
T HE G EOGRAPHY H YPOTHESIS
One widely accepted theory of the causes of world
inequality is the geography hypothesis, which claims that
the great divide between rich and poor countries is created
by geographical differences. Many poor countries, such as
those of Africa, Central America, and South Asia, are
between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. Rich nations,
in contrast, tend to be in temperate latitudes. This
geographic concentration of poverty and prosperity gives a
superficial appeal to the geography hypothesis, which is
the starting point of the theories and views of many social
scientists and pundits alike. But this doesn’t make it any
less wrong.
As early as the late eighteenth century, the great French
political philosopher Montesquieu noted the geographic
concentration of prosperity and poverty, and proposed an
explanation for it. He argued that people in tropical climates
tended to be lazy and to lack inquisitiveness. As a
consequence, they didn’t work hard and were not
innovative, and this was the reason why they were poor.
Montesquieu also speculated that lazy people tended to be
ruled by despots, suggesting that a tropical location could
explain not just poverty but also some of the political
phenomena associated with economic failure, such as
dictatorship.
The theory that hot countries are intrinsically poor, though