Romney courts donors, raises cash in Israel (Palestinian leaders-comments racist and out of touch)

[Igel]

22. Prosperity has many mothers.

Some people like including "black sheep" mothers. Others insist that they be excluded.

Look at Jared Diamond. He gave a lot of people a belief. He wasn't forceful enough in deriding the "all or nothing" kind of thinking that many of his readers needed.

Diamond's right. But Diamond didn't argue for everything he thought. He didn't need to. He presented what he thought missing. He's a counterpoint to a school of thought that was being developed at about the same time, but which most of Diamond's readers never were aware of. He was one hand clapping, knew he was one hand clapping, said he was one hand clapping. We saw the waving and thought the argument was about the waving because it said a civilization isn't responsible for what it has or for its collapse. We saw him waving his hand and thought he was conducting; he was focused on the sound the two hands' clapping made.

In Collapse he pointed out how important the environment was. This was also viewed as something external to civilizations, and often they are--you have a 200-year drought, that's a real stress on a civilization and it's bound to fail.

I happen to think that things like equal rights, respect for law, consideration of the common good, freedom of speech, social trust that leads to medium sized organizations and social structures, hard work, valuing education, long-term thinking, believing that effort is strongly correlated with success, rational thought and science, are all mothers of prosperity. So is environmentalism, after a certain point (but not before).

They're also all cultural traits. That was a large part of Diamond's _Collapse_. It was a cultural trait that Diamond, being who he is, could point to as being important. It was a rebuttal to those who thought he was conducting when he was trying to clap. It didn't sell as well. And again, as he was trying to slap people they again saw him waving his hands and believed he was conducting. His focus was still "clapping."

I also think that using words like "advanced" culture is like calling somebody a "bigot." It's not meant to understand or dialog, it's meant to shut down the other person and extreme offense--offendedness and offensiveness. People adapt their culture to conditions as needed; they also tend to stick with cultural traits long after they've become an economic drag on the civilization (but that's okay: viewing everything through the prism of money or the economy is *also* a cultural trait).

The Palestinian economy was soaring at one point. It was doing well, prosperity was on the increase, unemployment falling. Then it flatlined. It flatlined for cultural reasons. The intifada shut it down. Soon after that the Israelis locked down the West Bank and gave everybody the Diamondesque reason they wanted. As it is, the Pal economy needs more links to the outside. Why it should be any better than the Jordanian or Syrian economy is a mystery. They're limited not by external, Diamondesque factors, but by internal factors. This is as true now as it was in the 1920s and 1910s.