“Air conditioning. … It changed the nature of civilization by making development possible in the tropics.
Without air conditioning you can work only in the cool early-morning hours or at dusk. The first thing I did upon becoming prime minister was to install air conditioners in buildings where the civil service worked. This was key to public efficiency.”
I love this video, and similar by NightHawkInLight,[0] but (as they would agree) it's not a commercial product just yet.
For a while I've thought the first thing to coat with a fancy "Free AC" paint should be... the AC! For most sky-cooling rigs the main cost is pipes or panels on the roof to move heat from inside to outside, but AC is already moving heat. AC units operate at a higher temperature, so it should emit more IR radiation as T^4 (meaning a small increase makes a big difference). Most AC has a pretty good sky view, but maybe not as ideal as the roof.
It seems ironic to use "No AC" paint on your AC, but the physics and economics doesn't lie. Per square inch it's probably the most effective place!
As someone who grew up in a tropical country and has moved to a temperate one, this rings very true.
It is significantly easier to walk in 20C, 50% humidity than to walk the same distance in 28C, 100% humidity. You get lethargic really quickly in a hot humid area.
Every physical action just feels easier in a temperate climate than in a tropical one. Which is why air-conditioning is such a big deal - it lets you get temperate conditions in a tropical location.
How do we square this with what happened when imperialist people went into areas with much hotter weather to establish colonies? Were the colonists less efficient back then when air conditioning didn't exist yet? Or could it be that these area weren't as hot in earlier centuries as they are today? Also, what are the implications for countries with imperialist pasts that are getting hotter due to climate change?
Thank you for sharing this article. I had never learned of this type of fan before, but I always wondered about how the people from Europe who weren't used to the heat would have coped with it, especially with how in recent times there has been news coverage about heat domes and infrastructure that might have been designed for a different climate.
(I'm not saying that those are a Mafia hallmark, but I do wonder whether the robes would make sense in Brazil. As far as I'm aware they are the gold standard of heat-adapted clothing. They probably don't do much about humidity.)
This being a snapshot in time, how would the claim change if we looked at the past? Do the explanations fade if you look back in history at empires in hot parts of the world, like the Egyptian, Mauryan, Persian, Akkadian, Mesopotamian, Carthaginian, Songhain, Incan, Aztec, Mayan...
The seat of civilization is in Mesopotamia, so no this hypothesis doesn’t exactly hold up. The cultural exchange and wars between the ancient eastern and western civilizations aided their evolution before colonization took place. People used to travel far east as well during these time periods, which spread cultural influence in a three-way direction.
Those societies which were further spread apart from this central region of cultural exchange, like many in Latin America, Africa, colder regions in North America and so on were less culturally developed by the time they met others or colonialists, that’s why you have funny things like the University of Oxford being older than the Incan empire.
There are many warm countries which aren’t poor, and the warm countries which are poor, are composed of people whose ancestors (meaning those who were there pre-colonialism and those who were there when borders were formed post-colonization) were spread out far from a region of central cultural exchange in the Middle East, Europe, North Africa and East Asia.
I think the fact that the majority of the 'rich' nations population consisting of Europe and North America (Japan/SK/AU/NZ are a smaller population base) speaks to this.
You could just ask why those 2 regions are so rich right now and the answer i think has much to do with military dominance starting a few hundred years back.
The climate line seems to be artificially pushed by "Look the southern hemisphere below latitude -40 is as wealthy as europe/NA above latitude 40". There's literally <2million people below latitude -40... (that's the top of Tasmania, part of NZ and patagonia for reference) How can they suggest what they are suggesting without consideration of this? As in the data of "oh look southern hemisphere is rich near the poles too" is just based on a handful of people living there.
Don't worry. In 20 years, people with no knowledge of history will be writing articles asking why are the richest countries those with some random fact that unites China and India.
Human societies, viewed as systems, have changes occurring over decades and centuries. Taking short snapshots will fool you about the nature of these systems.
> You could just ask why those 2 regions are so rich right now and the answer i think has much to do with military dominance starting a few hundred years back.
That doesn't seem as explanatory as much as it just pushes the explanation further away in time. How did Europe arrive at "military dominance starting a few hundred years back?" At which point we just start quoting Charles Mann and Jared Diamond and the more droll will make subtle remarks about how the North Americans' syphilis really did a number on the European monarchies.
My additional theory on top of that was that in warm countries nature often provides free food. Don’t need to hustle. Don’t need to hustle to create shelter also. So the environment sort of discourages any extra effort.
Good point, plus what if some cultures evolved to tolerate heat or cold more so than others. With different cultures having different numbers of eons available you would expect quite a bit of dissimilarity. About as much dissimilarity as the extremes of climate found in the places settled for long-term habitation.
At the same time there could also be some with natural flexibility to adapt to more extremes than others, realistically outside the realm of one extreme or another dominating, but instead for some the ability to adapt is what's extreme enough to be uncommon.
Sometimes maybe even beyond the range of both cold lovers and warm lovers combined.
I have a theory not listed here: harsh winters make a people calculative (and calculative people make more money).
If you can survive all year sleeping under a tree, you eventually end up with a different gene pool than in a place where you need to calculate how much grain you need to store for winter in order to feed you family.
Harsh winters kill people that cannot plan ahead. This, over time, changes the gene pool and the attitude toward planning.
As a colombian I feel like in current times that situation is pretty much the opposite - though I feel like most people here are "hot blooded", i.e. they're temperamental on many times they do not give critical thinking or learning stuff any value and take decisions on the moment.
On the other hand I reckon this feeling is happening a lot in "richer" countries. I just feel like though we gain political independence from Spain we are yet to gain "economical" independence. Add corruption and the same people ruling the country for more than 200 years and you got the current situation where kids in the northest part of the country were starving to death and at the same time some daddy's boys ask on r/Colombia or r/Bogota why the whole country does not have Netflix.
Not sure why this is being downvoted. Alexander von Humboldt did a similar statement in his "Buch der Begegnungen" where he compares and finds cultures from tropical areas to be more "lazy" as all the fruits just grow on their own without any human involved.
It sounds like you haven't lived in the tropics. The heat exerts a different force than cold winters. Sure there's plenty of water and food (if you can find it), but where and how you sleep matters. For example in a rain forest you never sleep under a tree because they will randomly fall on you.
Weather can be chaotic and highly destructive and like winters, cyclone season will hit hard. Rain all the time sounds lovely until it rots everything. Food expires far quicker.
The gene pool comment is ignorance combined with misinformation. Our ancestors interbred with a number of hominins across the world and then with each other. Especially across asia-europe, everyone banged each other and other hominins.
To be honest your comment annoyed me a tad because I lived in the tropics and loved it. Wish I could go back. Wish the tropics had more jobs for me. Unfortunately my government doesn't spend enough.
This is not a new theory at all and it’s also nonsense. Case in point; during the last glacial period when the temperature of Africa was similar to Europe today there was no magical climate based success in Africa.
Another case in point, Rome and Greece were very successful and in hot climates while the people north them were not nearly as successful. Another case in point; Indian civilizations and the Bijang civilization among others, all in hot jungle climates. The Mayans, the Aztecs, etc.
It’s all just more constant rationalization and coping, i.e., trying to find some excuse and lie that can be maintained to justify the cult of everyone is the same. Its just moved on from magic dirt rationalization due to the cultural perspective of the early 20th century, to note adapted magic climate rationalization nonsense.
Bonus case in point; the Hispanics that conquered the middle and southern Americas didn’t have any problem being not poor in hot and tropical climates, especially when you exclude the non-Hispanic people of those regions.
> Indian civilizations and the Bijang civilization among others, all in hot jungle climates. The Mayans, the Aztecs, etc.
Agreed
> It’s all just more constant rationalization and coping, i.e., trying to find some excuse and lie that can be maintained to justify the cult of everyone is the same.
You took a strange turn from
acknowledging warm climate great civilizations to then implying people from warm climates lack abilities to form great civilizations
what i was told in school iirc was a combination of climate plus europe being far more populated and dynamic. The environment and competition forced them to innovate much more and there was much more cultural exchange going on. The next obvious step was expanding the search for resources etc etc.
It's obvious that the roman empire contributed a huge amount towards the process of European progress. Come to think of it Europe has kind of been dominant over the middle east since Alexander the great.
Europe spent like a thousand years losing Christian territory to the Arabs/Turks, at one point they pushed from Spain into France. Istanbul is called Istanbul and not Constantinople, no Greek royalty in Egypt, etc etc.
From the fall of Rome until colonization and industrialization got rolling they were definitely not dominant.
And of course there's the role there of the Mediterranean in massively enabling trade between places of various resources and needs, while directly connecting to global oceans on top of that.
Agree, there is some truth in these arguments, but, historically speaking, social, religious, legal frameworks that evolved in northern climes over a few thousand years may play important roles in economic success. And it was never a completely linear upward progression, with significant setbacks for sometimes long periods, and nothing about the future is guaranteed.
Last night I watched several Rick Steves episodes about European art, and how it reflected society and culture over time. The Greeks set up the rationality in government, the Romans excelled at conquest and building infrastructure, while providing a good life, for centuries, and that progressed to other systems as Rome fell. So northern cultures have their ups and downs, but the past yields plenty of lesson in terms of engineering of government and infrastructure
> historically speaking, social, religious, legal frameworks that evolved in northern climes over a few thousand years may play important roles in economic success.
Those frameworks have evolved elsewhere in the world independently as well in a similar fashion. What you’re looking at is a specific time in history where due to a variety of reasons, some places are doing well relative to others. If you look at history across 2000 years, you’ll find that different parts of the world were doing better at different times.
This is an absurd article, I’m sorry. To accept the explanation of “brown people are just worse” as possible, but to throw out “colonialism shaped the modern world” because Australia is rich is so clearly biased that it reads like a strawman. Also, are they aware that Australia is quite hot…?
Putting that huge issue aside for more fundamental ones: certainly climate impacts culture in the aggregate to some extent, but the overall framing here is way too overconfident. There’s about a million confounding variables when assessing different societies over large time scales, the largest of which are A) technology and B) to what extent GDP is even a primary goal. Asking if heat makes societies poorer is like asking if rivers make societies richer: it depends!
> This theory is extremely contested, and I haven’t independently assessed it, so I won’t go into any detail, but for sake of completeness we must add the hypothesis that race also has influence in economic development. I might eventually make an independent assessment of the claim.
If you haven't "independently assessed" it and have zero details to add, please leave it out until you do!
Why? There's no reason to inject hostility like this. It's not as if the author said, "I suspect brown people are stupid, but I won't make any formal claims until I perform an assessment."
Lee Kuan Yew on what made Singapore successful:
Combining AC with some of the modern low-cost roof coatings could be a game changer for reducing the total global amount of AC this will require.
https://www.habitat.org/emea/stories/how-excel-coolcoat-maki...
https://www.xlcoatings.com/cool-roof-paint-cool-coat
Cue the Tech Ingredients episode:
Revolutionary Paint: How to Make Surfaces Stay Cool in the Sun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNs_kNilSjk
I love this video, and similar by NightHawkInLight,[0] but (as they would agree) it's not a commercial product just yet.
For a while I've thought the first thing to coat with a fancy "Free AC" paint should be... the AC! For most sky-cooling rigs the main cost is pipes or panels on the roof to move heat from inside to outside, but AC is already moving heat. AC units operate at a higher temperature, so it should emit more IR radiation as T^4 (meaning a small increase makes a big difference). Most AC has a pretty good sky view, but maybe not as ideal as the roof.
It seems ironic to use "No AC" paint on your AC, but the physics and economics doesn't lie. Per square inch it's probably the most effective place!
[0] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1a2HkcVbmAWExiWT__qQ...
As someone who grew up in a tropical country and has moved to a temperate one, this rings very true.
It is significantly easier to walk in 20C, 50% humidity than to walk the same distance in 28C, 100% humidity. You get lethargic really quickly in a hot humid area.
Every physical action just feels easier in a temperate climate than in a tropical one. Which is why air-conditioning is such a big deal - it lets you get temperate conditions in a tropical location.
How do we square this with what happened when imperialist people went into areas with much hotter weather to establish colonies? Were the colonists less efficient back then when air conditioning didn't exist yet? Or could it be that these area weren't as hot in earlier centuries as they are today? Also, what are the implications for countries with imperialist pasts that are getting hotter due to climate change?
We see Egypt colonizing its hotter neighbors, but it seems no administrator considered himself lucky to have the job.
My guess is the answer involves slavery/forced labor.
https://scroll.in/article/1028513/amidst-uk-heatwave-a-remin...
Thank you for sharing this article. I had never learned of this type of fan before, but I always wondered about how the people from Europe who weren't used to the heat would have coped with it, especially with how in recent times there has been news coverage about heat domes and infrastructure that might have been designed for a different climate.
Popular joke here in Brazil: Why don't we have mafias? Too hot to wear suits.
Is it too hot to wear Arab-style robes?
(I'm not saying that those are a Mafia hallmark, but I do wonder whether the robes would make sense in Brazil. As far as I'm aware they are the gold standard of heat-adapted clothing. They probably don't do much about humidity.)
I am from eastern India, not Brazil. It is definitely too humid to wear robes. Arabia is dry and hot, very different from humid and hot.
I wish it is that simple. AC is everywhere now and my country is still poor.
[dead]
This was discussed in at least 3 books that I remember. Guns, getms and steel, why nations fail and the wealth and poverty of nations.
This being a snapshot in time, how would the claim change if we looked at the past? Do the explanations fade if you look back in history at empires in hot parts of the world, like the Egyptian, Mauryan, Persian, Akkadian, Mesopotamian, Carthaginian, Songhain, Incan, Aztec, Mayan...
The seat of civilization is in Mesopotamia, so no this hypothesis doesn’t exactly hold up. The cultural exchange and wars between the ancient eastern and western civilizations aided their evolution before colonization took place. People used to travel far east as well during these time periods, which spread cultural influence in a three-way direction.
Those societies which were further spread apart from this central region of cultural exchange, like many in Latin America, Africa, colder regions in North America and so on were less culturally developed by the time they met others or colonialists, that’s why you have funny things like the University of Oxford being older than the Incan empire.
There are many warm countries which aren’t poor, and the warm countries which are poor, are composed of people whose ancestors (meaning those who were there pre-colonialism and those who were there when borders were formed post-colonization) were spread out far from a region of central cultural exchange in the Middle East, Europe, North Africa and East Asia.
I think the fact that the majority of the 'rich' nations population consisting of Europe and North America (Japan/SK/AU/NZ are a smaller population base) speaks to this.
You could just ask why those 2 regions are so rich right now and the answer i think has much to do with military dominance starting a few hundred years back.
The climate line seems to be artificially pushed by "Look the southern hemisphere below latitude -40 is as wealthy as europe/NA above latitude 40". There's literally <2million people below latitude -40... (that's the top of Tasmania, part of NZ and patagonia for reference) How can they suggest what they are suggesting without consideration of this? As in the data of "oh look southern hemisphere is rich near the poles too" is just based on a handful of people living there.
Don't worry. In 20 years, people with no knowledge of history will be writing articles asking why are the richest countries those with some random fact that unites China and India.
Human societies, viewed as systems, have changes occurring over decades and centuries. Taking short snapshots will fool you about the nature of these systems.
> You could just ask why those 2 regions are so rich right now and the answer i think has much to do with military dominance starting a few hundred years back.
That doesn't seem as explanatory as much as it just pushes the explanation further away in time. How did Europe arrive at "military dominance starting a few hundred years back?" At which point we just start quoting Charles Mann and Jared Diamond and the more droll will make subtle remarks about how the North Americans' syphilis really did a number on the European monarchies.
My additional theory on top of that was that in warm countries nature often provides free food. Don’t need to hustle. Don’t need to hustle to create shelter also. So the environment sort of discourages any extra effort.
Good point, plus what if some cultures evolved to tolerate heat or cold more so than others. With different cultures having different numbers of eons available you would expect quite a bit of dissimilarity. About as much dissimilarity as the extremes of climate found in the places settled for long-term habitation.
At the same time there could also be some with natural flexibility to adapt to more extremes than others, realistically outside the realm of one extreme or another dominating, but instead for some the ability to adapt is what's extreme enough to be uncommon.
Sometimes maybe even beyond the range of both cold lovers and warm lovers combined.
Related question I've been asking my friends: if you were forced to get rid of air conditioning or democracy, which would you choose?
In favor of what form of government?
I have a theory not listed here: harsh winters make a people calculative (and calculative people make more money).
If you can survive all year sleeping under a tree, you eventually end up with a different gene pool than in a place where you need to calculate how much grain you need to store for winter in order to feed you family.
Harsh winters kill people that cannot plan ahead. This, over time, changes the gene pool and the attitude toward planning.
You're over indexing on the genetics impacts of these things over the cultural impacts.
As a colombian I feel like in current times that situation is pretty much the opposite - though I feel like most people here are "hot blooded", i.e. they're temperamental on many times they do not give critical thinking or learning stuff any value and take decisions on the moment.
On the other hand I reckon this feeling is happening a lot in "richer" countries. I just feel like though we gain political independence from Spain we are yet to gain "economical" independence. Add corruption and the same people ruling the country for more than 200 years and you got the current situation where kids in the northest part of the country were starving to death and at the same time some daddy's boys ask on r/Colombia or r/Bogota why the whole country does not have Netflix.
Not sure why this is being downvoted. Alexander von Humboldt did a similar statement in his "Buch der Begegnungen" where he compares and finds cultures from tropical areas to be more "lazy" as all the fruits just grow on their own without any human involved.
For small settlements sure but not for civilizations: both Aztec and Incas had to invent ways to increase farm output and were still beholden to crops
North American cultures in harsher conditions were nomadic herders
It sounds like you haven't lived in the tropics. The heat exerts a different force than cold winters. Sure there's plenty of water and food (if you can find it), but where and how you sleep matters. For example in a rain forest you never sleep under a tree because they will randomly fall on you.
Weather can be chaotic and highly destructive and like winters, cyclone season will hit hard. Rain all the time sounds lovely until it rots everything. Food expires far quicker.
The tropics also gave rise to the best sea faring people; the polynesians. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynesian_navigation
The gene pool comment is ignorance combined with misinformation. Our ancestors interbred with a number of hominins across the world and then with each other. Especially across asia-europe, everyone banged each other and other hominins.
To be honest your comment annoyed me a tad because I lived in the tropics and loved it. Wish I could go back. Wish the tropics had more jobs for me. Unfortunately my government doesn't spend enough.
> Weather can be chaotic ...
That's probably the difference. Seasons can be prepared for. Natural disasters no so much.
This is not a new theory at all and it’s also nonsense. Case in point; during the last glacial period when the temperature of Africa was similar to Europe today there was no magical climate based success in Africa.
Another case in point, Rome and Greece were very successful and in hot climates while the people north them were not nearly as successful. Another case in point; Indian civilizations and the Bijang civilization among others, all in hot jungle climates. The Mayans, the Aztecs, etc.
It’s all just more constant rationalization and coping, i.e., trying to find some excuse and lie that can be maintained to justify the cult of everyone is the same. Its just moved on from magic dirt rationalization due to the cultural perspective of the early 20th century, to note adapted magic climate rationalization nonsense.
Bonus case in point; the Hispanics that conquered the middle and southern Americas didn’t have any problem being not poor in hot and tropical climates, especially when you exclude the non-Hispanic people of those regions.
> Indian civilizations and the Bijang civilization among others, all in hot jungle climates. The Mayans, the Aztecs, etc.
Agreed
> It’s all just more constant rationalization and coping, i.e., trying to find some excuse and lie that can be maintained to justify the cult of everyone is the same.
You took a strange turn from acknowledging warm climate great civilizations to then implying people from warm climates lack abilities to form great civilizations
what i was told in school iirc was a combination of climate plus europe being far more populated and dynamic. The environment and competition forced them to innovate much more and there was much more cultural exchange going on. The next obvious step was expanding the search for resources etc etc.
It's obvious that the roman empire contributed a huge amount towards the process of European progress. Come to think of it Europe has kind of been dominant over the middle east since Alexander the great.
Europe spent like a thousand years losing Christian territory to the Arabs/Turks, at one point they pushed from Spain into France. Istanbul is called Istanbul and not Constantinople, no Greek royalty in Egypt, etc etc.
From the fall of Rome until colonization and industrialization got rolling they were definitely not dominant.
And of course there's the role there of the Mediterranean in massively enabling trade between places of various resources and needs, while directly connecting to global oceans on top of that.
Yes, weird to consider Europe without the Mediterranean influence
[dead]
I see a lot of correlation but not a lot of causation.
The "correlation" listed seems very odd: > Diseases: > The warmer the country is, the poorer it is, and the unhealthier it is.
Agree, there is some truth in these arguments, but, historically speaking, social, religious, legal frameworks that evolved in northern climes over a few thousand years may play important roles in economic success. And it was never a completely linear upward progression, with significant setbacks for sometimes long periods, and nothing about the future is guaranteed.
Last night I watched several Rick Steves episodes about European art, and how it reflected society and culture over time. The Greeks set up the rationality in government, the Romans excelled at conquest and building infrastructure, while providing a good life, for centuries, and that progressed to other systems as Rome fell. So northern cultures have their ups and downs, but the past yields plenty of lesson in terms of engineering of government and infrastructure
> historically speaking, social, religious, legal frameworks that evolved in northern climes over a few thousand years may play important roles in economic success.
Those frameworks have evolved elsewhere in the world independently as well in a similar fashion. What you’re looking at is a specific time in history where due to a variety of reasons, some places are doing well relative to others. If you look at history across 2000 years, you’ll find that different parts of the world were doing better at different times.
Malaria.
Next question.
This is an absurd article, I’m sorry. To accept the explanation of “brown people are just worse” as possible, but to throw out “colonialism shaped the modern world” because Australia is rich is so clearly biased that it reads like a strawman. Also, are they aware that Australia is quite hot…?
Putting that huge issue aside for more fundamental ones: certainly climate impacts culture in the aggregate to some extent, but the overall framing here is way too overconfident. There’s about a million confounding variables when assessing different societies over large time scales, the largest of which are A) technology and B) to what extent GDP is even a primary goal. Asking if heat makes societies poorer is like asking if rivers make societies richer: it depends!
I think I missed it but where do they say "brown people are just worse"?
They hint at it:
> 5. Race
> This theory is extremely contested, and I haven’t independently assessed it, so I won’t go into any detail, but for sake of completeness we must add the hypothesis that race also has influence in economic development. I might eventually make an independent assessment of the claim.
If you haven't "independently assessed" it and have zero details to add, please leave it out until you do!
> If you haven't "independently assessed" it and have zero details to add, please leave it out until you do!
Sounds like a "no I did not forget this" marker.
See also, "this page intentionally left blank".
Why? There's no reason to inject hostility like this. It's not as if the author said, "I suspect brown people are stupid, but I won't make any formal claims until I perform an assessment."
> Also, are they aware that Australia is quite hot?
That's about as specific as saying the U.S. is quite hot.. you'd be interested to compare the cultures of Darwin and Melbourne or Hobart.
So the solution to all of the world's problems is to move everyone to the Arctic/Antarctic regions! Got it