Please note that this is BBC copyright and may not be reproduced or copied for any other purpose. RADIO 4 CURRENT AFFAIRS ANALYSIS THE RAIN IN SPAIN TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED DOCUMENTARY Presenter: Diane Coyle Producer: Zareer Masani Editor: Nicola Meyrick BBC White City 201 Wood Lane London W12 7TS 020 8752 6252 Broadcast Date: 31.07.03 Repeat Date: 03.08.03 Tape Number: Duration: 27’35” Taking part in order of appearance: Jared Diamond Professor of Geography, University of California, Los Angeles Jeffrey Sachs Director of the Earth Institute, Columbia University Alain de Botton Writer and philosopher Niall Ferguson Professor of Financial History, New York University Sheila Page Research Fellow at the Overseas Development Institute Razia Khan Chief Economist for Africa at Standard Chartered Bank Andrew Simms Policy Director of the New Economics Foundation COYLE: Do you have a sunny disposition? Or a stormy temperament? Perhaps you wilt as the thermometer climbs in the summer - or get depressed during the short, dark days of January. Just how much does the weather affect us – our moods and personality, and even our incomes and health? DIAMOND: Cool climates are bad for germs and diseases and parasites because the parasites and germs die out in the winter and they come back in the summer. Tropical climates - parasites can thrive all year round, so tropical countries generally have a heavier burden of disease than do temperate zone countries. SACHS: The evidence linking climate and economic performance is extremely strong. It happens, for example, that virtually all of the rich countries in the world are in the temperate zones, virtually all of the countries in the tropics are poor with very, very few exceptions and exceptions that tend to prove the rule. DE BOTTON: I do think that climate has an unfortunate role to play in the way we see the world, how we feel, because most of the time we find ourselves in the wrong climate and it’s rather in a way insulting to feel that we’re so determined by something that’s completely out of our control, because just as you can’t control your genes, you can’t control the weather. COYLE: A geographer, an economist and a philosopher – for each of them we’re shaped in vital ways by the climate in which we live. They’re reviving a debate that stretches from the Stoics of Ancient Greece, who thought human beings could rise above their external environment, to Friedrich Nietszche, who argued in the 19th century that the weather actually makes us what we are. Who could doubt our mood is affected by sunny or gloomy conditions? Of course, it’s all too easy to reduce the arguments to cliches: Northerners are dour and puritanical, whereas people from the sunny south are hedonistic and carefree. In at least one respect, though, the old stereotypes are still true, according to the writer and philosopher Alain de Botton. DE BOTTON: The big distinction is the level of what, for want of a better word, one could call sensuality. As soon as it’s hot, you’re made much more aware of your body and of nature and of the outside world and air temperature – all of these things that when you’re very wrapped up and very much inside, you tend to forget, and that has an impact on sexuality. It’s definitely true that most puritanical movements have been the work of the North. And one only has to spend some time in Brazil, for example, to see that however prudish some of the dictates of the Catholic church might sound, a few minutes on the beach in Rio will quickly persuade you that the weather has had a real impact on this. And of course this was a point that really exercised missionaries who came from Northern climates. They were appalled by what they saw as the excessive sensuality of the natives. COYLE: As they would have been by all those Northern party-goers heading for the sun in Ibiza this summer. But sex wasn’t the only weakness of the flesh missionaries to steamy, tropical lands needed to worry about. Disease was another – not only diseases imported by the colonists but also native illnesses. Surprisingly, perhaps, this old concern is still shared by one of the West’s most influential development economists. Despite the advances of medicine, the prevalence of malaria in particular is central to what Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, describes as tropical underdevelopment. SACHS: The closer you look at it, the more you find that Africa is far and away the natural home of this disease, and the burden of malaria in Africa’s economic development has been absolutely profound. It has meant that infant mortality rates have been vastly higher in Africa than in other parts of the world, even when countries have invested the same amounts in healthcare, even when income levels are otherwise similar, and that has led to a kind of poverty trap for Africa. And when you trace out the economics of the last fifty years, what you find with essentially no exceptions, is that the highly malarious areas of the world and principally sub-Sahara and Africa simply did not achieve economic development even when other conditions of governance, of political institutions simply don’t show up as explaining the difference. COYLE: Some regions are dealt a bad hand by their geography. Climate and ecology can make them unsuitable for settled agriculture, so they never generate the surplus of wealth that lies at the root of successful industrial development. The history of military conquest and colonialism by the west has reinforced this natural bad luck. But vulnerability to tropical disease and parasites remains fundamental to global inequality. That’s the thesis popularized by Jared Diamond , Professor of Geography at the University of California in Los Angeles, in his bestselling book, ‘Guns, germs and steel’. DIAMOND: I do a lot of my fieldwork in Papua New Guinea which lies on the Equator, and malaria is a big health problem there just as in Africa and South East Asia. My New Guinea friends periodically have attacks of malaria, and when they have an attack of malaria they’re out for a week or two or they have low-grade malaria and that means that they are low on energy. And then they have a shorter life span dying in their forties, fifties or sixties. So you get someone and train them and educate them and they are then a full scale professional at age twenty-five or thirty. And in a tropical country where they then die at age forty-five or fifty-five, you get only twenty-five or thirty years out of them, whereas in the temperate zones, with a longer life span into their eighties, you can get forty, fifty, sixty years productive work out of them. COYLE: Of course, some modern killers like SARS and AIDS don’t respect the thermometer. As we’ve seen, they can thrive just as much in freezing Toronto as in steamy Hong Kong. But quite apart from nasty germs and parasites, does climate perhaps have an equally important psychological impact on our well-being and, ultimately, productivity? Alain de Botton thinks it might. DE BOTTON: In an environment which is very harsh where you can’t rely on nature to be good to you, you have to do an awful lot of planning ahead and that shapes the character of people - particularly, for example, if you look at the architecture. Northern architecture is all about sort of keeping out the bad weather and it’s much, much more solid than architecture that arises in sunnier climates and you have to plan much more for how to survive a winter. COYLE: Some thinkers have been happy to use that kind of determinism to explain why people who live in tropical countries are inferior, their tropical lassitude. DE BOTTON: I do know that the kind of thinking that I do becomes quite impossible once the temperature reaches above about twenty-six degrees. So, for me, I find it quite plausible to think that it’s hard to start writing philosophy above about twenty-seven degrees, and you know in a way the history of the world kind of bears that out. I imagine that Greek philosophy was mostly written in the winter months. Over a certain temperature it becomes very hard to sustain a certain kind of thought. It also becomes much, much more desirable to go and jump in some water and not to go in for the kind of introspective gloom that it’s very natural to feel in Denmark on a November night. I remember an essay by Cyril Connolly where he says that the invention of air conditioning is going to turn a whole swathe of the globe that hitherto hasn’t been interested in literature, it’s going to turn them towards literature because his view very much was literature is something you do when it’s raining or what you do when it’s quite cold. COYLE: But aren’t we forgetting examples like the ancient Hindu philosophers who wrote the Sanskrit Vedas in far from temperate climes? We in the West have a long tradition of rationalizing our own sense of superiority. The 18th century French philosopher Montesquieu attributed the global dominance of Enlightenment Europe to ‘tropical lassitude’, the lack of energy that comes from living in a hot land. He even blamed hot climates for oriental despotism. But the history of Ancient Greece and Rome, and more recently of the great, pre-colonial tropical empires of Central America and Moghul India suggest that sunshine doesn’t necessarily make emperors lazy. Niall Ferguson is Professor of Financial History at New York University and the author of a recent history of the British Empire. FERGUSON: There’s certainly a temptation if you’re a new Montesquieu to say the world is the way it is because it’s the way it is, and that’s just the way the weather forecast was always going to make it. I’m very strongly opposed to that. I think it’s a defeatist rationalization of the way the world is. I think it’s unhistorical as well. Now I firmly believe that in this debate, it’s the institutions that matter and that good institutions will deliver better economic outcomes regardless of whether you’re living in the Arctic or in the tropics. COYLE: But there is this quite compelling fact, isn’t there, that all the rich countries are in temperate zones and almost all the countries in the tropical zones are very poor? How do you explain that fact? FERGUSON: Well it wasn’t true, of course, always. If you go back five hundred years, the richest and most advanced societies included Central America and large parts of the Indian sub-continent. It wasn’t Northern Europe and it certainly wasn’t the British Isles. So the big story that economic historians are grappling with is the story of divergence big time. Peru is still where Peru always was and Scotland is still where Scotland always was and India is still where India always was, but the economic performance of these parts of the world has diverged quite dramatically in the space of half a millennium. COYLE: The most dramatic reversal of historical fortunes occurred in the region around the eastern Mediterranean which included modern day Iraq. This was once the cradle of human civilisation. As its name the “Fertile Crescent” suggests, geography gave it this head start – but as Jared Diamond explains, it was also later the cause of its decline. DIAMOND: Some environments are much more fragile than other environments, in particular environments with low rainfall. Once you deforest them, the forest grows back more slowly, you are more likely to get soil erosion. And an example of that is who led the world ten and a half thousand years ago? Iraq. Iraq was where agriculture developed, Iraq was where writing developed, Iraq was where copper metallurgy and then bronze metallurgy developed, but Iraq doesn’t lead the world today. Iraq, and to a lesser extent Greece, South Western Asia and South Eastern Europe have the misfortune to be in a area of lower rainfall than North Western Europe. And so those areas were more readily deforested. There were bigger problems with soil erosion, failing of dams and terracing systems. And that’s a very important part of the equation of how countries become rich or stop being rich. COYLE: Climate and geography offer a plausible account of why fertility abandoned the Fertile Crescent and traveled northwards into Europe. But other cases seem much harder to explain in the same terms. Take China, for example, with its vast and diverse territory, a mainly temperate climate and what’s more a commanding early lead in economic development. Why did it fall so far behind the less civilised European countries on exactly the same latitude after about 1500? DIAMOND: I see the main reason as being ultimately geographical - namely, if you look at a map, China doesn’t have those big peninsulas like Italy and Greece that became independent, China doesn’t have those big islands like Britain and Ireland that became independent. So China was unified early, 221BC. It’s been unified most of the time ever since, whereas Europe for geographic reasons was never unified. But Europe’s disunity meant two thousand different experiments competing with each other, whereas China’s unity meant that one emperor could turn off the tap, and that’s what happened after 1500. COYLE: But that’s sort of counterintuitive because if there has been so much conflict in Europe, you might expect that to have been damaging rather than helpful? DIAMOND: Yes, it’s true that disunity is a mixed bag – disunity brings wars but disunity also brings advantages, and the net effect in Europe has been to stimulate technology. One can think of disunity as having some optimal intermediate value. China was too unified, the Indian continent was too disunified, again for geographic reasons. Europe, with its intermediate degree of disunity - that seems to have been the optimal amount. COYLE: Lucky for Europe, then, to have had natural boundaries that made it optimally quarrelsome. But is this explanation a bit too convenient, a retrospective validation of European political and economic supremacy? Historian Niall Ferguson gives a very different account of why India declined compared with some other parts of the British empire. FERGUSON: If one’s trying to explain why India wasn’t Canada in the 19th century or Australia or New Zealand, then it’s very tempting to say “it’s the geography/environment, stupid” - but, no, it seems to me that’s not the right answer. The big difference between Canada and India circa 1700 was that India was already a very sophisticated, populous civilization. It wasn’t, therefore, a terribly encouraging prospect for would be migrants from the poorer peripheral parts of North Western Europe. Canada was very thinly populated and, therefore, one could start from scratch in Canada. One could arrive in millions and build a new society in the image but not in the exact image of Western Europe without any real and serious opposition. So it seems to me to have much more to do with whether one could start institutionally from scratch or not. COYLE: It’s clear that the pattern of natural advantage for different countries has been far from permanent over time, as economic fortunes ebb and flow. But for Jeffrey Sachs it’s technologies more than institutions that account for such reversals. SACHS: What is a favourable geographic condition can change as technology changes. North America, for example, was very sparsely populated for very deep reasons before the Columbian incursion in 1492. One reason was that a lot of the best staple crops that would end up supporting large populations in North America didn’t exist in North America, wheat being the predominant example. Wheat was brought by the European colonizers, it changed the history of the world. The idea that there can be changes in what’s favourable or not favourable depending on diffusion of new technologies does not diminish in any way the basic idea that for prolonged periods of time a particular place may be favoured by its geography and climate relative to another place. Place matters but it’s conditioned by human knowledge. COYLE: How far human knowledge conditions geography depends to a large extent on how easily new technologies can spread from one country to another. The main channel, now and in the past, has been trade. And the development of trade routes, too, was governed by geography. PAGE: I wouldn’t put that in the past tense; it remains one of the most important aspects of trade. COYLE: For Sheila Page, Research Fellow at the Overseas Development Institute, access to the sea is still crucial. PAGE: If you look at prosperity now, Europe is a little of an exception but that’s because we have two very long, accessible rivers in the Danube and the Rhein, so effectively all of Europe has sea borders. If you look at Latin America, the two countries without sea transport are Bolivia and Paraguay, two of the poorest in the continent. If you look at Africa, it has the highest proportion of landlocked countries; they are also among the poorest in the world. Having access to the cheapest sea routes was very important. Although air transport and the growth of services rather than goods means that sea transport is no longer the only type of trade, it remains dominant. COYLE: Does that mean that island nations like Britain and Japan still have trading advantages? PAGE: Yes – island combined with good ports, of course. Location, location, location applies to trade as well as to everything else. COYLE: For her, a successful location isn’t just a matter of climate. Other blessings, including a coast or navigable river and the availability of natural resources, are the important variables. And the calculus of success can change over time. PAGE: If we had been having this conversation fifteen hundred years ago, it would have been why have the Romans been able to take over from the Egyptians and the Greeks. At different times different types of industrial advantage have been important: agriculture at the time of the development of wheat in the Fertile Crescent; coal at the time of the Industrial Revolution, which gave an advantage to Northern Europe; oil of course in this century. The geography does, I think, have a very important role, but it is a changing one. It is changing now in the sense that the access to air transport, the importance of services is making areas like inland bits of India able to develop through call centres in a way in which was never possible before. You need to ask what is the suitable geography for something, not what is a suitable geography. There are no absolutes in this. COYLE: Now more than ever globalization, new technology is offering countries the chance to overcome the drawbacks of their climate and location. Natural resources obviously count for much less, now that few poor countries plan for growth based on heavy industries. Razia Khan is Chief Economist for Africa at the Standard Chartered Bank. KHAN: Financial services are seen as a very big possibility in terms of future growth because obviously then geography matters less. That can really be of benefit to countries that were relatively isolated and are now less so, countries like Dubai. Traditionally that had been very reliant on oil exports. Looking for ways to diversify, financial services are going to be a big part of it, as is the case with Bahrain. In Africa, countries like Botswana and Mauritius. COYLE: Lee Kuan Yu once said that air conditioning was the most revolutionary discovery. Do you think it’s a case of centres like these overcoming the constraints of climate and geography? KHAN: Yes. Increasingly, especially with the shift from agriculture, away even from manufacturing to service based economies, climate is just not as important as it was. Cyclones, whereas they once might have had a very significant impact on growth, they may have been enough to take several percentage points off the growth rate, may now only affect growth in one quarter. COYLE: That isn’t a view shared by all financial market experts. Some blame the El Nino weather pattern in the Pacific Ocean at least partly for the financial hurricane that disrupted the global markets in 1997 and 98. Still, new technologies could be helping rising financial centres such as Dubai and Botswana to join a handful of earlier tropical success stories like Singapore. If more and more work involves tapping at a keyboard in an air-conditioned office, is it time to ditch, then, the outmoded colonial notion that work, unlike love, is easier in a cold climate? Alain de Botton thinks what matters most is not whether it’s hot or cold but whether it’s unpredictable – something we’re all too familiar with here in Britain. DE BOTTON: People here respond in a much more Mediterranean way to the weather when it’s warm than people in the Mediterranean. Suddenly everyone stops working, starts wearing t-shirts and starts behaving like a cliché version of a Spaniard. Actually if you go to Madrid on a very hot day, everyone’s working and no one’s paying very much attention to the weather. The reason is that it’s pretty much nice weather for five months of the year, whereas in Britain it’s pretty much nice weather for about six days of the year. So I think there’s an interesting connection between the length of good weather or bad weather and how people are affected by it. So when you go from Britain and feel quite hot on the beach in Spain, you think, ooh, no one could get any work done and you tend to imagine that all Spaniards must be lazy. So I think that these geographical theories are often the work of Northerners who go South and sweat a lot in the first few weeks that they’re in a place. COYLE: So he believes that many people can operate at temperatures above 27 degrees, even if philosophers have their thermostat set lower. In fact, most people in tropical countries work much harder than those of us lucky enough to live in a rich, temperate economy. The average worker in Hong Kong or Malaysia clocks up nearly 50 hours of work a week compared to a typical 40-hour week in Britain and a legal maximum of 35 hours in France. Professor Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University is adamant that his own arguments about poverty in the tropics have absolutely nothing to do with any natural indolence on the part of those living under the heat of an equatorial sun. SACHS: That people in the tropics don’t work very hard is one of the most pernicious, maybe self-serving, ideological fantasies of rich people living in the temperate zone. I’ve never seen such backbreaking work as I’ve seen of peasant farmers stooped in the fields trying to stay alive in Africa, in tropical Asia, in tropical Latin America. It’s a struggle for survival. That’s still the condition of around one billion people living in the most extreme poverty in our planet, virtually all of them in the tropics, and the idea that they have an easy life and have just chosen to lie under the hammock as the tropical fruits fall to the ground for their eating pleasure is one of the most ridiculous propositions that still has some circulation in our world. COYLE: If tropical lassitude is such a myth, are we likely to see more poor countries overcoming their traditional geographical disadvantages as new technologies become more widely available to them? After all, some of them, countries like Malaysia, Mauritius and Botswana, have in recent decades been growing extremely rapidly, starting to make their way into the ranks of the world’s richer nations. Jeffrey Sachs believes that the secret of these success stories lies in acknowledging the geographical realities. SACHS: Malaysia’s probably the classic example. Malaysia could not get rich, they realised, on the basis of their traditional tropical crops. They would have stagnated, as so many other tropical agriculture producers did. They were able to get a foothold into the new manufacturing sectors that were being globalised already around the 1970s – electronic semi-conductors and the like. How did they do that? Did they make it by focusing on their tropical location and advantages? No, they worked around it. COYLE: Don’t you think there’s a danger in talking about tropical underdevelopment of encouraging a kind of fatalism about the prospects for very poor countries? I mean you might not think this, but others might conclude that they’re doomed by their weather, their climate’s their destiny. SACHS: As soon as I say the word ‘geography’ someone says ‘determinism’; as soon as I say that climate or place might matter, someone says fatalism. But of course what good analysis shows is where you ought to invest to overcome the liabilities. That’s not a matter for fatalism; that’s a matter for activism – to say we’d better invest in malaria control in sub-Saharan Africa. It’s a matter of directing the development agenda. The fact that the last ten thousand missions of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank went to Africa without mentioning malaria is really damning of the more traditional ways of looking at things. COYLE: So we need to think much harder about the specific obstacles faced by developing countries in their unique geographical context. But that’s a task which could be seriously complicated by rapid and unpredictable climate change. If global warming radically alters familiar weather patterns, won’t it also affect the current pattern of natural advantage and disadvantage? SIMMS: One of the biggest problems with climate change is that it introduces this terrible wild card of instability which means that you’re not going to be knowing from one year to the next whether you’re going to have to throw money more towards responding to extreme weather events and natural disasters, outbreaks of new diseases which were previously unfamiliar, massive crop failures. COYLE: Andrew Simms is Policy Director of the New Economics Foundation. SIMMS: I think it’s this wild card of instability that climate change introduces, which is going to be one of the biggest problems for the poorest countries. Two years ago, I travelled to the very small South Pacific island of Tuvalu where people have survived in an extremely hostile environment for many, many hundreds of years. Now they’re just beginning to be tipped over the edge because of the increasing instability in rainfall patterns, changes in sea level. When you’re living on the edge like that climatically or economically, climate change could well be the straw that breaks the global camel’s back. COYLE: The exodus from Tuvalu has begun; 3,000 inhabitants are already living overseas and the remaining 9,300 are being gradually relocated from their island, just a few metres above the current sea level. They’re the early losers from the unpredictability of climate change. But those of us who live in the temperate north shouldn’t be too complacent about the future. The fastest-growing economies of recent times have been places much hotter than even a warmed-up British summer. There’s no guarantee that we’ll be winners in the climate stakes in future, just because we have been for the past five hundred years. Alain de Botton reminds us that ‘cold good, hot bad’ hasn’t always been the correct rule of thumb. DE BOTTON: The Romans thought that anyone living above what they called the ‘olive line’, the line above which olive trees cannot grow, anyone living above that line was a barbarian and was also lazy, very fierce, but completely stupid. And the reason for that view is there was no other example of anything else to them. I mean when you went to Germany in Roman times, it really was a pretty barbaric place – no one was driving a BMW or a Volkswagon. So I think that people do tend to argue always on the basis of precedent and often they look at quite a limited range of examples that suits their hunches. It’s possible that as we go forward in history what we’re going to find is more and more hot countries developing their economies, developing new ways of life and, who knows, you know in fifty or a hundred years time it’s totally possible that these hot countries will have the advantage over cold ones. COYLE: If he’s right, watch out for the new theory linking damp skies and low temperatures to northern sluggishness – and the counter-arguments pointing to the economic dynamism of Finland and the sensuality of the Icelandic. Yes, of course that sounds silly - the weather doesn’t determine our destiny as individuals. But climate does affect us just as much as history. In the age-old argument between nature and nurture, environment and institutions, our climate is as important as our cultural heritage. 1