In making his controversial argument that “culture” was the main reason Israelis were wealthier than Palestinians, Mitt Romney cited two authors who had written major works on the wealth of nations, Daniel Landes and Jared Diamond. The latter took to the New York Times op-ed page on Thursday to clear the record, saying Romney’s account of his argument was wildly inaccurate. While Romney saw Diamond as arguing that “physical characteristics of the land” like iron deposits were the key determinants of a nation’s success, Diamond’s book Guns, Germs, and Steel instead emphasizes water access, local plant and animal life, and geographical features like latitude as being determinative. Diamond calls Romney’s interpretation “so different from what my book actually says that I have to doubt whether Mr. Romney read it.”
But, in Diamond’s view, this misrepresentation isn’t “the worst part.” Rather, it was his reduction of an immensely complex subject to a simplistic, one-word explanation:
Even scholars who emphasize social rather than geographic explanations — like the Harvard economist David S. Landes, whose book “The Wealth and Poverty of Nations” was mentioned favorably by Mr. Romney — would find Mr. Romney’s statement that “culture makes all the difference” dangerously out of date. In fact, Mr. Landes analyzed multiple factors (including climate) in explaining why the industrial revolution first occurred in Europe and not elsewhere.
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