Why warm countries are poorer

Popular joke here in Brazil: Why don't we have mafias? Too hot to wear suits.

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.

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

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?

I wish it is that simple. AC is everywhere now and my country is still poor.

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.

You're over indexing on the genetics impacts of these things over the cultural impacts.

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.

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.

> 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

Yes it is particularly stupid because there are European people doing way better than the natives in many of those hot countries. The argument is always that the bad white people oppress the natives but at some point, there are patterns that can't be ignored. Many places that the colons were left for the natives to run went to shit also, so clearly, it's not just about the climate.

The amount of bullshit people can say for bullshit political correctness virtue signaling is absolutely insane.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

In favor of what form of government?

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

The "correlation" listed seems very odd: > Diseases: > The warmer the country is, the poorer it is, and the unhealthier it is.

I think I missed it but where do they say "brown people are just worse"?

> 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.