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!