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Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

We’re not the only ones with a wealth of natural resources. Canada, Russia, Argentina, Australia, Brazil all have per capita even more natural resources at their disposal.

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With shitty climates. The surface area of optimal climate in the US is likely larger than that of all the countries you've named combined. What's optimal? For example in Canada most farmed areas yield only one harvest per year. And most of the land is barren wasteland. You have some of it as well, but it's not the majority of the territory.

Brazil is pretty damn fertile, and nearly as large as the US though... If we're just talking about farmable land area, I'd be surprised if the US is larger than Brazil. Farmed land area is a different thing though. Not sure how what compares.

Argentina seems like a counterexample here: the Pampas are one of the world's major temperate agricultural regions.

Argentina's arable land is just 27% of what the USA has. Fact-checking myself... the USA has more arable land than Canada, Australia and Argentina combined. Russia has a lot, but the USA has the most. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_arable_la...

Not sure where to find an aggregate growing days figure, but there's clearly less of them per arable surface area in Canada compared to the USA.

The thread was about climate. US is 3.5x greater than Argentina.

Not strictly about climate, also about surface area in optimal climate.

Not per capita. Look, Japan (and S Korea, Taiwan, Switzerland, etc) have shit for natural resources yet they are not technologically retarded. They have a highly advanced economies and societies.

This is drifting from the point. The thread was about the share of territory with optimal farming climate, not per-capita anything, and not whether resource-poor countries can be advanced.

Honestly if other countries did the same stuff as Argentina they'd probably be way worse off than Argentina as the country is still relatively wealthy. They were arguably too rich (and not populated enough with 4 million people in 1900) for a while making industry, especially export oriented industry, less viable sort of like dutch disease.

Geographic determinism is one of those theories that explains everything after the fact and predicts almost nothing

Most of this isn't geographical determinism, though. The death of the indigenous americans (allowing settlers to come in and take over), the brain drain after WW2, the first modern democracy (even if the Constitution is a bit kludgy), etc., all not geographical determinism.

You could say that about any other determinism. Nevertheless, it's a huge factor in the wealth of nations and a pillar of geopolitics. It's also why we don't all speak german today... /s

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