Guns, Germs and Steel

“I get the sense that a lot of the people criticizing it—calling it crude geographic determinism—have not actually read the entire book. In fact, it is exactly the opposite of crude.” Read more...

The best books on The Great Divergence

Davis Kedrosky, Economist

“The book is a masterpiece in terms of integrating a vast range of material from different disciplines, material on language, archaeology, comparative bio-geography, with also lots of his own ethnographic field studies peppered in there…whether you think it is right or wrong, it’s spurred an incredible amount of research. People took it seriously and fully engaged with it. It’s driven economists to get better data to test the theory. So, for example, there’s a number of economic studies now supporting Diamond’s basic thesis. Researchers went and got the date for the earliest beginning of agriculture in different parts of the world, and then used that to predict modern economic development—GDP per capita in the year 2000. You control for a lot of factors statistically, and it is still seems to be the case that what Jared Diamond presented very qualitatively—that the earliness of agriculture really matters—does hold when you do statistical analyses.” Read more...

The best books on Cultural Evolution

Joseph Henrich

“He explains the interaction of geography and science with economic development…It’s about understanding how the disparities of income and wealth which we have today have built up over millennia.” Read more...

The best books on Economics in the Real World

John Kay, Economist

“Europe has a very wide East-West axis, which goes all the way to China, we happen to be on the same latitude so there have been all sorts of trade going on for thousands and thousands of years” Read more...

The best books on The Environment

Mark Lynas, Environmentalist