...On why it's not just about Guns, Germs and Steel
"I'm a huge admirer of Jared Diamond, and I've been inspired by him and indeed influenced by him. I think the idea that competition is a killer app, I credit him with that insight.
"But the emphasis that he puts on geography as a determining factor is something I have a slight problem with, not because it's not helpful. It's clear that the reason Eurasia ends up being a great deal richer and more powerful than, say, Australasia or, for that matter, the Americas, has to do with geography.
"But — and this is the critical point — the Diamond thesis can't really explain why one end of Eurasia ends up dominating the other end; in other words why Europe ends up so much more powerful than China and India and indeed ends up formally ruling India after the mid-18th century.
"And I don't think you can get there with a geographical story ... there isn't a significant enough difference, it seems to me, in geography between the two ends of the Eurasian landmass. And indeed that's why I press the case for an institutional explanation ...
"You can think of this as a big debate between people who think that it's natural resource endowments that determined history — including geography or for that matter climate — and those like me who say ... it's the manmade institutions that make the difference.
"And one reason that I incline strongly towards that second view is that we've conducted some interesting experiments in the last 100 years to see what happens when you make radical institutional changes. We took two very similar populations, living in pretty much the same place, and we divided them — the Germans and the Koreans — into communist and non-communist or capitalist parts.
"And with incredible speed, the institutional changes had massive material consequences. They just changed the way that people behaved. So Germans living in Germany, Koreans living in Korea started to behave totally differently because they had different institutions.
"That seems to me a pretty good illustration of the way institutions matter. And that's why my book is much more about institutions. Although I call them the killer applications to try to attract the attention of my teenage readers, including my own children, I'm really talking about institutions here. And I think they're more important, in the end, than geography."