This article discusses German beer production and Japanese milk production as being less efficient than their equivalent industries in the US as a result of legal and cultural factors (Germans liking local beer, Japanese emphasizing freshness).<p>It seems to suggest that more efficient industries would be more desirable; but I’d argue that freshness and variety are more important than efficiency in many regards.<p>(I also say this as someone whose dominant regional milk distributor often distributes milk that’s already sour when opened minutes after purchase a week before the sell-by date, probably because it’s more “efficient” to produce milk a full day’s drive from a factory that’s a full day’s drive from the city; and more “efficient” not to clean their equipment thoroughly. Since few stores here carry any other brands of “normal” milk, I’ve had to start buying a more expensive “organic” brand just to get reliably drinkable milk; but plenty of people can’t afford that.)
<i>Guns, Germs, and Steel</i> is a really good book. Two hospital MD's independently stopped me at gym to say "that's one of the best books I've ever read." And the department chair where I worked exclaimed similarly.<p>Another hypothesis I would posit about the evolution of world powers is that WWII Axis members later reached population maximums and declines <i>before</i> Allied powers, and that that somehow shaped their political and situational values to align them together. It's not obvious until you see population graphs of Japan, Italy and other Axis countries are nearly all in population decline unless other unqiue factors like immigration bolster their numbers.
Oh actually, it's giving me an idea. Someone should try to setup two teams, each supposed to develop the same software on its own. The two teams can speak to each other, they can see the other team code, but they can't merge into one team. I bet the resulting software (the best of the two software) could be significantly better than with one team. (at some point one the team could be instructed to copy the other team's software and work from there for another competition cycle)
On a tangent, the Mixed Mental Arts podcast episode with Diamond is _very_ entertaining.<p>They also interviewed Peter Turchin, who proposes an alternative vision to why certain nations succeed, namely multi-level selection (aka group selection) which I find just as interesting. Diamond seems pretty controversial among anthropologists, likewise multilevel selection is topic of debate among evolutionists. I don’t know enough myself to make an informed judgement in these matters.