This is a replay of old racist theory that was used at one point to justify that slave-descendant African-Americans are an inferior race. That one stated that slave catchment formed a part of natural selection - only stupid ones got caught. This sounds like a replay of the same old gem.

Frankly, authors of both probably belong in the same place - on trial for attempting to justify genocide and racism.

Aghhh...as an economist your summary of the paper makes me wince (I can't be bothered to read the actual paper to see who's at fault) This is surely a classic example of established correlation being used to imply causality... which is a load of crap as any decent scientist or even economist could tell you.

Icon for obvious reasons....

It's bleeding obvious that africans are less able to feed, clothe, and look after themselves than europeans.

...I think "No shit, Sherlock" was all that needed to be said. Does the Economist have the cheek to charge a fee for this "publication" of theirs?

no sirs, what give us the europeans decendant our economic superiority (right now) is the "beautiful" combination of inquisitive geeks+power freaks+racist superiority belief of the last centuries.

That let a world dominated by european-white for long , with the 20 century full of example of where that cock-tell drive us.

Now the geek side is moving to Asia, in 5 hundred years someone could say exactly the same racist shit but speking of asian ancestors population.

"Nonetheless, Putterman and Weil believe that if the world's poor could learn to be more like European-descended people, they might become big economic successes too - perhaps, in timely fashion, just as the rich economies of the world are largely imploding."

Or, as we used to say, "make the world England".

However, on the other hand, one might give the examples of Liberia and Sierra Leone as countries that tried to "go Euro", and see how well that turned out.

Face it, Europeans are successful because historical we've sat on the funny-coloured locals wherever we go. We're still willing to do it. Hell, we're even willing to squash our fellow whities in the quest for the big bucks. The only thing that stops that is pesky "labour laws". Thankfully the ones with funny-coloured faces don't have labour laws, so we can pay them a pittance while crippling them with unsafe machinery and poisoning them with horrendously toxic substances. Why can't we do that here? If we could, it would cut unemployment at a stroke.

You know what? The relative lack of success of non-whites may well be due to something we used to call "compassion" and "community spirit"....

I for one am proud of my hard-working ancestors.

Another coffee please, need to whittle away some more time on the intertubes.

> Now parents don't want to raise their children at all

That's right Kyle. Well done. All parents, today, do not want to raise their children. This is because every parent on the planet is too busy taking drugs, surfing p@rn, getting involved in gangs, fiddling social security and watching reality TV.

Daily Mail/Encyclopaedia Britannica. What's the difference eh?

This was more or less the premise behind "Guns, Germs and Steel": the Agricultural Revolution depended on domesticatable plant and animal species, which were (1) already most concentrated in the so-called Fertile Crescent and (2) able to withstand migration, as this was mainly along parallels of latitude and therefore to regions with similar climates.

Such thinking was roundly denounced by cultural anthropologists, who could not accept that people were the constant but assigned undue importance to social, cultural and religious factors, and trendy-lefties who had their illusion of there being something inherently evil white people shattered.

I love teh comment about making the world England :) I thought it already was except they spoke funny and had funny food.

Could the result be that 500 years ago there wasnt teh laws there are now so people could be explouted making new wealth ?

Oh well.

I for one would like to see teh reformation of the Empire and those bloody colonists slapped down finally.

No matter what Bill Gates says there is no suchthing as American English, just English.

I am proud to be directly beneath such an excellent troll.

"... other groups of people than Europeans have set out to colonise places in the modern era and done very well: whereas being moved across the oceans as slaves doesn't seem to help people at all."

So, basically, if your ancestors were first to grab a piece of the globalized pie and hang on to it, you're more likely to be rich.

The reason Europe was so successful is because during it's colonial period it was willing and able to go to other less militarily advanced nations and take their resources.

Allow me unlimited and low cost access to the resources of others and I'll be very successful too!

These two American economists must be members of the Aryan Brotherhood or some other White Supremacist organization.

"I for one welcome our Western European overlords!"

...or a look at how colonial European societies dominated the others.

Also, lumping in Oz and NZ into that pie graph is really irritating. Australian indigenous population: 2.5%. NZ indigenous population: 12%. It makes a difference.

"The influence of population origins suggests that there is something that human families and communities transmit from generation to generation — perhaps a form of economic culture, a set of attitudes or beliefs, or informally transmitted capabilities — that is of... importance to economic success."

It's called "inheritance" and it's so well known that we not only have a word for it but also a tax.

AC wrote: And you don't use the term European African for European Africans, or European Americans, why is it only white people in America can be Americans but anyone else is a "insert nation" American?

You mean like those "Irish Americans"? or more like the "Italian Americans"? Those pesky white people, not following your racist agendas, tsk tsk.

Perhaps I missed the point and you actually meant something more along the lines of "Latino" - as far from speaking Latin as you can get!

Its patently obvious this is basically correct.

Who pioneered the Age the Exploration? Where was printing invented? Where did the Industrial Revolution start .? Etc Etc.

Certainly wasnt a mud hut in Zambia.............even Paris know that.

Being an Iberian, I resent the fact that everybody here seems to think that it were the British that set forth the age of exploration.

Truth is, by the time they got there the Portuguese & Spainiards -- and the French and the Dutch, to a lesser extent -- had already done all the work and two centuries had gone by.

Paris, because she has european ancestry (and you'd meet her in World History 101, if ignorance didn't rule nowadays)