> Question: What would controlling for racial composition do to these
> results? Clearly there is high collinearity between race and latitude,
> though modern transportation is weakening the connection. If you do
> both latitude and racial composition, what would happen? Does anyone
> have hard evidence on this?
> Prof. Bryan Caplan
Observation: A lot of cultures close to the equator seem to have been
wealthy compared to Europe before the rise of the West aftyer 1500. The
conquistadors compared Technotitlan to Cordoba (the wealthy Spanish
coastal city) and various Arabic cultures close to the equator seem to
have been wealthy.
I think that the wealth/race/latitude thing might be artifact of
colonialism.
Think about it: cultures near the equator exhibit a lot of variation
in wealth before colonialism. Then the West expands into the Americas
and other places. A lot of wealthy cultures near the equator are wiped out
due to conquest or disease (the Aztecs), others are just in general
decline (the Ottomans) and some were very poor to start with (like many in
Central Africa).
So before regressing wealth on racial composition and then making
sweeping conclusions, one should remember that the current concentration
of wealth in the North is really just something that happened in the
last 500 years.
-f
