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RADIO 4
CURRENT AFFAIRS

ANALYSIS
THE RAIN IN SPAIN
TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED
DOCUMENTARY
Presenter: Diane Coyle
Producer: Zareer Masani
Editor: Nicola Meyrick
BBC
White City
201 Wood Lane
London
W12 7TS
020 8752 6252
Broadcast Date: 31.07.03
Repeat Date:
03.08.03
Tape Number:
Duration: 2735

Taking part in order of appearance:

Jared Diamond
Professor of Geography, University of California, Los
Angeles
Jeffrey Sachs
Director of the Earth Institute, Columbia University
Alain de Botton
Writer and philosopher
Niall Ferguson
Professor of Financial History, New York University
Sheila Page
Research Fellow at the Overseas Development Institute
Razia Khan
Chief Economist for Africa at Standard Chartered Bank

Andrew Simms
Policy Director of the New Economics Foundation

COYLE: Do you have a sunny disposition? Or

a stormy temperament? Perhaps you wilt as the thermometer climbs in the
summer - or get depressed during the short, dark days of January. Just how
much does the weather affect us our moods and personality, and even our
incomes and health?
DIAMOND:
Cool climates are bad for germs and
diseases and parasites because the parasites and germs die out in the winter
and they come back in the summer. Tropical climates - parasites can thrive
all year round, so tropical countries generally have a heavier burden of
disease than do temperate zone countries.
SACHS: The evidence linking climate and
economic performance is extremely strong. It happens, for example, that
virtually all of the rich countries in the world are in the temperate zones,
virtually all of the countries in the tropics are poor with very, very few
exceptions and exceptions that tend to prove the rule.
DE BOTTON:
I do think that climate has an
unfortunate role to play in the way we see the world, how we feel, because
most of the time we find ourselves in the wrong climate and its rather in a
way insulting to feel that were so determined by something thats
completely out of our control, because just as you cant control your genes,
you cant control the weather.
COYLE: A geographer, an economist and a
philosopher for each of them were shaped in vital ways by the climate in
which we live. Theyre reviving a debate that stretches from the Stoics of
Ancient Greece, who thought human beings could rise above their external
environment, to Friedrich Nietszche, who argued in the 19th century that the
weather actually makes us what we are.
Who could doubt our mood is affected by sunny or gloomy conditions? Of
course, its all too easy to reduce the arguments to cliches: Northerners are
dour and puritanical, whereas people from the sunny south are hedonistic
and carefree. In at least one respect, though, the old stereotypes are still
true, according to the writer and philosopher Alain de Botton.
DE BOTTON:
The big distinction is the level of
what, for want of a better word, one could call sensuality. As soon as its
hot, youre made much more aware of your body and of nature and of the

outside world and air temperature all of these things that when youre
very wrapped up and very much inside, you tend to forget, and that has an
impact on sexuality. Its definitely true that most puritanical movements
have been the work of the North. And one only has to spend some time in
Brazil, for example, to see that however prudish some of the dictates of the
Catholic church might sound, a few minutes on the beach in Rio will
quickly persuade you that the weather has had a real impact on this. And
of course this was a point that really exercised missionaries who came from
Northern climates. They were appalled by what they saw as the excessive
sensuality of the natives.
COYLE: As they would have been by all those
Northern party-goers heading for the sun in Ibiza this summer. But sex
wasnt the only weakness of the flesh missionaries to steamy, tropical lands
needed to worry about. Disease was another not only diseases imported
by the colonists but also native illnesses. Surprisingly, perhaps, this old
concern is still shared by one of the Wests most influential development
economists. Despite the advances of medicine, the prevalence of malaria in
particular is central to what Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth
Institute at Columbia University, describes as tropical underdevelopment.
SACHS: The closer you look at it, the more
you find that Africa is far and away the natural home of this disease, and
the burden of malaria in Africas economic development has been
absolutely profound. It has meant that infant mortality rates have been
vastly higher in Africa than in other parts of the world, even when
countries have invested the same amounts in healthcare, even when income
levels are otherwise similar, and that has led to a kind of poverty trap for
Africa. And when you trace out the economics of the last fifty years, what
you find with essentially no exceptions, is that the highly malarious areas
of the world and principally sub-Sahara and Africa simply did not achieve
economic development even when other conditions of governance, of
political institutions simply dont show up as explaining the difference.
COYLE: Some regions are dealt a bad hand by
their geography. Climate and ecology can make them unsuitable for settled
agriculture, so they never generate the surplus of wealth that lies at the root
of successful industrial development. The history of military conquest and
colonialism by the west has reinforced this natural bad luck. But
vulnerability to tropical disease and parasites remains fundamental to
global inequality. Thats the thesis popularized by Jared Diamond ,
Professor of Geography at the University of California in Los Angeles, in
his bestselling book, Guns, germs and steel.
DIAMOND:
I do a lot of my fieldwork in Papua
New Guinea which lies on the Equator, and malaria is a big health problem
there just as in Africa and South East Asia. My New Guinea friends
periodically have attacks of malaria, and when they have an attack of
malaria theyre out for a week or two or they have low-grade malaria and
that means that they are low on energy. And then they have a shorter life
span dying in their forties, fifties or sixties. So you get someone and train
them and educate them and they are then a full scale professional at age
twenty-five or thirty. And in a tropical country where they then die at age
forty-five or fifty-five, you get only twenty-five or thirty years out of them,
whereas in the temperate zones, with a longer life span into their eighties,
you can get forty, fifty, sixty years productive work out of them.

COYLE:

Of course, some modern killers like

SARS and AIDS dont respect the thermometer. As weve seen, they can
thrive just as much in freezing Toronto as in steamy Hong Kong. But quite
apart from nasty germs and parasites, does climate perhaps have an equally
important psychological impact on our well-being and, ultimately,
productivity? Alain de Botton thinks it might.
DE BOTTON:
In an environment which is very harsh
where you cant rely on nature to be good to you, you have to do an awful
lot of planning ahead and that shapes the character of people - particularly,
for example, if you look at the architecture. Northern architecture is all
about sort of keeping out the bad weather and its much, much more solid
than architecture that arises in sunnier climates and you have to plan much
more for how to survive a winter.
COYLE: Some thinkers have been happy to use
that kind of determinism to explain why people who live in tropical
countries are inferior, their tropical lassitude.
DE BOTTON:
I do know that the kind of thinking
that I do becomes quite impossible once the temperature reaches above
about twenty-six degrees. So, for me, I find it quite plausible to think that
its hard to start writing philosophy above about twenty-seven degrees, and
you know in a way the history of the world kind of bears that out. I
imagine that Greek philosophy was mostly written in the winter months.
Over a certain temperature it becomes very hard to sustain a certain kind of
thought. It also becomes much, much more desirable to go and jump in
some water and not to go in for the kind of introspective gloom that its
very natural to feel in Denmark on a November night. I remember an essay
by Cyril Connolly where he says that the invention of air conditioning is
going to turn a whole swathe of the globe that hitherto hasnt been
interested in literature, its going to turn them towards literature because
his view very much was literature is something you do when its raining or
what you do when its quite cold.
COYLE: But arent we forgetting examples like
the ancient Hindu philosophers who wrote the Sanskrit Vedas in far from
temperate climes? We in the West have a long tradition of rationalizing
our own sense of superiority. The 18th century French philosopher
Montesquieu attributed the global dominance of Enlightenment Europe to
tropical lassitude, the lack of energy that comes from living in a hot land.
He even blamed hot climates for oriental despotism. But the history of
Ancient Greece and Rome, and more recently of the great, pre-colonial
tropical empires of Central America and Moghul India suggest that
sunshine doesnt necessarily make emperors lazy. Niall Ferguson is
Professor of Financial History at New York University and the author of a
recent history of the British Empire.
FERGUSON:
Theres certainly a temptation if
youre a new Montesquieu to say the world is the way it is because its the
way it is, and thats just the way the weather forecast was always going to
make it. Im very strongly opposed to that. I think its a defeatist
rationalization of the way the world is. I think its unhistorical as well.
Now I firmly believe that in this debate, its the institutions that matter and
that good institutions will deliver better economic outcomes regardless of
whether youre living in the Arctic or in the tropics.
COYLE: But there is this quite compelling fact,
isnt there, that all the rich countries are in temperate zones and almost all
the countries in the tropical zones are very poor? How do you explain that
fact?
FERGUSON:

Well it wasnt true, of course, always.

If you go back five hundred years, the richest and most advanced societies
included Central America and large parts of the Indian sub-continent. It
wasnt Northern Europe and it certainly wasnt the British Isles. So the big
story that economic historians are grappling with is the story of divergence
big time. Peru is still where Peru always was and Scotland is still where
Scotland always was and India is still where India always was, but the
economic performance of these parts of the world has diverged quite
dramatically in the space of half a millennium.
COYLE: The most dramatic reversal of
historical fortunes occurred in the region around the eastern Mediterranean
which included modern day Iraq. This was once the cradle of human
civilisation. As its name the Fertile Crescent suggests, geography gave it
this head start but as Jared Diamond explains, it was also later the cause
of its decline.
DIAMOND:
Some environments are much more
fragile than other environments, in particular environments with low
rainfall. Once you deforest them, the forest grows back more slowly, you
are more likely to get soil erosion. And an example of that is who led the
world ten and a half thousand years ago? Iraq. Iraq was where agriculture
developed, Iraq was where writing developed, Iraq was where copper
metallurgy and then bronze metallurgy developed, but Iraq doesnt lead the
world today. Iraq, and to a lesser extent Greece, South Western Asia and
South Eastern Europe have the misfortune to be in a area of lower rainfall
than North Western Europe. And so those areas were more readily
deforested. There were bigger problems with soil erosion, failing of dams
and terracing systems. And thats a very important part of the equation of
how countries become rich or stop being rich.
COYLE: Climate and geography offer a
plausible account of why fertility abandoned the Fertile Crescent and
traveled northwards into Europe. But other cases seem much harder to
explain in the same terms. Take China, for example, with its vast and
diverse territory, a mainly temperate climate and whats more a
commanding early lead in economic development. Why did it fall so far
behind the less civilised European countries on exactly the same latitude
after about 1500?
DIAMOND:
I see the main reason as being
ultimately geographical - namely, if you look at a map, China doesnt have
those big peninsulas like Italy and Greece that became independent, China
doesnt have those big islands like Britain and Ireland that became
independent. So China was unified early, 221BC. Its been unified most
of the time ever since, whereas Europe for geographic reasons was never
unified. But Europes disunity meant two thousand different experiments
competing with each other, whereas Chinas unity meant that one emperor
could turn off the tap, and thats what happened after 1500.
COYLE: But thats sort of counterintuitive
because if there has been so much conflict in Europe, you might expect that
to have been damaging rather than helpful?
DIAMOND:
Yes, its true that disunity is a mixed
bag disunity brings wars but disunity also brings advantages, and the net
effect in Europe has been to stimulate technology. One can think of
disunity as having some optimal intermediate value. China was too
unified, the Indian continent was too disunified, again for geographic
reasons. Europe, with its intermediate degree of disunity - that seems to
have been the optimal amount.
COYLE:

Lucky for Europe, then, to have had

natural boundaries that made it optimally quarrelsome. But is this

explanation a bit too convenient, a retrospective validation of European
political and economic supremacy? Historian Niall Ferguson gives a very
different account of why India declined compared with some other parts of
the British empire.
FERGUSON:
If ones trying to explain why India
wasnt Canada in the 19th century or Australia or New Zealand, then its
very tempting to say its the geography/environment, stupid - but, no, it
seems to me thats not the right answer. The big difference between
Canada and India circa 1700 was that India was already a very
sophisticated, populous civilization. It wasnt, therefore, a terribly
encouraging prospect for would be migrants from the poorer peripheral
parts of North Western Europe. Canada was very thinly populated and,
therefore, one could start from scratch in Canada. One could arrive in
millions and build a new society in the image but not in the exact image of
Western Europe without any real and serious opposition. So it seems to me
to have much more to do with whether one could start institutionally from
scratch or not.
COYLE: Its clear that the pattern of natural
advantage for different countries has been far from permanent over time, as
economic fortunes ebb and flow. But for Jeffrey Sachs its technologies
more than institutions that account for such reversals.
SACHS: What is a favourable geographic
condition can change as technology changes. North America, for example,
was very sparsely populated for very deep reasons before the Columbian
incursion in 1492. One reason was that a lot of the best staple crops that
would end up supporting large populations in North America didnt exist in
North America, wheat being the predominant example. Wheat was
brought by the European colonizers, it changed the history of the world.
The idea that there can be changes in whats favourable or not favourable
depending on diffusion of new technologies does not diminish in any way
the basic idea that for prolonged periods of time a particular place may be
favoured by its geography and climate relative to another place. Place
matters but its conditioned by human knowledge.
COYLE: How far human knowledge conditions
geography depends to a large extent on how easily new technologies can
spread from one country to another. The main channel, now and in the past,
has been trade. And the development of trade routes, too, was governed by
geography.
PAGE:
I wouldnt put that in the past tense; it
remains one of the most important aspects of trade.
COYLE: For Sheila Page, Research Fellow at
the Overseas Development Institute, access to the sea is still crucial.
PAGE:
If you look at prosperity now, Europe
is a little of an exception but thats because we have two very long,
accessible rivers in the Danube and the Rhein, so effectively all of Europe
has sea borders. If you look at Latin America, the two countries without
sea transport are Bolivia and Paraguay, two of the poorest in the continent.
If you look at Africa, it has the highest proportion of landlocked countries;
they are also among the poorest in the world. Having access to the
cheapest sea routes was very important. Although air transport and the
growth of services rather than goods means that sea transport is no longer
the only type of trade, it remains dominant.

COYLE: Does that mean that island nations

like Britain and Japan still have trading advantages?
PAGE:
Yes island combined with good
ports, of course. Location, location, location applies to trade as well as to
everything else.
COYLE: For her, a successful location isnt just
a matter of climate. Other blessings, including a coast or navigable river
and the availability of natural resources, are the important variables. And
the calculus of success can change over time.
PAGE:
If we had been having this
conversation fifteen hundred years ago, it would have been why have the
Romans been able to take over from the Egyptians and the Greeks. At
different times different types of industrial advantage have been important:
agriculture at the time of the development of wheat in the Fertile Crescent;
coal at the time of the Industrial Revolution, which gave an advantage to
Northern Europe; oil of course in this century. The geography does, I
think, have a very important role, but it is a changing one. It is changing
now in the sense that the access to air transport, the importance of services
is making areas like inland bits of India able to develop through call centres
in a way in which was never possible before. You need to ask what is the
suitable geography for something, not what is a suitable geography. There
are no absolutes in this.

COYLE: Now more than ever globalization,

new technology is offering countries the chance to overcome the
drawbacks of their climate and location. Natural resources obviously count
for much less, now that few poor countries plan for growth based on heavy
industries. Razia Khan is Chief Economist for Africa at the Standard
Chartered Bank.
KHAN: Financial services are seen as a very
big possibility in terms of future growth because obviously then geography
matters less. That can really be of benefit to countries that were relatively
isolated and are now less so, countries like Dubai. Traditionally that had
been very reliant on oil exports. Looking for ways to diversify, financial
services are going to be a big part of it, as is the case with Bahrain. In
Africa, countries like Botswana and Mauritius.
COYLE: Lee Kuan Yu once said that air
conditioning was the most revolutionary discovery. Do you think its a
case of centres like these overcoming the constraints of climate and
geography?
KHAN: Yes. Increasingly, especially with the
shift from agriculture, away even from manufacturing to service based
economies, climate is just not as important as it was. Cyclones, whereas
they once might have had a very significant impact on growth, they may
have been enough to take several percentage points off the growth rate,
may now only affect growth in one quarter.
COYLE: That isnt a view shared by all
financial market experts. Some blame the El Nino weather pattern in the
Pacific Ocean at least partly for the financial hurricane that disrupted the
global markets in 1997 and 98. Still, new technologies could be helping
rising financial centres such as Dubai and Botswana to join a handful of
earlier tropical success stories like Singapore. If more and more work

involves tapping at a keyboard in an air-conditioned office, is it time to

ditch, then, the outmoded colonial notion that work, unlike love, is easier in
a cold climate? Alain de Botton thinks what matters most is not whether
its hot or cold but whether its unpredictable something were all too
familiar with here in Britain.
DE BOTTON:
People here respond in a much more
Mediterranean way to the weather when its warm than people in the
Mediterranean. Suddenly everyone stops working, starts wearing t-shirts
and starts behaving like a clich version of a Spaniard. Actually if you go
to Madrid on a very hot day, everyones working and no ones paying very
much attention to the weather. The reason is that its pretty much nice
weather for five months of the year, whereas in Britain its pretty much
nice weather for about six days of the year. So I think theres an
interesting connection between the length of good weather or bad weather
and how people are affected by it. So when you go from Britain and feel
quite hot on the beach in Spain, you think, ooh, no one could get any work
done and you tend to imagine that all Spaniards must be lazy. So I think
that these geographical theories are often the work of Northerners who go
South and sweat a lot in the first few weeks that theyre in a place.
COYLE: So he believes that many people can
operate at temperatures above 27 degrees, even if philosophers have their
thermostat set lower. In fact, most people in tropical countries work much
harder than those of us lucky enough to live in a rich, temperate economy.
The average worker in Hong Kong or Malaysia clocks up nearly 50 hours
of work a week compared to a typical 40-hour week in Britain and a legal
maximum of 35 hours in France. Professor Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia
University is adamant that his own arguments about poverty in the tropics
have absolutely nothing to do with any natural indolence on the part of
those living under the heat of an equatorial sun.
SACHS: That people in the tropics dont work
very hard is one of the most pernicious, maybe self-serving, ideological
fantasies of rich people living in the temperate zone. Ive never seen such
backbreaking work as Ive seen of peasant farmers stooped in the fields
trying to stay alive in Africa, in tropical Asia, in tropical Latin America.
Its a struggle for survival. Thats still the condition of around one billion
people living in the most extreme poverty in our planet, virtually all of
them in the tropics, and the idea that they have an easy life and have just
chosen to lie under the hammock as the tropical fruits fall to the ground for
their eating pleasure is one of the most ridiculous propositions that still has
some circulation in our world.
COYLE: If tropical lassitude is such a myth, are
we likely to see more poor countries overcoming their traditional
geographical disadvantages as new technologies become more widely
available to them? After all, some of them, countries like Malaysia,
Mauritius and Botswana, have in recent decades been growing extremely
rapidly, starting to make their way into the ranks of the worlds richer
nations. Jeffrey Sachs believes that the secret of these success stories lies
in acknowledging the geographical realities.
SACHS: Malaysias probably the classic
example. Malaysia could not get rich, they realised, on the basis of their
traditional tropical crops. They would have stagnated, as so many other
tropical agriculture producers did. They were able to get a foothold into
the new manufacturing sectors that were being globalised already around
the 1970s electronic semi-conductors and the like. How did they do that?
Did they make it by focusing on their tropical location and advantages?
No, they worked around it.

COYLE: Dont you think theres a danger in

talking about tropical underdevelopment of encouraging a kind of fatalism
about the prospects for very poor countries? I mean you might not think
this, but others might conclude that theyre doomed by their weather, their
climates their destiny.
SACHS: As soon as I say the word geography
someone says determinism; as soon as I say that climate or place might
matter, someone says fatalism. But of course what good analysis shows is
where you ought to invest to overcome the liabilities. Thats not a matter
for fatalism; thats a matter for activism to say wed better invest in
malaria control in sub-Saharan Africa. Its a matter of directing the
development agenda. The fact that the last ten thousand missions of the
International Monetary Fund and World Bank went to Africa without
mentioning malaria is really damning of the more traditional ways of
looking at things.
COYLE: So we need to think much harder
about the specific obstacles faced by developing countries in their unique
geographical context. But thats a task which could be seriously
complicated by rapid and unpredictable climate change. If global warming
radically alters familiar weather patterns, wont it also affect the current
pattern of natural advantage and disadvantage?
SIMMS: One of the biggest problems with
climate change is that it introduces this terrible wild card of instability
which means that youre not going to be knowing from one year to the next
whether youre going to have to throw money more towards responding to
extreme weather events and natural disasters, outbreaks of new diseases
which were previously unfamiliar, massive crop failures.
COYLE: Andrew Simms is Policy Director of
the New Economics Foundation.
SIMMS: I think its this wild card of instability
that climate change introduces, which is going to be one of the biggest
problems for the poorest countries. Two years ago, I travelled to the very
small South Pacific island of Tuvalu where people have survived in an
extremely hostile environment for many, many hundreds of years. Now
theyre just beginning to be tipped over the edge because of the increasing
instability in rainfall patterns, changes in sea level. When youre living on
the edge like that climatically or economically, climate change could well
be the straw that breaks the global camels back.

COYLE: The exodus from Tuvalu has begun;

3,000 inhabitants are already living overseas and the remaining 9,300 are
being gradually relocated from their island, just a few metres above the
current sea level. Theyre the early losers from the unpredictability of
climate change. But those of us who live in the temperate north shouldnt
be too complacent about the future. The fastest-growing economies of
recent times have been places much hotter than even a warmed-up British
summer. Theres no guarantee that well be winners in the climate stakes in
future, just because we have been for the past five hundred years. Alain de
Botton reminds us that cold good, hot bad hasnt always been the correct
rule of thumb.
DE BOTTON:
The Romans thought that anyone
living above what they called the olive line, the line above which olive

trees cannot grow, anyone living above that line was a barbarian and was
also lazy, very fierce, but completely stupid. And the reason for that view
is there was no other example of anything else to them. I mean when you
went to Germany in Roman times, it really was a pretty barbaric place no
one was driving a BMW or a Volkswagon. So I think that people do tend
to argue always on the basis of precedent and often they look at quite a
limited range of examples that suits their hunches. Its possible that as we
go forward in history what were going to find is more and more hot
countries developing their economies, developing new ways of life and,
who knows, you know in fifty or a hundred years time its totally possible
that these hot countries will have the advantage over cold ones.
COYLE: If hes right, watch out for the new
theory linking damp skies and low temperatures to northern sluggishness
and the counter-arguments pointing to the economic dynamism of Finland
and the sensuality of the Icelandic. Yes, of course that sounds silly - the
weather doesnt determine our destiny as individuals. But climate does
affect us just as much as history. In the age-old argument between nature
and nurture, environment and institutions, our climate is as important as
our cultural heritage.