o determinismo geográfico

Geography, in short, brings bad tidings, and everyone knows what you do to that kind of messenger. As one practitioner puts it: "Unlike other history . . . the researcher may be held responsible for the results, much as the weather forecaster is held responsible for the failure of the sun to appear when one wishes to go to the beach."

Yet we are not the wiser for denial. On a map of the world in terms of product or income per head, the rich countries lie in the temperate zones, particularly in the northern hemisphere; the poor countries, in the tropics and semitropics. As John Kenneth Galbraith put it when he was an agricultural economist: "[If] one marks off a belt a couple of thousand miles in width encircling the earth at the equator one finds within it no developed countries.... Everywhere the standard of living is low and the span of human life is short." And Paul Streeten, who notes in passing the instinctive resistance to bad news:

Perhaps the most striking fact is that most underdeveloped countries lie in the tropical and semi-tropical zones, between the Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn. Recent writers have too easily glossed over this fact and considered it largely fortuitous. This reveals the deepseated optimistic bias with which we approach problems of development and the reluctance to admit the vast differences in initial conditions with which today's poor countries are faced compared with the pre-industrial phase of more advanced countries.