Aug 9, 2009
Lunch with the FT: Jared Diamond
Jared Diamond’s is yet another book that I read after hearing it garnered a recommendation by Charlie Munger (and a Pulitzer). It’s a great book that helps provide an explanation based in science for why Europe conquered and colonized most of the world. The book’s theories are often debated and even controversial, but it’s well worth taking the time to read. I was pleased to see Jared Diamond as the feature of this week’s Lunch with the FT (one of my favorite features of the newspaper):
“There is a parallel based on the same fundamental mechanisms of the economic collapse that we’re seeing now and the collapse of past civilisations such as the Maya,” he continues. “The message is that when you have a large society that consumes lots of resources, that society is likely to collapse once it hits its peak.”
He helps himself to a mouthful of vegetables, bought from the supermarket but as fresh-tasting as if he had dug them from the garden. Chewing slowly, he continues: “The Maya collapse began in the late 700s, and then simply the most advanced society in the New World collapsed over the course of several decades. They were mostly gone a century later,” he says wistfully. “When a complex structure like that starts collapsing, you are pulling out dominoes in the whole structure.”
I ask whether Lehman Brothers is such a domino. “The events of last October have crept up seemingly so suddenly,” he replies: “I say ‘seemingly’ because, in a sense, it is not at all sudden. Any idiot knows that if you are drawing more money out of your bank than you are paying into your bank, then eventually something is going to happen. Somehow this lesson escaped the decision-makers in the US government.”
As always, be sure to read the rest of the article.
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