Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis

by Jared Diamond

For instance, the Finnish verb meaning “to meet” is “tapaa” with a single p, while the verb “to kill” is “tappaa” with a double p. Hence if you ask a Finn to meet you but you mistakenly double the p, you may end up dead.

Languages!

As a result, Finland became the sole continental European country fighting in World War Two to avoid enemy occupation.

Interesting.

“the least awful of several very bad options.”

Jeez.

my younger readers who were not alive during the 1940’s, 1950’s, and 1960’s

Lol!

The percentage of Chileans living below the poverty line dropped from its level of 24% during Pinochet’s last year in power to only 5% by 2003.

Good news!

Indonesia is the world’s fourth most populous country, with about 260 million inhabitants, exceeded only by China, India, and the United States.

Noted for Maria.

Nevertheless, what happened in Indonesia in 1965 and 1966 still ranks as one of the world’s biggest episodes of mass murder since World War Two.

Corruption has decreased, and sometimes it gets punished.

But history rarely presents us with either pure evil or pure good, and history should be reviewed honestly.

But Indonesia didn’t fall apart. It built from scratch, surprisingly quickly, a sense of national identity.

Germany had lost World War Two and Britain had won it, but it was West Germany rather than Britain that then created the economic miracle.

My German friends with experience of the U.S. variously either rate Germany today as much less authoritarian than the U.S.,

On October 3, 1990 East Germany was dissolved, and its districts joined (West) Germany’s as new states (Bundesländer).

There are many countries that have much smaller populations than Japan’s, and that are nevertheless rich and important players on the world stage, including Australia, Finland, Israel, the Netherlands, Singapore, Sweden, Switzerland, and Taiwan.

Then why does everybody ignore Taiwan?

Every year, Japan legally circumvents those quotas by killing large numbers of whales for the supposed purposes of research, then publishes little or no research on those dead whales and instead sells them for meat.

Mad!

Winston Churchill quipped, in response to someone expounding to him the usual complaints about democracy’s disadvantages, that democracy is indeed the worst form of government, except for all of the alternative forms that at one time or another have been tried.

Compromise reduces tyranny by those in power, who might otherwise ignore opposite viewpoints.

the reality is that every single American today is either an immigrant or else descended from immigrants.

Today, though, many of our entertainments—our smartphones, iPods, and video games—are solitary rather than social. They are individually selected niche entertainment, like individually selected niche political information.

We tend to have strong inhibitions about being rude to a live human who is two feet away from us, and whom we can see and hear. But we lose those inhibitions when people are reduced to words on a screen. It’s much easier to be rude and dismissive towards words on a screen than towards a live person looking you in the face.

Once we’ve thus gotten accustomed to being abusive at a distance, it’s an easier next step to being abusive also to a live person.

Since Indonesia resumed free democratic elections after 1999, Indonesian voter turnout has fluctuated between 86% and 90%,

For comparison, U.S. turnout of eligible voters for our national elections averages only 60% for years of presidential elections, and 40% for years of midterm congressional elections.

All of these selective obstacles contribute to the fact that voter turnout is over 80% for Americans with incomes exceeding $150,000, but under 50% for Americans with incomes under $20,000.

All schoolteachers in South Korea, Singapore, and Finland come from the top third of their school classes, but nearly half of American teachers come from the bottom third of their classes.

Sad.

Non-Americans often comment on the optimism and “can-do” attitude of Americans: we view problems as existing in order to be solved.

U.S. in the last 70 years has jettisoned long-standing values that were acknowledged to have become outdated: our foreign political isolation was cast aside after World War Two, and our discrimination against women and our race-based discrimination have been in retreat since the 1950’s.

QUESTION: When will the U.S. take its problems seriously? ANSWER: When powerful rich Americans begin to feel physically unsafe.

What is going to happen to the U.S.? That will depend upon the choices that we make. The enormous fundamental advantages that we enjoy mean that our future can remain as bright as has been our past, if we deal with the obstacles that we are putting in our own way. But we are presently squandering our advantages.

Skepticism about science is increasingly widespread in the U.S., and that’s a very bad portent, because science is basically just the accurate description and understanding of the real world.