Yali’s question

In 1972, on a beach in New Guinea, a local politician named Yali asked Jared Diamond a simple question. Why had white people brought so much cargo, so many goods and tools, while New Guineans had so little of their own?

Diamond spent years on the answer. He firmly rejects the idea that some peoples are smarter than others. Instead, he argues, the uneven world we live in was shaped by the environments different peoples happened to start in.