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Title: thought provoking
Review: Agree or disagree, you have to admit that there is food for thought in this collection. After all, if culture doesn't matter why is Singapore rich while Banglsdesh starves? The problem with this sort of thing is that it is so hard to pin down. Jared Diamond, after all, can tell us exactly how many domesticable plants there were per square mile on any given coast, and a phalanx of econometric historians tells us how taxes or wages impacted growth at given points in the past. By comparison culture is a slippery customer. Still, this is an interesting read. As a companion volume, I recommend Diana Muir's Reflections in Bullough's Pond, a dazzling little volume that plays out the culture wars on the ground.
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