Jared Diamond Interview

An interview with Jared Diamond
Journalist: Today we will be interviewing Jared Diamond, a well-known author who wrote “Guns, Germs, and Steel” which was awarded the Pulitzer prize in the general non-fiction category. He was born in Boston on September 10th, 1937. He studied many things, including ecology, geography, biology, physiology and anthropology. Today we’ll be looking into his theory of what makes countries rich or poor. So, Jared, I’ll kick this interview off by asking what impact you think the geography of a country has on how rich it is.
Jared Diamond: I believe that a country’s wealth is highly dependant on the environment in which the country belongs in. An extremely important part of this environment is the edible plants in the area. In my book “Guns, Germs, and Steel” I discussed how the Europeans first gained a massive head start on becoming a richer country by having many types of nutritious grains that could be easily planted and grown. Many other countries at the time only had grains with low nutrients or grains that were difficult to grow. By having such abundant supplies of grains and other edible plants in Europe domesticating animals became an ease. This paired with the overwhelmingly large amount of domesticable animals in the area helped Europe grow as a country even faster. Some of these animals were used as transportation or labourers, whereas others were used for clothing and food. Most of the world had next to no domesticable animals or the animals had already been hunted into extinction. …show more content…
Jared Diamond: With gradually increasing grain yields and overall number of domesticated animals the Europeans developed a more complex community. This led to less farmers and labourers and an increase in other kinds of jobs such as inventors, writers, soldiers and so on. The increase of inventors led to more technological innovations being discovered at a faster

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