Intro

Before we get into today’s episode, I want to take a second to plug a pretty cool thing I made that can really help out anybody who has learned a little bit of Spanish and wants to go much deeper. It is the Mexican Spanish Master course.

It’s 90 minutes of video lessons about Mexican slang, culture, and profanity. You can download the videos, the audio files, as well as the transcripts, and listen to the course in your spare time.

This course did not exist when I needed it to exist, but it does exist now, and you don’t have to spend hundreds of hours listening to people say these words but not understanding them, and then slowly putting together a vocab list of new words that your teachers never bothered to tell you about because they were teaching you a generic international Spanish.

If this sounds interesting, check out digitalnomad.mx and scroll down right below the email signup form, and you can join The Mexican Spanish Master Course.

That’s it. Let’s get into the show.

Nogales VS Nogales

My research for The Mexican Revolution took me on several detours. One of those detours was the Labyrinth of Solitude. Another detour was Why Nations Fail.

If I could go back in time to when I was 18 or 19, when I was deciding to go to college and thinking about majoring in Global Studies, which is the ridiculous Marxist version of Poli Sci and International Relations, I would say tell myself first of all not to major in Global Studies because it would be a colossal waste of time, and I would tell myself, “If you really want to understand global development, college will not explain it to you. You should start with two books. One of those books is Why Nations Fail. The other is Guns, Germs, and Steel.”

In college I had to read a ton of irrelevant nonsense: Postmodern imbeciles like Horkheimer and Adorno, Foucault, and a bunch of other people whose appraisal of global development is so flawed that it’s honestly baffling to me that anybody takes them seriously in the 21st century.

These two books basically took my Bachelor’s degree, threw it in the garbage, set it on fire, and then spit in my face. They showed me that my degree is EVEN LESS VALUABLE than a Gender Studies degree. I graduated with a piece of paper that’s worth less than Comparative Literature.

But Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson, and Jared Diamond have at least helped me stop believing the total nonsense I believed in my 20’s. I can’t turn back the clock, but I can hopefully serve as a warning to anybody who’s thinking about going down the same stupid road I went down. Don’t do it. Just read the two books I mentioned.

Why Nations Fail and Guns, Germs, and Steel offer arguments that in some ways compete with each other and in some ways complement each other.

Right away in the first chapter of Why Nations Fail, they smacked me so hard that my face still hurts.

The simplest way to understand the basic argument of the book is to look at the differences between Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora, Mexico. And then North Korea vs South Korea.

The differences between those places are not explained by geography or culture. These are places separated only by a little fence, not by oceans and not by cultures. Just a fence.

There are differences in culture, especially between North and South Korea, but they didn’t start that way. And those cultural differences didn’t cause the South Korea to win and North Korea to fail.

Acemoglu and Robinson argue that the real determining factors in a country’s prosperity are its economic and political institutions. To put it in as plain language as I can, the countries with good institutions are prosperous while the countries with bad institutions fail. To be clear, Acemoglu and Robinson aren’t calling them “good” and “bad” institutions. I am. The language the authors use is inclusive institutions and extractive institut