
A geographic model of why Europe tended to fragmentation, and China to unity - andyljones
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbGOXnElJeU&feature=youtu.be&t=507
======
andyljones
I'm a huge fan of using simulations to ground qualitative arguments. While the
sims usually need to be fine-tuned so extensively as to leave them open to
claims of 'overfitting', the benefit is that it nails the assumptions in your
argument to the church door.

Abstract:

 _Patterns of political unification and fragmentation have crucial
implications for comparative economic development. Diamond (1997) famously
argued that “fractured land” was responsible for China 's tendency toward
political unification and Europe's protracted political fragmentation. We
build a dynamic model with granular geographical information in terms of
topographical features and the location of productive agricultural land to
quantitatively gauge the effects of “fractured land” on state formation in
Eurasia. We find that either topography or productive land alone is sufficient
to account for China's recurring political unification and Europe's persistent
political fragmentation. The existence of a core region of high land
productivity in Northern China plays a central role in our simulations. We
discuss how our results map into observed historical outcomes and assess how
robust our findings are._

[https://sci-hub.tw/https://www.nber.org/papers/w27774](https://sci-
hub.tw/https://www.nber.org/papers/w27774)

