Jared Diamond on Leaders, Luck, and Irreplaceability

Tyler Cowen (0:04)

Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. For a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links, visit conversationswithtyler.com.

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today, I am greatly honored to be speaking with Jared Diamond.

Jared studied physiology at Harvard and Cambridge, and became initially a leading expert on the gallbladder. He is also an ornithologist, anthropologist, sociologist, evolutionary biologist, ecologist, and environmental historian with a working knowledge of archaeology, genetics, and the epidemiology of human diseases. And on top of all that, he is professor of geography at UCLA. He has a new and notable book out called, Profits, Profits, Coaches and Kings. When Do Leaders Matter? Jared, welcome.

Jared Diamond (1:09)

Thank you. It's a pleasure to be with you.

Tyler Cowen (1:11)

Who do you think is the least replaceable leader in human history?

Jared Diamond (1:16)

Wow.

Wow. The least replaceable leader in human history.

Frankly, my answer is none. There has been no unreplaceable leader in human history because over a long time, things wash out. A candidate, of course, would be Jesus Christ. But there were half a dozen other prophets in the Roman Empire at that time discussed in the New Testament. And if Christ had died in childbirth, one of those other prophets might have taken over. So I would say that in the long run, there is no leader that has made a difference.

Tyler Cowen (1:54)

Well, you say might have taken over, but that's probabilistic, right? Say with a 40 percent chance, someone else would have taken over. It still seems an expected value terms. Christ made an enormous difference.

Jared Diamond (2:06)

Certainly his religion made an enormous difference. Christ himself were the charismatic founder.

But a religion needs three things. It needs a charismatic founder, it needs an organizer, and often it needs a general because new religions often face opposition. The organizer for Christianity was Saint Paul. In the case of the Mahdi's religion of the Sudan in the late 1800s, the Mahdi was the charismatic founder, and he was the organizer, and he was the general.

In the case of Islam, Mohammed was the founder, and the organizer, and the general. So religions may have three roles, some of which are sometimes played by the same person.

Tyler Cowen (2:55)

But without the figure of Mohammed at exactly the time he came along, is it not quite easy to imagine a Middle East not unified under Islam, not unified with the common language of Arabic, in some ways maybe a bit more like the Caucasus, which remains a crazy quilt of different patterns. And thus Mohammed is one of the three or four most consequential leaders ever.

Jared Diamond (3:15)

That's possible. That's the big question. It's harder to become clear about Mohammed than it is about Christ, because we don't know what the weather was like in Arabia at that time. Weather makes a big difference. If it was rainy, that would mean lots of plant growth for lots of babies, and for feeding an army. We just don't have information on weather in Arabia at that time. A counter example is Genghis Khan, Genghis Khan who developed the largest land empire in world history, all the way from China to Poland. Why did Genghis Khan do it? When there were other step leaders like Adil the Hun and Timur the Turk. We've learned recently that the wettest time on the steps in the last 2,000 years was around the time of Genghis's birth. He was born at exactly the right time, at the right place. If we had been born 200 miles further away and 20 years earlier, we wouldn't know anything about him. And so in the case of Muhammad, we just don't know whether the time of his birth was a particularly propitious time to found a religion in that area or not.

Tyler Cowen (4:30)

The very notion that the two first names we're talking about, they're both religious leaders, right? They're not kings, they're not inventors.

Do you think that suggests a vision of the world where it's ideas that really matter and somewhat at variance with your own geography-based theories?

Jared Diamond (4:46)

My own geography-based theories. People often say, Jared, have you changed your mind?

Here's this book about individuals and your other books, Guns, Germs, the Seen and so on, about whole societies for 10,000 years. No, I haven't changed my mind. It's that I'm asking different questions. For questions such as, why is it that you and I are now speaking the English language, and you and I evidently have European background, but we're standing on the land of Native Americans? That's long-term history. The explanation is not individual leaders, but it has to do with plants and animals available for domestication in the Fertile Crest and versus in the New World. So that's a question whose answer does not depend upon individual leaders. Whereas if you want to know why Amazon is now the largest everything store, a store that cares so much about individual customers and doesn't care about paying evidence to its investors, that has everything to do with one person, Jeff Bezos.