Word: diamonded
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According to Diamond, Eurasians were eventually able to dominate because of their earlier adoption of agriculture and consequently their development of complex societies around farming cultures. These societies had the dual advantages of technological superiority and disease resistance, a theory reflected in the title Guns, Germs, and Steel...
...Diamond spend a good portion of the evening talking about beer? The German beer industry is one of the ways in which he has expanded his theory in the past seven years. “We love German beer,” he said, because it is delicious and unique. As Diamond explains, German beer is generally micro-brewed, and most of it is consumed within twenty miles of where it was produced. This system is extremely inefficient, so German beer is both expensive and infrequently exported (American beer, on the other hand, is produced on a much larger scale...
...point is that his theories in Guns, Germs, and Steel can also be applied to the modern economy. According to Diamond, the organization of a company or industry, just like the institutions of a society, is the most significant reason for its success or lack thereof. He even says that Bill Gates supports this theory—that it was actually Gates who first applied the logic of Diamond’s theory to the contemporary business world...
This particular application is one of the motivations behind Diamond’s new afterword to the book. In the new section, Diamond uses his theory to explore the underlying social processes by which weapons spread, ultimately reinforcing his original argument about why Europe emerged as the dominant world player...
However, ideas alone did not prompt Diamond to include this afterword. As he joked to the audience, the afterword is “the reason why all of you who own copies of the book will want to rush...