Heat, literacy, and air-conditioning. By Ed West.

Different climates have enjoyed advantages at different points in time.

For most of history, industry and scholarship in southern Europe benefitted from significantly longer hours of sun and daylight much of the year compared to the north, allowing for more hours of work and study. James Belich noted in The World the Plague Made that this all changed with the expansion of the Basque whaling trade in the late medieval period, providing cheap wax for candles.

England and the Netherlands subsequently overtook the south in their levels of literacy, a transformation usually attributed to Protestantism, although this technical solution to a physical disadvantage certainly helped. As the northern countries grew richer, and were able to use more energy, so the climate came to be an advantage. Cooler areas of Europe in particular benefitted from a relative absence of vector-borne disease, dangerous insects and food poisoning, which made hotter regions of the world more lethal.

Yet the biggest curse of the lower latitudes is that heat makes us sluggish — since people struggle to work above 23° centigrade. As Maarten Boudry writes on his substack, ‘For every degree above 25°C (77°F), our cognitive performance declines by around two percent. And if synapses suffer, so does economic activity. At 30°C, office performance drops by almost 9 percent.’

I see that. I’ve been trying to write this in temperatures of up to 34°, which equates to a production level similar to a moderate hangover. If only there was some sort of technology that could make my home cooler.

Until relatively recently the world was dominated by a handful of relatively cold regions, and Paul Johnson observed in his history of the United States that human industry thrives in what Fahrenheit appreciators would call ‘the 60s’, a Goldilocks zone that turned New England and Greater Yankeedom into a powerhouse. The southern states, in contrast, were held back by higher mortality and the impossibility of productive work in the sweltering summer months, and until the mid-20th century were about 40 per cent poorer than the Union states.

The northerners were especially known for their work ethic and their inventiveness, a characteristic epitomised by the Boston-born Benjamin Franklin.

Then in 1902, New York’s Willis Carrier changed everything with the one of the most world-changing inventions, the air conditioning unit; aircon has notably shifted population and power in the US southwards, but Dixieland is just part of a broader, global ‘sunshine belt’.

Among the most notable beneficiaries of this technology are the financial powerhouses of Dubai and Singapore. Lee Kuan Yew famously said of air conditioning that it was ‘perhaps one of the signal inventions of history. It changed the nature of civilization by making development possible in the tropics… The first thing I did upon becoming prime minister was to install air conditioners in buildings where the civil service worked.’ …

Japan has almost universal air conditioning, with 91 per cent of homes equipped, compared to 88 per cent in the US. China is home to more than 500 million aircon units, is the world’s largest manufacturer, and has also seen an economic shift towards the south. Vietnam, also likely to be a major economic power by mid-century, is as dependent on this technology as it is on its people’s ingenuity. The development of aircon, and medical breakthroughs in the treatment of tropical diseases, has shifted the centre of gravity away from the cold regions of the earth – just as the globe is warming up.

The article is mostly about the reluctance of Europe to use (allow!) airconditioning, due to their belief in the carbon dioxide theory of global warming. But that’s an interesting intro, quoted above.

Here in Perth Australia, the invention of evaporative air conditioning changed everything. Prior to 1970, Perth was a hot, small, sleepy town — where many people slept outside on their verandah during the hot summer nights. Evaporative air conditioning is cheap to run, costing only about a tenth as much as regular air conditioning. However, it only works in dry air — it is perfectly useless in humid climates. But it suits Perth perfectly, because Perth only has at most a handful of humid days each summer. With cheap aircon, Perth grew fast and blossomed.

We live by our “evap” in summer, leaving it on 24/7 for several months. It knocks about 5 degrees C off the temperature inside.