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Traditional practices can offer indirect lessons, too. Investors would be wise to take cues from the practices of Andean farmers, Diamond says. Their scattered plots were deemed by outsiders "appalling" in their inefficiency, yet the farmers' goals weren't to maximize time-averaged yields. What good are nine productive years if the
10th year has no yield, putting them at risk of starvation? Their goal, then, was to make sure yields never drop below a certain level. The diffuse plots account for variation and unpredictability in crop yield from field to field, year to year, Diamond writes. In the same vein, if you're depending on your investments to pay current expenses, you need to settle for a lower yield in exchange for more security and stability. The book is liberally peppered with personal anecdotes from Diamond's various expeditions. He recounts one memorable incident where his New Guinean companions refused to sleep near a tall dead tree for fear it would fall and kill them. Diamond thought they were being absurd. But as months of forest camping went by, he realized that he heard a tree falling almost every day. As such, if New Guineans spend much of their lives camping, it behooves them to take precautions with repeated low-risk activities because the hazard is cumulative. The same can be said in modern societies with driving a car, Diamond argues. While there is no shortage of thought-provoking material in the book, it's unclear whether a casual reader would have the patience to slog through some of the more mundane, drawn-out sections. In a chapter looking at human violence, Diamond mentions that the Kung of southern Africa had 22 homicides in 49 years
-- then proceeds to detail each incident. Still, Diamond's style is a model of explanatory writing, and he delivers on his premise that the past is worth revisiting.
[Associated
Press;
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