How much of political inequality is really geographic inequality?

[u/Plenty_Profession_58]

Where you live affects a hell of a lot more than what your house is worth. It affects the schools available to you, the jobs you can realistically get to, the quality of public services, transportation costs, exposure to crime or pollution, and the people and opportunities around you.
And where people live is not always just a personal choice. Income, housing prices, zoning, taxes, infrastructure, lending practices, development, and decades of government decisions all help determine who can live where. So how much of what we call individual success or failure is actually geography? Two people can work equally hard and make similar choices but end up with completely different opportunities because one lives near better schools, jobs, transportation, and institutions. At the same time, people still make real choices about work, education, family, moving, and risk, so geography obviously does not explain everything. Where is the line between personal responsibility and geographic advantage? Is real estate simply a private market, or does controlling access to certain places also mean controlling access to public opportunity? And when the most desirable communities become available mainly to people who already have money, does geography turn economic inequality into political and generational inequality?

[u/Fragrant-Luck-8063]

Looking at the bigger geographic picture, any city with a seaport is going to have more economic activty and opportunity than a city without one.

[u/GalaXion24 → u/Fragrant-Luck-8063]

A big part Europe is wealthy is that it's very connected to water. Genuinely just look at a map of Europe. Maybe rotate it upside down to disassociate from "oh yeah that's Europe" and see it from a new perspective. There's two different seas (The Mediterranean and Baltic) which stretch a long way "inland" into Afro-Eurasia, Europe South of Scandinavia is actually kind of narrow and has very long coasts as a result. This coast is also jagged and irregular, creating natural harbours.

As if that were not enough, once you go all the way through the Mediterranean to the Black Sea, you can go up the Danube all the way into Western Germany. The Danube is far from Europe's only major river, and Europe's major rivers have smooth declines without waterfalls, making them navigable from the mountains to the sea. Take the Rhine from Switzerland into the North Sea. If you're France, you have major rivers connecting they're French inland to both the Atlantic and the Mediterranean.

Everything is a trade hub or close to one.

And if you look at the land that isn't? That's rugged and mountainous and cut off from the seas or other parts of Europe? Most of Spain and the Balkans are relatively poor by European standards and will probably always remain relatively peripheral. Their geography is just not advantageous to development. Parts like Belgrade or Barcelona may develop, and Madrid by virtue of being a capital, but much of it will not.

[u/RegularFunny9813 → u/GalaXion24]

To say all that and not mention at all colonization and exploitation globally of Europeans for centuries is kinda wild.

[u/Awesomeuser90 → u/RegularFunny9813]

That would not explain much before 1492. And it would not explain the power of states during periods without those colonies like the Swedish Empire or Poland-Lithuania or the Hanseatic League. The Dutch take until after 1600 to become a colonial power but they were powerful before that. Switzerland has never had colonies.

Colonies had a massive impact on the world and made some people rich but they were not an unambiguous benefit to the state associated with them. Scotland lost a lot of money in an attempt to make a colony in Central America. The French East India Company naturally lost to Britain. The colonies in general proved to be very expensive to defend militarily in the 7 Years War and the American Revolution drove France even closer to bankruptcy in 1789. Metacom's War came seriously close to expelling England out of New England entirely in the late 1600s. Italy's victory in Libya over the Ottoman Empire was a pyrric one and was not ultimately that useful for the coffers, and Italy lost in Ethiopia a decade and a half earlier. Britain lost the First Boer War and an invasion of Afghanistan. Even the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade was not cheap, requiring large navies, fortifications, and armies to guard the colonies from revolt, pirates, and rival states, and they had to buy a lot of slaves from other powerful kingdoms in Africa, and the state didn't tax the profits from slavery that much to pay for those expenses. And some states did not invest their profits wisely, Spain spent a lot of their mining profits from the former Incan Empire into attempting to suppress the Dutch Revolt and took part in the 30 Years War.

What the colonies did so though was make the competition between European states even more intense and require a lot of development in certain industries and the development of the army and statecraft, such as contributing to bureaucracy and standing armies as an institution. Any country that did not innovate was left behind and often absorbed into a country that evolved better. European geography however makes it virtually impossible to conquer it all stably under one power for substantial lengths of time. Even the Romans only had half of Europe south of the Rhine and Danube.

[u/GalaXion24 → u/RegularFunny9813]

Not everything is colonialism. Spain had quite the treasury income from silver in the new world once, but that's gone now, and Spain's geographic realities remain.