Why is North America (US + Canada + Mexico) ,.more economically developed than South American counties.. is it just because the is US culturally that different , I mean South Americans.are we’re originally influenced by Western Europe as well . Or is the some geographic or climatic difference that affected development?
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The short answer is “The Cold War” both the USA and the USSR used Central and South America to fight proxy wars against each other. It’s hard to build and maintain a developed nation when the two biggest super powers are constantly undermining your government and convincing you to fight each other.
Beyond that I would try r/askhistorians for a more detailed explanation.
It mostly comes down to better terrain.
The east coast of North America is largely approachable by ship which allows for easy offboarding of people who can then easily make their way inland towards vast farming areas. Those farming areas have very powerful river systems they could use to help transport their goods.
Conversely, South America’s eastern coastline isn’t as open, with a lot of mountains directly behind it. Where it is open is fairly bad terrain for setting up farms on. The river systems that could be used to transport goods are significantly more dangerous compared to the ones in North America.
The North American climate was also closer to Europe’s climate, which meant farming knowledge was easily transplanted from one continent to the other.
This is not easily ELI5 (or ELI 18 for that matter) as there are many factors involved and no simple narrative can possibly capture the nuances.
Here is an economic paper from the NBER that is probably in reasonable layperson’s territory although some familiarity with economic terms is necessary.
[https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c10652/c10652.pdf](https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c10652/c10652.pdf)
There are theories based on climate (prevalence of diseases), poor legal foundations, differences in colonial institutions, poor macro economic and political factors.
Basically it mattered who colonized where. South America and Mexico where for the most part Spanish and Portugese, meanwhile Canada and the US were combination French and English.
So in short Spain and Portugal mostly focused on getting rare materials like rubber, gold, silver, etc.
Meanwhile in US and Canada we had substantially less accessible deposits during that period, so we went with grains, timber and fur trading.
Personally I think the political structure of the native groups was key as well, in that because groups like the Inca and Maya and Aztec where already organized as empires the Spanish where harder on them and making sure that there was less development that could cause organization and rebellion.
The United States treats South America almost like colonies to this day. They will have the CIA agitate for a coup d’etat if the government is seen to actively or passively stand in the way of any profits the United States could otherwise be getting.
One recent example is the Coup in Bolivia which was likely about access to their lithium mines and maintaining cheap labor therein. All so that we could keep selling Tesla’s, laptops and phones at a good profit margin.
Wow. Misinformation here is through the roof.
I’ll eli5 as best as I can.
Most of NA was colonized by people that wanted to live there (occupational colonization) while Central and SA were colonized by people that wanted to extract the lands riches (explorational colonization) so most of the riches of those colonies got relocated (stolen) by the countries that colonized them (mostly Portugal,Spain, France and USA), as well as leaving most of those colonies in debt.
A few hundred years is not enough to recover from a financial blow that stripped away most of C-S Americas value and destroyed considerably their fauna and flora (another added cost to recover those damages) and the ever increasing interest does not help.
Edit: forgot to add spain and fixed typos
There are a lot of reasons, but I’m going to say one for now: Soil.
Most people back in the day were illiterate, so the most common way to make a living was by farming. Canada’s and America’s soil are really good for farming. This gives people the ability to make their own food to eat and even sell the rest, that makes sure that you’re not hungry and is able to build some wealth to pass down to your kids, creating a big middle class. This is also really important for democracy, because the people are not hungry and wealth is more equally distributed among the people in the form of land and farming.
**Most of South America is located in the tropical region, which SUCKS for farming.** The soil is too salty and acidic. Most of the time, the country also heavily relies on one material good (oil, sugar cane, mineral), if you control that material good and you basically control the country’s only source of wealth.
This means the vast majority of people can’t make their own food and can’t build wealth, making them hungry and poor, and the country’s only wealth is concentrated on one small group of people. The perfect recipe for totalitarianism or a failed democracy.
Tl,Dr: poor soil means south American people are hungry and can’t make a lot of money, so the poor are vulnerable and the wealth is concentrated on the top 1%.
**Addendum: countries like Uruguay, Chile and Argentina (all outside of the tropical belt, go figure) are more developed than Mexico. They’re also the exception since they have good soil. Which is why I just said America and Canada.**
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