He may need the racial terms for rhetorical reasons. What GGS does is provide a Big Picture account of the difference levels of material success achieved by different “races” of people, as those races were recognized by 18th and 19th century Western thinkers. What makes GGS so attractive to the popular audience, however, is that it provides that account without the appeal to racial inferiority that is found in earlier generations of thinkers. To the extent that the GGS account is satisfying, it allows people to take that difference in material success at face value without commiting them to beliefs about the essential “nature” of other people that they find unacceptable.

The objective of Diamond’s Big Picture is to eliminate the stigma of race. In some alternative universe where there is an earthlike planet with a history largely similar to ours, but no superfical racial differences among people, there would be no audience for a book like GGS.

Exactly. Said it far worse, myself, over on Brad’s blog. The question, though, whether this is an inevitable byproduct of macroscopic (and macrostructural) explanations, or if it is possible to build accounts sensitive to multiple levels of analysis.

I’ve been wresting this kind of problem for a while. I have some forthcoming work that explores it in the context of European state formation.

He is very materialist. I’m sure you are right that he would consider the bantu kin disputes as just details of an agricultural expansion.

In “collapse”, I was suprised that he makes arguments about the Rwandan genocide being the result of overpopulation. Is this something that other people take seriously?

Oh, Steel. Got to fix that.