Can Turtles Fly?

(This is a non-investing post so skip if you are looking for investing stuff) (Image by Vern Evans for Strategy+Business ) How to Get Rich? is the title of a speech given in 1999. It sounds like it might have been from someone promoting a get-rich-quick scheme; perhaps someone selling a seminar, or a product, or a training program. But it is not. In fact it was an illuminating lecture given by Jared Diamond in 1999. For those not familiar, Jared Diamond is a somewhat controversial social scientist who primarily specializes in anthropology, geography, physiology, and ecology. He is most famous for his book, Guns, Germs, and Steel , on why certain civilizations, especially what he calls the eurasian one, succeeded while many others failed. I haven't read the book yet but, from what I understand, a lot of the controversy is over the fact that Diamond attributes outcomes to geography, which is a bit too radical for many to accept—conventional thinking is that genetics, culture, socia...