This is another example of click bait. What we want to know, and what the posting read, is only the first sentence. The reader wades us through the first third of his essay, which actually points out ChatGPT's inability to answer to the author's satisfaction a book in a language he does not read which probably does deal with this question, but not in the way he would like. He then proceeds to show is that he can use Wikipedia and Google all by himself, but still does not come up with any hypothesis that convinces him except to say that maybe rural Spain isn't empty!
Pity this note couldn't go to the front of this essay. Then you wouldn't have wasted your time as did I.
I've been steadily reading Empty Spain in AI-translated chunks. I'm finding it very much worth reading, even though I had never considered the question of why Spain is empty and in fact had not particularly known that it was, beyond an impression of wilderness from reading Cervantes as a much younger man. (Of course wilderness is relative and stories and fairy tales from continental Europe often seem to the young imagination as if they are set in a vast untamed wilderness that is only occasionally broken by a tiny village or a woodcutter's hut.)
Given that the author is a self proclaimed dilletant and states his intention as only giving a certain delightful impression of the empty Spain that he knows and loves, it's perhaps not surprising that I don't have any specific reflections to offer. Fun book though. It's been a while since I've read this kind of light so called nonfiction.
I'm quite surprised to have gotten this far with hardly a mention of Franco and none of the fascists. (I notice that Greece, one of the other highly urbanized countries, was also ruled by a fascist dictatorship post WWII.) One of the first things I think would be worth examining (after checking whether the data is just a statistical artifact or if Spain has always been that way--good catches on both of those) is whether the fascists directed the economy in a way that resulted in this population structure, or if this population structure itself contributed to the Spanish Civil War in some way (eg, peasants on big estates rebelling against absentee landlords).
I have not personally been terribly impressed with Chat GPT (I am more impressed with the image generators). I find that it writes at about the level of a high school student. That is, it sounds like writing, yes. The words are generally in the correct order, yes. But there is no true understanding or processing; it doesn't say anything new or particularly interesting. All it can really do is regurgitate a kind of averaged-out version of things it has already read.
I worry about people using Chat GPT to answer questions they have because Chat GPT doesn't *know* the answers. It can only tell you the sorts of things that sound like what it has read other people saying. Similarly, the art-bots have no idea how many fingers or teeth humans have. They have a general idea of "lots." Good luck not getting manticores.
Lots of people over in the "Rationalist" sphere are concerned about AI taking over. I'm more concerned about humans *trusting* random stuff Chat GPT says--it'd be like insisting that humans have 20 fingers because it shows 20 fingers in the picture, and then going around getting upset at people who point out that really, no, we don't have 20 fingers.
Del Molino, of course, mentions Franco. It is always easy when discussing fascists to fall victim to naive historiography. He does a surprisingly good job of avoiding this pitfall and notes that the falangists who were the most actually fascist of Franco's early supporters precisely drew their energy from a desire for justice for rural Spain. Their later (1950s) complaint about Franco was that he had not improved things the way he had promised for those in the countryside. They saw this as a betrayal, but given what else Del Molino says elsewhere in the book, it would have taken some kind of miracle to allow Franco to follow through.
Generic prompts yield generic output; if you want more interesting writing from a LLM you need to steer it away from the boring average. Ethan Mollick has written about this and I have found it worthwhile to follow that advice.
I'm sure there's a trick to it, just like the art-bots take time to learn. But take the output in this article: not replacing a human author anytime soon.
Spain is very mountainous. It has the second-highest average altitude in Europa. Combine with how dry most parts are and it will result in population concentration in river valleys.
Maybe there are also political and cultural factors.
In the plains of Eastern Europe there's a lot of space but historically rural people usually lived in villages and towns, not in individual homesteads like american farmers. That's probably because of the risks of muslim slavers raiding and because the rulers liked it better this way.
And here's the translation (via GPT3, not 4) of the (typically journalism-style) preface:
<<
The Madrid bohemians had a phobia for all countries that extended beyond the Royal Theater and the Church of San José.
RICARDO BAROJA
Many Spaniards, the Spanish ruling classes, believed that Spain existed only in the capitals and cities, and they were unaware of the living reality of the towns and villages, the smaller places, the needs, and often inhumane life of large sectors of the nation, and all of this is what the Movement has come to redeem.
FRANCISCO FRANCO
The Spaniards have made immense discoveries in the New World but still do not know their own continent: there are some areas in their rivers that they have not yet discovered, and in their mountains, there are nations that are unknown to them.
CHARLES DE MONTESQUIEU
THE MYSTERY OF THE BURNT HOUSES
When the police told him it could be a terrorist attack, the canon breathed. Perhaps they didn't use the word terrorist. Political motivation, rather. They believed the attack was part of a campaign, although they had not arrested anyone and there were no suspects. If they didn't dare to use the term terrorist, it was because there was real terrorism in Ireland. That seemed like something else. It also seemed different to the canon. He believed it had to do with people from the town and feared it was the beginning of a spiral of violence, but the police reassured him. They hadn't attacked him, not even his house. They had attacked what it represented. The canon was English, and the house they had burned down was his summer residence, an isolated cottage on the Llyn Peninsula.
Between 1979 and 1991, a group called Meibion Glyndwr (Sons of Glyndwr) set fire to 228 country houses in Wales. The police only arrested one person in 1993, accused of sending bombs by mail to English citizens. They didn't find out anything else. The case of the burnt houses remains a mystery. They never found any evidence. No one was prosecuted! The investigators believed that behind Meibion Glyndwr, there was only a very small group carrying out the attacks in secret.
In the 1970s and 1980s, terrorism, both nationalist and ideological-revolutionary, was one of the most serious issues in Europe. Germany, Italy, France, the United Kingdom, and of course, Spain, suffered from it. In the British context, where a part of the country (Northern Ireland) lived under a state of emergency, a few nighttime attacks on holiday homes were not a terrorist problem, despite the emergence of groups claiming responsibility for the fires. Compared to the violence of ETA, the IRA, or the Red Brigades, what Meibion Glyndwr did seemed almost like a prank.
Northern Pembrokeshire is one of the most remote areas of Wales, very rural, without industrial cities like those in the south, and with little English influence until recent times. It is one of the few corners of the country where Welsh can be heard more than English. In the 1970s, it became fashionable among the middle class and experienced a small real estate boom. In a few years, thousands of English people acquired country houses. Their arrival greatly altered the life of the villages. There were frictions, distrust towards the new tenants, and manifest hostility.
Hence the relief expressed by the canon to the BBC reporter who interviewed him: it wasn't a vendetta. Because those attacks seemed like the uncontrolled reaction of jealous villagers of their customs who felt threatened by outsiders. But if there was a political motive, the canon could continue to live peacefully in the village. Otherwise, every time he entered the pub, bought from the butcher, or went out for a walk, he would see a bunch of suspects in the faces of his neighbors. People who didn't want him around. People who were willing to burn his house to drive him away. How could he live among such people? If the fire had been a nationalist attack, his neighbors would be exonerated.
However, the fires did seem like the typical reaction of closed-minded villagers who didn't want outsiders in their village. If the culprits had acted on behalf of a movement, the police would have found them. But if they acted independently, local grudges and specific hatred towards those holidaymakers were likely to weigh more than any nationalist vindication. The mystery of the burnt English houses speaks more about the relationships between the countryside and the city than about the relationships between London and its periphery or about terrorism or nationalism.
I think about the mystery of the burnt houses as I travel through Wales in the summer with my family and drive on single-lane roads that force me to seek refuge when another car appears in the opposite direction or to thank the other driver when they yield the way. Everyone so kind, so smiling, so peaceful. Harmonized with the green landscape and its woolly and slow sheep. What hatred could arise here, where there are only farms and cottages, and another farm and another cottage? I think of "Straw Dogs," one of the best films by one of my favorite directors, Sam Peckinpah. Dustin Hoffman plays an American mathematics professor who marries an English girl (Susan George, a sex symbol of the 70s). The movie begins when they move to a remote village in England. She is from there. He is not, and the young people in the village feel that the American has stolen the most beautiful girl from them. The film is a story of harassment and brutal violence against the couple that, originally (based on a novel by Gordon Williams titled "The Siege of Trencher's Farm"), was a more or less conventional thriller! Peckinpah accentuated the isolation of the protagonists, who had a child in the novel. He also changed the title, but without explaining it in the plot. Straw dogs are Taoist ritual objects based on a quote from Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching: "Heaven and earth are not human, and they regard people as straw dogs."
Each house I encounter along the way reminds me of the one in the movie. I think about the stories of violence that all small communities contain. The centuries-old hatred, the feuds that proximity and narrow-mindedness accentuate, the boredom. But above all, I think about this book, which has consumed me for months with readings, investigations, and many reflections. The mystery of the burned houses and that 1971 film tell me that I am telling something universal in it, the story of distrust. I wanted to write about my country and the issues that make it unique, but it has been in Wales, behind the wheel of a rental car through the towns of Pembrokeshire, that I have begun to understand that everything boils down to a matter of heterophobia.
Heterophobia means fear of the other. The term describes attitudes that have to do with our tribal organization, with the "us" and "them," and the identification of "them" as a threat. Humans don't know how to live outside of our group. It's an evolutionary advantage for which we have paid a very high price in wars and massacres. In urban and complex societies, the tribe is becoming less recognizable; it's difficult for us to find our own. Who are they? Fellow countrymen? Too diverse. I have much more in common with a thirty-something writer from Melbourne than with my neighbor. Our coworkers? Difficult, although the working class has been one of the most successful tribes in the last hundred years. People of my gender, those who speak my language, those of my religion, people of my age, those in my income bracket, those of my sexual orientation, those with children, those without? Before claiming that homeland is childhood or friends or any other nonsense, I prefer to make it clear that we live in such complex societies that have replaced tribal loyalties with changing and subtle affinities that serve as substitutes for tribes.
These substitutes have two advantages: they don't require us to go to war against the neighboring tribe, and to a large extent, they are elective. Many of these affinities have to do with acquired tastes, such as a football team or music. This richness and mutation are only possible in cities. There are other factors, but fundamentally, it's a matter of large numbers or critical mass. The larger the city in which one lives, the more possibilities there are to weave affinities in many more directions and levels. This is something new in human history. Less than two hundred years ago, people grew up and died in a tribe they hadn't chosen but belonged to because they were born into it. In small communities, tribal loyalties still function, justifying why, on any given night, warriors burn the houses of the invading tribe.
There are two Spains, but they are not Machado's. There is an urban and European Spain, indistinguishable in all its aspects from any European urban society, and there is an inland and depopulated Spain, which I have called "Empty Spain." Communication between the two has been and continues to be difficult. Often, they seem like foreign countries to each other. And yet, urban Spain cannot be understood without the empty Spain. The ghosts of the latter inhabit the houses of the former.
As an inhabitant of urban Spain, I inevitably assume the perspective of an Englishman who buys a house in Wales. I don't belong there and tend to idealize, caricature, or exploit its quaintness. But as the author of this book, I am obliged to also understand the Welsh who burn down my house. Why they hate me, why they don't want me there. I will have to revisit history, travel miles in the car, reread all the literature I previously skimmed through when I didn't know I was going to write this essay. My purpose is not so much to avoid having my vacation house burned down but to contemplate its ruins without astonishment, with my hands in my pockets and not on my head.>>
This didn't take very long, and was worth it for the following phrase, which sounds much like my own motto about understanding things: "My purpose is not so much to avoid having my vacation house burned down but rather to contemplate its ruins without astonishment, with my hands in my pockets and not on my head."
Pueyo has no idea and no strong opinion on this topic, by the way. He's not an economist, demographer or historian but a journalist, who is most comfortable describing what happens today. I'm not surprised his book is weak on the origin story of the emptiness.
That said, the extreme contrast seen in your map with the South of France doesn't seem warranted. It's probably a threshold effect. There are villages there, just less of them.
It's Dutch Disease during the Siglo de Oro. When the gold from the colonies flowed, domestic agriculture (back then the sector of 90% of activity) lost out to imported agriculture.
Also, as you give a hint of, the latifundia and unresolved land reform. Most land belonged to absentee nobles who never cultivated it. Similar to Mexico, where the system was exported to. There were lots of conflicts between landowners and tenants up to the 20th century.
I'm waiting eagerly for the useful information AIs to arrive. I'm old enough to have used search engines (mostly Google) very frequently for almost 20 years. And I can't perceive that they have improved in any meaningful way. If anything, I find using a search engine more difficult now compared to before 2010. I find that strange given the enormous technological developments since then. Hopefully also information technology that benefits people who like information will improve sooner or later.
Thank you for posting this link. That's a very interesting blog! I will say, though, that although the ideas at Uncharted Territories seem broadening, Tomas Pueyo is really frustrating to read.
I didn't know about it before. Substack is vast. At a first glance I get some Steven Pinker vibes. Well written, but sometimes a bit too basic. In any case, I was uneducated enough to learn a thing or two from the article about Spain and it was well-written enough for me to read through it.
This is another example of click bait. What we want to know, and what the posting read, is only the first sentence. The reader wades us through the first third of his essay, which actually points out ChatGPT's inability to answer to the author's satisfaction a book in a language he does not read which probably does deal with this question, but not in the way he would like. He then proceeds to show is that he can use Wikipedia and Google all by himself, but still does not come up with any hypothesis that convinces him except to say that maybe rural Spain isn't empty!
Pity this note couldn't go to the front of this essay. Then you wouldn't have wasted your time as did I.
I've been steadily reading Empty Spain in AI-translated chunks. I'm finding it very much worth reading, even though I had never considered the question of why Spain is empty and in fact had not particularly known that it was, beyond an impression of wilderness from reading Cervantes as a much younger man. (Of course wilderness is relative and stories and fairy tales from continental Europe often seem to the young imagination as if they are set in a vast untamed wilderness that is only occasionally broken by a tiny village or a woodcutter's hut.)
Given that the author is a self proclaimed dilletant and states his intention as only giving a certain delightful impression of the empty Spain that he knows and loves, it's perhaps not surprising that I don't have any specific reflections to offer. Fun book though. It's been a while since I've read this kind of light so called nonfiction.
I'm quite surprised to have gotten this far with hardly a mention of Franco and none of the fascists. (I notice that Greece, one of the other highly urbanized countries, was also ruled by a fascist dictatorship post WWII.) One of the first things I think would be worth examining (after checking whether the data is just a statistical artifact or if Spain has always been that way--good catches on both of those) is whether the fascists directed the economy in a way that resulted in this population structure, or if this population structure itself contributed to the Spanish Civil War in some way (eg, peasants on big estates rebelling against absentee landlords).
I have not personally been terribly impressed with Chat GPT (I am more impressed with the image generators). I find that it writes at about the level of a high school student. That is, it sounds like writing, yes. The words are generally in the correct order, yes. But there is no true understanding or processing; it doesn't say anything new or particularly interesting. All it can really do is regurgitate a kind of averaged-out version of things it has already read.
I worry about people using Chat GPT to answer questions they have because Chat GPT doesn't *know* the answers. It can only tell you the sorts of things that sound like what it has read other people saying. Similarly, the art-bots have no idea how many fingers or teeth humans have. They have a general idea of "lots." Good luck not getting manticores.
Lots of people over in the "Rationalist" sphere are concerned about AI taking over. I'm more concerned about humans *trusting* random stuff Chat GPT says--it'd be like insisting that humans have 20 fingers because it shows 20 fingers in the picture, and then going around getting upset at people who point out that really, no, we don't have 20 fingers.
Del Molino, of course, mentions Franco. It is always easy when discussing fascists to fall victim to naive historiography. He does a surprisingly good job of avoiding this pitfall and notes that the falangists who were the most actually fascist of Franco's early supporters precisely drew their energy from a desire for justice for rural Spain. Their later (1950s) complaint about Franco was that he had not improved things the way he had promised for those in the countryside. They saw this as a betrayal, but given what else Del Molino says elsewhere in the book, it would have taken some kind of miracle to allow Franco to follow through.
Generic prompts yield generic output; if you want more interesting writing from a LLM you need to steer it away from the boring average. Ethan Mollick has written about this and I have found it worthwhile to follow that advice.
Also, GPT-4 is markedly better at writing and analysis than stock ChatGPT.
I'm sure there's a trick to it, just like the art-bots take time to learn. But take the output in this article: not replacing a human author anytime soon.
Spain is very mountainous. It has the second-highest average altitude in Europa. Combine with how dry most parts are and it will result in population concentration in river valleys.
Maybe there are also political and cultural factors.
In the plains of Eastern Europe there's a lot of space but historically rural people usually lived in villages and towns, not in individual homesteads like american farmers. That's probably because of the risks of muslim slavers raiding and because the rulers liked it better this way.
It's easy to assume too much about GPT's training data, given that it is so large -- but the sum total of written words is truly vast.
For understanding text that isn't directly in the training data, you can grab a pdf and upload it to chatpdf (in chunks if it's big). It's far from perfect but it's a step further. Also if you can get the text of something you can chunk it a page at a time into GPT for translation. So for instance here's the book: https://archive.org/stream/la-espana-vacia-sergio-del-molino/La%20Espana%20vacia%20-%20Sergio%20del%20Molino_djvu.txt
And here's the translation (via GPT3, not 4) of the (typically journalism-style) preface:
<<
The Madrid bohemians had a phobia for all countries that extended beyond the Royal Theater and the Church of San José.
RICARDO BAROJA
Many Spaniards, the Spanish ruling classes, believed that Spain existed only in the capitals and cities, and they were unaware of the living reality of the towns and villages, the smaller places, the needs, and often inhumane life of large sectors of the nation, and all of this is what the Movement has come to redeem.
FRANCISCO FRANCO
The Spaniards have made immense discoveries in the New World but still do not know their own continent: there are some areas in their rivers that they have not yet discovered, and in their mountains, there are nations that are unknown to them.
CHARLES DE MONTESQUIEU
THE MYSTERY OF THE BURNT HOUSES
When the police told him it could be a terrorist attack, the canon breathed. Perhaps they didn't use the word terrorist. Political motivation, rather. They believed the attack was part of a campaign, although they had not arrested anyone and there were no suspects. If they didn't dare to use the term terrorist, it was because there was real terrorism in Ireland. That seemed like something else. It also seemed different to the canon. He believed it had to do with people from the town and feared it was the beginning of a spiral of violence, but the police reassured him. They hadn't attacked him, not even his house. They had attacked what it represented. The canon was English, and the house they had burned down was his summer residence, an isolated cottage on the Llyn Peninsula.
Between 1979 and 1991, a group called Meibion Glyndwr (Sons of Glyndwr) set fire to 228 country houses in Wales. The police only arrested one person in 1993, accused of sending bombs by mail to English citizens. They didn't find out anything else. The case of the burnt houses remains a mystery. They never found any evidence. No one was prosecuted! The investigators believed that behind Meibion Glyndwr, there was only a very small group carrying out the attacks in secret.
In the 1970s and 1980s, terrorism, both nationalist and ideological-revolutionary, was one of the most serious issues in Europe. Germany, Italy, France, the United Kingdom, and of course, Spain, suffered from it. In the British context, where a part of the country (Northern Ireland) lived under a state of emergency, a few nighttime attacks on holiday homes were not a terrorist problem, despite the emergence of groups claiming responsibility for the fires. Compared to the violence of ETA, the IRA, or the Red Brigades, what Meibion Glyndwr did seemed almost like a prank.
Northern Pembrokeshire is one of the most remote areas of Wales, very rural, without industrial cities like those in the south, and with little English influence until recent times. It is one of the few corners of the country where Welsh can be heard more than English. In the 1970s, it became fashionable among the middle class and experienced a small real estate boom. In a few years, thousands of English people acquired country houses. Their arrival greatly altered the life of the villages. There were frictions, distrust towards the new tenants, and manifest hostility.
Hence the relief expressed by the canon to the BBC reporter who interviewed him: it wasn't a vendetta. Because those attacks seemed like the uncontrolled reaction of jealous villagers of their customs who felt threatened by outsiders. But if there was a political motive, the canon could continue to live peacefully in the village. Otherwise, every time he entered the pub, bought from the butcher, or went out for a walk, he would see a bunch of suspects in the faces of his neighbors. People who didn't want him around. People who were willing to burn his house to drive him away. How could he live among such people? If the fire had been a nationalist attack, his neighbors would be exonerated.
However, the fires did seem like the typical reaction of closed-minded villagers who didn't want outsiders in their village. If the culprits had acted on behalf of a movement, the police would have found them. But if they acted independently, local grudges and specific hatred towards those holidaymakers were likely to weigh more than any nationalist vindication. The mystery of the burnt English houses speaks more about the relationships between the countryside and the city than about the relationships between London and its periphery or about terrorism or nationalism.
I think about the mystery of the burnt houses as I travel through Wales in the summer with my family and drive on single-lane roads that force me to seek refuge when another car appears in the opposite direction or to thank the other driver when they yield the way. Everyone so kind, so smiling, so peaceful. Harmonized with the green landscape and its woolly and slow sheep. What hatred could arise here, where there are only farms and cottages, and another farm and another cottage? I think of "Straw Dogs," one of the best films by one of my favorite directors, Sam Peckinpah. Dustin Hoffman plays an American mathematics professor who marries an English girl (Susan George, a sex symbol of the 70s). The movie begins when they move to a remote village in England. She is from there. He is not, and the young people in the village feel that the American has stolen the most beautiful girl from them. The film is a story of harassment and brutal violence against the couple that, originally (based on a novel by Gordon Williams titled "The Siege of Trencher's Farm"), was a more or less conventional thriller! Peckinpah accentuated the isolation of the protagonists, who had a child in the novel. He also changed the title, but without explaining it in the plot. Straw dogs are Taoist ritual objects based on a quote from Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching: "Heaven and earth are not human, and they regard people as straw dogs."
cont.
Each house I encounter along the way reminds me of the one in the movie. I think about the stories of violence that all small communities contain. The centuries-old hatred, the feuds that proximity and narrow-mindedness accentuate, the boredom. But above all, I think about this book, which has consumed me for months with readings, investigations, and many reflections. The mystery of the burned houses and that 1971 film tell me that I am telling something universal in it, the story of distrust. I wanted to write about my country and the issues that make it unique, but it has been in Wales, behind the wheel of a rental car through the towns of Pembrokeshire, that I have begun to understand that everything boils down to a matter of heterophobia.
Heterophobia means fear of the other. The term describes attitudes that have to do with our tribal organization, with the "us" and "them," and the identification of "them" as a threat. Humans don't know how to live outside of our group. It's an evolutionary advantage for which we have paid a very high price in wars and massacres. In urban and complex societies, the tribe is becoming less recognizable; it's difficult for us to find our own. Who are they? Fellow countrymen? Too diverse. I have much more in common with a thirty-something writer from Melbourne than with my neighbor. Our coworkers? Difficult, although the working class has been one of the most successful tribes in the last hundred years. People of my gender, those who speak my language, those of my religion, people of my age, those in my income bracket, those of my sexual orientation, those with children, those without? Before claiming that homeland is childhood or friends or any other nonsense, I prefer to make it clear that we live in such complex societies that have replaced tribal loyalties with changing and subtle affinities that serve as substitutes for tribes.
These substitutes have two advantages: they don't require us to go to war against the neighboring tribe, and to a large extent, they are elective. Many of these affinities have to do with acquired tastes, such as a football team or music. This richness and mutation are only possible in cities. There are other factors, but fundamentally, it's a matter of large numbers or critical mass. The larger the city in which one lives, the more possibilities there are to weave affinities in many more directions and levels. This is something new in human history. Less than two hundred years ago, people grew up and died in a tribe they hadn't chosen but belonged to because they were born into it. In small communities, tribal loyalties still function, justifying why, on any given night, warriors burn the houses of the invading tribe.
There are two Spains, but they are not Machado's. There is an urban and European Spain, indistinguishable in all its aspects from any European urban society, and there is an inland and depopulated Spain, which I have called "Empty Spain." Communication between the two has been and continues to be difficult. Often, they seem like foreign countries to each other. And yet, urban Spain cannot be understood without the empty Spain. The ghosts of the latter inhabit the houses of the former.
As an inhabitant of urban Spain, I inevitably assume the perspective of an Englishman who buys a house in Wales. I don't belong there and tend to idealize, caricature, or exploit its quaintness. But as the author of this book, I am obliged to also understand the Welsh who burn down my house. Why they hate me, why they don't want me there. I will have to revisit history, travel miles in the car, reread all the literature I previously skimmed through when I didn't know I was going to write this essay. My purpose is not so much to avoid having my vacation house burned down but to contemplate its ruins without astonishment, with my hands in my pockets and not on my head.>>
This didn't take very long, and was worth it for the following phrase, which sounds much like my own motto about understanding things: "My purpose is not so much to avoid having my vacation house burned down but rather to contemplate its ruins without astonishment, with my hands in my pockets and not on my head."
Pueyo has no idea and no strong opinion on this topic, by the way. He's not an economist, demographer or historian but a journalist, who is most comfortable describing what happens today. I'm not surprised his book is weak on the origin story of the emptiness.
That said, the extreme contrast seen in your map with the South of France doesn't seem warranted. It's probably a threshold effect. There are villages there, just less of them.
It's Dutch Disease during the Siglo de Oro. When the gold from the colonies flowed, domestic agriculture (back then the sector of 90% of activity) lost out to imported agriculture.
Also, as you give a hint of, the latifundia and unresolved land reform. Most land belonged to absentee nobles who never cultivated it. Similar to Mexico, where the system was exported to. There were lots of conflicts between landowners and tenants up to the 20th century.
ChatGPT may only really be useful for reproducing managerial-speak for/from a corporate template
I'm waiting eagerly for the useful information AIs to arrive. I'm old enough to have used search engines (mostly Google) very frequently for almost 20 years. And I can't perceive that they have improved in any meaningful way. If anything, I find using a search engine more difficult now compared to before 2010. I find that strange given the enormous technological developments since then. Hopefully also information technology that benefits people who like information will improve sooner or later.
“That kind of logical tracing is beyond ChatGPT. But it is no match for the human mind.”
For now.
There are probably more geographic considerations here.
https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/a-brief-history-of-spain
Thank you for posting this link. That's a very interesting blog! I will say, though, that although the ideas at Uncharted Territories seem broadening, Tomas Pueyo is really frustrating to read.
I didn't know about it before. Substack is vast. At a first glance I get some Steven Pinker vibes. Well written, but sometimes a bit too basic. In any case, I was uneducated enough to learn a thing or two from the article about Spain and it was well-written enough for me to read through it.