THE GEOGRAPHY AND ECONOMICS OF CREATIVITY

Sukriti Aggarwal

All the life we crave for a niche, for everything to be comfortable and for us to be at ease. This desire for comfort leads us to the most unexpected results. We have evolved and are not what we used to be millions of years ago. Each day we thrive harder to make our lives better than it was before. There are a few of us who try to make things simple for all of us like our Nobel laureates, technological pioneers, innovative entrepreneurs. They are surprisingly distributed across the world in an intelligible fashion. Their density increases in regions towards the North Pole, South Pole and the equator. This spatial distribution made scientists think if the stressful demands of the extreme climates had anything to do with the economic wealth resources in modulating creative culture, including both inventive idea generation and innovative idea implementation. Further, if we consider the play of societal intellectualization, industrialization, and urbanization, results indicated that higher thermal demands, primarily cold stress and secondarily heat stress, hinder creativity in poorer populations but promote creativity in richer populations.

Climate and creativity though distinct, have a cause-effect relationship. It is evident in the human history files that climatic discomfort has required innovative ideas and craft implementation.

Colder latitudes at a greater distance from the equator are home to higher rates of creativity. This geographic anomaly can be observed in each of the four Earth’s hemisphere, Swedes and Swiss from the northern hemisphere and the Australians and New Zealanders from the south top the charts in the invention, innovation, investment and imagination. In contrast, populations in hotter latitudes have intriguingly high creativity rates, including Barbadians, Bruneians, Ecuadorians, Malaysians, Seychellois, and Singaporeans.

The graph represents the ensuing J-shaped latitudinal variation of creative culture.

The eco theory of creativity emphasizes the casual interplay between thermal climate and economic wealth. Humans, as warm-blooded animals, have evolved not only a conscious and unconscious awareness of needs for thermal comfort, nutrition, and health but have also created ecologically-specific strategies. Consequences of shrinking environmental control in colder and hotter habitats. An assessment of the relationship between self-control and ambient temperature: A reasonable conclusion is that both heat and cold reduce self-control. Include cognitive demands and affective stresses, which in turn lead to conative attempts to turn these demands and stresses into tangible objects. Climatically more demanding and stressful regions require more inventive and innovative uses of natural and artificial resources. Creative efforts to restore shrinking environmental control in harsher habitats are usually facilitated by the availability of wealth resources. Money plays an important role in turning stressful climatic conditions into opportunities. In poor populations, threat appraisals may trigger more creativity purely out of necessity. Moreover, closed-mindedness and risk aversion hinder innovation. In contrast, richer populations challenge appraisals are thought to leave more leeway to develop and nurture open-mindedness, risk-seeking, and creativity as a result. Liquid cash and illiquid capital offer opportunities of free choice in setting and achieving goals, including creative choices in satisfying basic needs Perhaps most important, financial transactions and trade enable people to inventively and innovatively manage thermal demands and environmental stresses by acquiring clothing, housing, warming and cooling devices, meals, medical cure and care, and numerous other temperature-related goods and services.

Lower prevalence of infectious or pathogenic diseases is another component of the climatic ecosystem that may help counteract shrinking control over everyday life in colder and hotter habitats. Suppositions suggest that Disease-causing pathogens tend to thrive in warm or temperate climates, whereas both much colder and much hotter environments than 22°C are suboptimal because, just like humans, parasites can be easily frozen or burned to death. Lower prevalence of pathogens in colder and hotter habitats may increase creativity due to less illness, increased social interaction, and less conformity. This research tested the possibility that a lower parasitic disease burden mediates the beneficial impact of thermal demands and wealth resources on invention and innovation.

The broad idea is that the climatic ecosystem consisting of thermal necessities monetary opportunities and their parasitic repercussions shapes interdependent pressures on creativity. The relatively complex eco theory of creativity predicts that direct effects and indirect parasite-mediated effects of thermal demands on creative culture are modified by wealth resources.