It was my mother's theory that it was the cold that stopped Poland from being as poor as, say, Ethiopia. She noticed abject poverty, walking-in-a-rag and living-in-a-plastic-bag poverty on a large scale of the population, only happened in tropical countries -- because everywhere else they would freeze to death en masse, or have a revolution first.

I am still not ready to embrace the theory of climatological geopolitics as devised by my mither, but what you are basically describing is the fable of the ant and the grasshopper - except the grasshopper is not lazy, he's just thinking further. To that end I would like to point out LA as a counterexample: Silicon Valley ain't here. It is a surprisingly conservative media town.