Lee Lecture 2017: The Ecological Origins of Economic and Political Systems

5th June 2017, 5:00 pm

Why are some world regions populated by wealthy democracies, while others are populated by low and middle-income autocracies?  This paper argues that the answer is to be found in the ecological constraints operating on food kilocalorie production, storage, and trade between the Colombian exchange and the onset of modernity (roughly 1500 to 1750).  Those differences in what could be grown, how long it could be stored, and how much of it had to be set aside as a buffer against weather shocks structured the incentives of human beings, giving rise to different institutional ecologies, only one of which was conducive to sustained economic growth and the consolidation of democracy.  In order to test this theory we have constructed a geo-coded dataset that approximates the size, productivity, storage capacity, and drought frequency of agricultural markets circa 1750.  We find that those variables not only explain 20 to 50 percent of the variance in levels of democracy and per capita incomes today, but also explain the variance in the emergent phenomena (levels of urbanization, human capital, and limits on government authority as measured in the 19th century) that mediated between agricultural ecologies in the past and human well-being today.

Stephen Haber is the A.A. and Jeanne Welch Milligan Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University.  In addition, he is Professor of Political Science, of History, and (by courtesy) of Economics at Stanford, as well as the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow of Stanford’s Hoover Institution and a Senior Fellow of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.  Haber is among Stanford’s most distinguished teachers, having won all five major teaching awards Stanford offers. Haber has spent his academic life investigating the conditions under which societies create economic and political systems that foster innovation, social mobility, and high standards of living. He is the author or coauthor of five books, most recently Fragile by Design: The Political Origins of Banking Crises and Scarce Credit.  He has also published numerous scholarly articles in a variety of fields, including economic history, innovation economics, the political economy of finance, comparative politics, intellectual property, and cultural history.  His current research is focused in two areas: the economics of standards; and the ecological origins of political and economic systems.